Poetry

Flies arriving on the backdoor, big black bottles yearning to be let out. I oblige sweeping them into the frozen air.

What are they rising from. What dead body feeds the maggots. What little present do I want to avoid. I hope they’ve finished their work and it has returned to dust.

The dog watches it all from her bed under the table. She views with equanimity the shivering mouse edging under the counter, the mother raccoon nesting on the porch, even the bird brained squirrels collecting bread from the compost.

The dog is skeletal. Her sleek coat, often admired by passing humans, is coming out in tufts, I don’t know why. She hobbles up stairs. But she seems happy now. It was only when she changed from quick unassailable dog to old lady that both she and I felt the loss. This is a new phase, one I imagine of contemplation, and appreciation of the good things in life, food, a satisfying scratch, a deep comfortable sleep, and sometime a burst of energy that makes her look like a puppy again.

More phases are ending, COSINE waves of seasons, fall dipping into Narnia winter. Take out our bundling coats and stumble over the white clouds. The lantern steams between the fir trees. Mr. Tumnas leads me to his patterned lobby. A blanket proffered for chilly knees. The tea makes me sleepy, have I been betrayed.

Is fiction an liar. Do we spend our days in distracted slumber. The winter waits for someone one with a purpose to melt the white noise.

Am I pulling my weight. Did I do it right? Is there a punishment for noncompliance.

I suspect a softer universe. But not a benevolent father. Perhaps an avuncular universe, distant, with his own life, but wishing you the best, and there in an emergency. The favoured uncle, the bright niece, the best presents for xmas and birthdays. These will not be forgotten.

I just ran across this (kind of) curatorial statement on the blog of Daniel Campbell Blight for a 2009 painting and etching show he curated called ‘On Land’. The piece below, written by Vince Stephen, really touched and intrigued me.

I love the combination of poetic language, economic critique and the evocation of nostalgia in one confident piece. The writing style doesn’t feel contemporary although the concerns are.

To John Ruskin

The vital principle is not the love of knowledge, but the love of change.

Up here above Coniston Water we walk your floors and play your piano. Children play raindrops on the white keys. We are surrounded by constructions of memories.

You came here to rest they tell me, to convalesce, when it seemed the country would never accept a different style of progress. When you took on too much and burnt yourself, you came here to build a garden and for quiet and for the view. You withdrew. For the light and the water. We follow you.

Dissidents they tell me passed through your dining room, with content for pamphlets – with front-line reports, out here far from Manchester, a slow revolution.

If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work.

For music, birdsong. For still-life, feathers. For landscape a circular turret connected to the edge of your bedroom. It collects light and it allows contemplation. Below my wife traces aimless circles with a mobile phone pressed to her ear. And somehow I know she is speaking her language.

I don’t know if you died alone, but they say the storm clouds which loitered above convinced you in your last days that the battle against evil, against the horrors of industry and uncaring capital, had gone somehow biblical, was taking place in the elements now, a skybound struggle for the soul of the Island. I don’t know if you died alone, but they’ve placed your walking stick on your tiny single bed. Somehow this arrangement of objects suggests so.

We buy our liveries, and gild our prayer-books, with pilfered pence out of children’s and sick men’s wages, and thus ingeniously dispose a given quantity of Theft, so that it may produce the largest possible measure of delicately-distributed suffering.

Vince Stephen, 2009.

This last quote which I love was from John Ruskin (1817-1900) was from Ruskin’s book The Two Paths (available online at Project Gutenberg).

The first appearance of archy

One morning Don Marquis arrived in
his office to find the following
message on his typewriter, all in
lower case. Archy, a cockroach
reincarnated from a poet, had laboriously
typed the message to Don by climbing upon
the typewriter and jumping on the keys,
one at a time. The message is all in
lower case, because Archy could not
operate the shift key.

The Coming of Archy:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went
into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook on life

i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i can’t eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why don’t she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay

most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems
showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he won’t be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

don’t you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread
for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy