Long Poem Excerpt

I have been working on a long poem sequence which may go on for some time.  Some poetry comes quickly. These poems feel like sculpture to me. Like terracotta or clay, sometimes marble, chips flying here and there. I thought I would share the sixth in the sequence.

-A lyric sadness in the air. Mozart?

Or Haydn? Almost sounds like Arvo Part.

-She is superb this busker near the curb.

-A balm for equine meditated flight.

-She raises all our darkness to the light.

We join the crowd. The pigeons we disturb

Advance and peck the concrete looking lost.

Our coins, festina lente, tempest-tost.

 

The sharps and flats and pitch are anchors thrown

To still our stride, like snares of sound our own

Hearts recognize. Becalmed in placid seas

Of melody, she bows us into port,

Slow sarabandes for landfalls soft. They court

Our wayward variations with a breeze

Of interlude. You take my arm and draw

Me on, exempla of Newtonic Law.

© ralph patrick mackay

Cicada Summer

In casual conversation with a neighbor on the sidewalk before my house, he noticed--keen sighted for a man in his early 70s--an insect on the tree trunk behind me on my lawn. I turned to investigate and discovered a cicada newly emerged from its simulacrum, drying its new-born wings beside the phantom of its old body which had crawled out of the ground after perhaps six years as a grub and nymph. It had crawled up the trunk about seven feet from the base and attached itself there facing the street.  An odd and rather vulnerable place. It was a rare chance, I thought, to see a cicada beside its cast off shell, and I am grateful to my neighbor's sharp sight. Our conversation continued apace, some of it dealing with cicadas, all the while I was thinking I should try and take a picture. We parted and I did manage to take a few photographs. My camera, an old, inexpensive digital model, was not adequate for the job, but enough to capture the moment.  A few minutes after taking the pictures, the cicada disappeared.  Now when I listen to the cicada in the trees, I think it might be this very one, together with the other harbingers of heat in their short life of a few weeks.

I wrote two haiku inspired by this sight:

New born wings, poised, warm,
Beside aged nymphal shroud
Clinging to silence.


Shrill the pine tree sings
Above silent bamboo chimes,
Shadowless and still.

©ralph patrick mackay, July 21, 2012.

I have long had an interest in Japanese literature and culture even before discovering Lafcadio Hearn in the late 1970s. In his Shadowings, he devotes a chapter to Sémi, the Japanese cicada.




Anyone wanting to learn more about the unusual lives of Cicada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has an excellent site devoted to this fascinating insect.

Terza Rimas for Virgil Burnett's Terra Cottas

There is to me something so incomprehensible in death, that I can neither speak nor think on the subject. -Lord Byron in a letter to John Hobhouse, August 10, 1811.

When we heard of the death of Virgil Burnett, my wife and I were overcome with a great sadness.  We had both been thinking about him, he was in our thoughts.

Books brought us all together. He came to our bookshop and often visited the library where my wife works and we always enjoyed his visits. We were not close friends but we did cherish the occasional invitations to his beautiful house and the fine dry white wine he shared, much like his wit. We both have fond memories of his graciousness and kindness.

For a number of years I was selling a small portion of his personal library on consignment.  I enjoyed sitting at a table at the back of his living room cataloguing his books and having his youthful cat, Arlequino, constantly curl his way around me as I worked.

Virgil's terra cotta sculptures fascinated me.  In a letter to me, in thanks for the poem I wrote about his sculptures, he said, "I am very flattered and so are my clay ladies, vainglorious baggages that they are." His wit and humour always hovering nearby. The poem is an acrostic one and he said, in his usual understated manner, "I have never been acrosticized before--not to my knowledge anyway."  The small appendages to his sentences, little afterthoughts and reflections, are to be found in his novels and stories as well as in his speech. His very style. Le style est l'homme meme. His patience too can be seen in the lines of his illustrations.

Many, many, many people will miss him. I know we will.

Terza Rimas for Virgil's Terra Cottas

Voluptuous embodiments alight,
In stasis, dancing to an ancient song;
Redeeming Love, and Fortune's round delight.
Gyrating with this earthen world, yet strong
In vigil, burnished with a fixed desire,
Life-giving forms to guide our souls along.

By silent stillness, sculptures do inspire,
Unveiling what is ripe within.  One's hope
Renews, that truth and beauty do conspire.
Noetic visions through the figure's scope.
Eternal shapes transcendent into thought,
Transparent with the weight of mythic trope,

Though sensual, through tactile passions sought.

-ralph patrick mackay

feburary 2006.

Words, and Numbers, and Rhyme

Weeding papers, shedding years as fable,

Years of numbers, dollars, gross and net;

Riffling ordered files upon the table,

Measurements like music, of love, regret.

Rain was seeping mist, my tea was cold,

A pinching darkness lay upon the room.

Feeling less than able, feeling, old.

Dieffenbachia and Spathiphyllum gloom.

Then, appeared the poet. Not in a dream

Distant, yet so near, asking for a light,

But on the cover of a McGill magazine,

Dapper, poised, looking at the camera's sight.

How he came to be within “Utilities”

I don't know. But out he slipped fresh as print.

Nineteen eighty-two, “Scrivener” volume three,

Slightly yellowed, nick or two, not quite mint.

Memories arose, cross-hatched with thought,

Bookshops, cafés, parks and mountain shade;

Mezzotint musings in nostalgia caught.

Halcyon days. Perhaps. The dues were paid.

Purchased at The Word, the source, the stream,

Captured by the poet's poker face.

Chosen over Pynchon, or a Henry Green,

Two bucks proffered for a soul of grace.

Twenty-four in nineteen eighty-two,

Blind, adrift, still plodding in the maze,

(Rereading books like Soren's 'Point of View.')

Did I see a way within his Zen-like gaze?

Ladies' man at forty-seven, lover,

Troubadour poet, and singer of fame.

Thirty years have not quite seen another

Suit and cowboy boot on la rue Saint-Urbain.

Forty-four years I lived in the city,

Happenstance never once crossed our ways,
Sharing a bench, and views of women so pretty,

Feeding dry bread to the birds and the strays.

Would it be too late if this native returned

Recognitions faltering dense with time,

New steps, old paths to movements long adjourned,

Papers in pockets, words, and numbers, and rhyme?

ralph patrick mackay, april 30, 2012.

Pilish or not to Pilish

I saw that March 14 was Pi day and discovered Pilish, a language using the numbering of Pi for the length of the words. I was on twitter so I attempted to tweet something using the structure of Pilish and came up with the following within the limitations of one tweet:
Pilish Tweet
For a poet,
a nerdy wordsmith,
an absurd quark for urban gravitas;
overweary cambric fussiness
for an illusory poem
forged in fipple.
I had to forgo the punctuation and title but provided a hashtag, #pilish. This language structure may or may not keep my interest. Lately I have been paring down my verse but this may be a good exercise for the brain. A method to stir up the rich sounds of word interplay, though such a restraint may exhaust one fairly quickly. However, someone persevered and wrote a book using Pilish: Not a Wake.

divinations

divinations

were we of, from, on, like, in, by and for
would our every self be who we, you, see?

though there is or was
will
how to give full use
in that we could
must
after all
be?

were we of, from, on, like, in, by and for
would our every self be who we, you, see?

by ralph patrick mackay
march 9, 2012.

Autumn Reflections

There is a favourite image I have always loved and keeps coming up in my thoughts with the approach of autumn: a hedge with a dusting of fallen leaves. I seem to fall back on it as a poetic image as these poems of mine from different periods reflect.


Haiku
Under leaf frothed hedge
Dark-eyed crow in stillness lies,
Staring out the sun.
(September 21, 2011.)


Bounden
Beneath ashen clouds
Huddle-wise brewing unhallowed cares,
Fresh linen forms the breeze beyond hedges frothed with leaf.

On this autumn head, this top-dressed sod,
With alluvial shoulder shouldering but another age,
I squat, printing finger's touch on stone,
Feeling the silences that hold.

(October 1985)


Fireflies on BirchWood-stove sweet hints of maple
Fluent with the breeze
Swaying over cedars feathered in leaf fall
Grafting
With October's gilded text.

Motionless above me,
Fireflies on birch.
Codelessly camouflaged on a dark window of grace,
A natural scar
Form for their gathering
Beyond the cold light of their old desires,
And beyond the strange embers
Beneath my cigarette ash.

(Lake Malaga, Autumn 1983)


LeafageActions as at autumn bent brow
Chestnut cordial countenance.
Oak on over phrases pile
Encausted flicker of leaves on hedges
Frothed with glass imaginings.
Tapered thought, til up was wrought
Rows, rows, sitting so.
Life margining movements, power dives,
Pliant stiffs waxing within wreaths.
Down, down, down each edge flows frozen full.

(Autumn 1982)

poems copyright ralph patrick mackay.
Note: The Haiku was inspired by the sad sight of a dead crow under a hedge and a well- known haiku by Basho; Bounden reflects my searching out my grandfather's grave; Fireflies on Birch was inspired by direct observation of nature; and Leafage reveals a youthful interest in Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is interesting to look back and see subtle influences by some favourite poets such as Edwin Muir, Hopkins, Ted Hughes. I have to admit that the title for the third poem was made with Irving Layton's famous poem, Butterfly on Rock, in mind, (it is not a comment on the great Canadian poets poem) but what I call my light verse lacks his robust life force. I come across as more lapsed Presbyterian than poet.

If, Dear Reader, you are still reading, you deserve a treat for venturing this far into my poetic hinterland, so I shall post this wonderful music, Autumn Leaves with the masters of poetic musical expression:

Sock du jour

Nothing quite like a large pile of freshly laundered socks,
to keep one's feet on the ground.
So to speak.

They promise autumnal promenades over leaves and rocks,
and toe holds on a future sound,
when snows will squeak.

The game's afoot with emotions, as the seasons and the clocks
in their filial round,
chime antique

Til the day our labeled toes point like compass stars, in dry docks
for our lost and found
souls oblique.

ralph patrick mackay
september 9, 2011.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Nights: Part Two, Parenthetical and Digressional

When Robert Louis Stevenson lived in Bournemouth during the years 1884-1887 he would often stay with Sidney Colvin when visiting or passing through London. Colvin, being the Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum, had the great fortune of living in a house provided for this position, a living quarter which flanked the Museum itself. It was no doubt where Louis was staying when he dropped by Walter T. Spencer's bookshop in 1885--but a short walk away from the British Museum--dripping with rain and suffering from a leaky shoe. Many years later, when established in the South Seas, he wrote a poem for Colvin called To S.C. It became part of the posthumous collection Songs of Travel and Other Verses arranged by Colvin and published in 1895 by Chatto & Windus. In the poem he shifts his thoughts from his tropical surroundings of his island home and recalls the fond memories of being a guest at Sidney Colvin's home at the British Museum, a home which Louis would refer to in letters and conversation as "the Monument" and here as "the many-pillared and the well-beloved":

To other lands and nights my fancy turned -
To London first, and chiefly to your house,
The many-pillared and the well-beloved.
There yearning fancy lighted; there again
In the upper room I lay, and heard far off
The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;
The muffled tramp of the Museum guard
Once more went by me; I beheld again
Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;
Again I longed for the returning morn,
The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,
The consentaneous trill of tiny song
That weaves round monumental cornices
A passing charm of beauty. Most of all,
For your light foot I wearied, and your knock
That was the glad réveillé of my day.

One of Colvin's colleagues at the British Museum was Richard Garnett (1835-1906) a scholar whose life was wholly bound up with the British Museum from the year 1851, when he entered the Museum as an assistant in the Library, to his later years as the Keeper of the Printed Book. Colvin in his Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852-1912, recalled Garnett with this description:

The most genially quaint of erudite men, the most helpful, the most smiling and queerly attractive to look at in spite of his stained teeth and bristling russet stubble of a beard, he was not, I suppose, a trained bibliographer in the full modern sense, but had a vast and varied practical knowledge of books and the most indefatigably obliging courtesy in helping all those who sought his help in their studies. Sedulous as he was in every museum duty, Garnett found time for a vast amount of reading and much miscellaneous critical and biographical writing outside his official work, and has left with all his colleagues a memory at which we cannot forbear to smile, but which we affectionately esteem and honour none the less. (pp. 208-209)

An interesting description which seems to suggest he was mildly eccentric. In Garnett's Times obituary the term vita umbratilis is referred to describe his career and it is doubly apt when considering he laboured beneath the umbrella-like protective dome of the Reading Room. Someone who was connected with the Museum from time to time was T. E. Lawrence--who could possibly be seen as eccentric in some ways as well. In an introduction to a reissue of one of Garnett's books, Lawrence wrote of him and the Reading Room of the British Museum:

The Reading Room, his province, is wise, rich, sober, warm, decent (even dingy), industrious; but it lacks humour, it lacks polish, and all that crackling display of surface virtue which comprehends smartness, and is much more. Consequently, because the Museum was hushed, Dr. Garnett would be--on paper--lively. Because the great ceiling coved so solemnly overhead, he would be flippant. Because his readers were so deadly serious, he would be sprightly. . . His dealings throughout the open hours were with living people, inquirers all, whether they were great scholars with minds so deep in the well of learning that never could they be raised to the life of day, or simple souls who had perhaps not heard of Sanchoniathon or Vopiscus. People would sidle up to him at his desk to ask for the best book upon caterpillars, for a Keats manuscript, to know how many protons might be in a cubic foot of Bessemer steel. The Library is the ultimate reference book of the world, and its presiding genius the Index.

Lawrence interestingly mentions in an aside, that the British Museum was an ideal place for umbrellas to find a home: "Incidentally this is the best place in London to lose an acquired or embarrassing umbrella. It costs no more than the pain of carrying off a brass disc; and that's not all loss, for there is one special pattern of slot machine in which these discs perform miracles." This little piece of advice from 1924 has left me with the image of T. E. Lawrence handing over an unwanted umbrella to the man at the door in red cuffs and lapels, and being handed a numbered brass disc, and has equally left me with the question of just what slot machine he was referring to.

The reference to an 'acquired' umbrella brings to mind poor Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster's Howards End, while the reference to an 'embarrassing' umbrella brings to mind the well-known and humorous undergraduate essay by Robert Louis Stevenson on The Philosophy of Umbrellas:

The falsity and the folly of the human race have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and while some umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not strikingly characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays his real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person’s disposition. A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets ‘with a lie in their right hand’?

A passage near the end of that funny essay is perhaps too good to pass up:

‘Not the least important, and by far the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it displays in affecting the atmospheric strata. There is no fact in meteorology better established—indeed, it is almost the only one on which meteorologists are agreed—than that the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in the form of rain. No theory,’ my friend continues, ‘competent to explain this hygrometric law has been given (as far as I am aware) by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait, Buchan, or any other writer; nor do I pretend to supply the defect. I venture, however, to throw out the conjecture that it will be ultimately found to belong to the same class of natural laws as that agreeable to which a slice of toast always descends with the buttered surface downwards.’

Light verse addendum:

I came across this saying in Putnam's Complete Book of Quotations, Proverbs and Household Words by W. Gurney Benham:

Rainy days will surely come,

Take your friend's umbrella home.

-Anon

And this from a book of comic verse:

The Rain

The rain it raineth every day,

Upon the just and unjust fellow,

But more upon the just, because

The unjust hath the just's umbrella.

-Anon

This last verse could be a companion to Robert Louis Stevenson's in his A Child's Garden of Verses:

The Rain

The Rain is raining all around,

It falls on field and tree,

It rains on the umbrellas here,

And on the ships at sea.

And on a personal note, my wife recently referred to umbrellas in a blogpost and quoted a verse of mine written in the early 1980s. I had been reading quite a bit of nonsense verse and cautionary tales, the work of Lear, Belloc, Carroll et al., and I wrote a flurry of light verse--or nonsense-- in that vein. Since I have digressed upon umbrellas, I shall leave with two verses of mine:

Umbrellas

Umbrellas were once made of feathers you know,

With two you could almost fly.

Like that girl from Trieste, in that strong north-west,

Who was swept up into the sky.

And when she looked down, she saw with a frown,

Her parents were waving goodbye, goodbye,

Her parents were waving goodbye.

Umbrellas are good in all sorts of weathers,

They can even be used as a boat.

Like that boy from Madras,

To impress a fine lass,

Crossed a stream like a knight o'er a moat.

And together they travelled, the stream that unravelled,

And off in the sunset did float, did float,

And off in the sunset did float.

-ralph patrick mackay

The Night After Christmas: A Visit from Stephen Fry and Co.

The Night After Christmas:

A Visit From

Stephen Fry

&

Co.

Twas the night after Christmas at Hugh Laurie's house,
His dear wife was screaming, "a Mouse! it's a Mouse!"
And Hugh in his stockings jumped up on a chair,
Thinking if only his friend, Stephen Fry had been there,
But he was probably in Norfolk all snug in his bed,
With visions of ipods and downloads in his head.
So the Lauries sipped eggnog on their chair in nightcaps,
And were soon fast asleep, snoring in their laps.
When out by the pool, they heard such a splatter,
They sprang from their chair with the force of dark matter.
Away to the window they flew in a trice--
Followed by a family of adorable mice.
The garden gnomes glistened in the moon's afterglow,
While the swimming pool rippled with hints of white snow.
When what to their wondering eyes should appear,
But Stephen Fry in trunks and red snorkle gear.
With his ipod roistered, lively and quick, he managed an inpromtu twitpic--
With his Santa hat, he looked a veritable St. Nick.
More merry than beagles his dear friends they came,
And with a Baaahhh! and a trimble, he called them by name,
"Bill Bailey! Alan Davies! Jo Brand! and Phil Jupitus!
Sean Lock! Jimmy Carr! Rob Brydon! and Trefusis!
To the springboard climb up, climb up one and all,
Together we'll create one massive cannonball!"
Like dry leaves they did shed their clothes and did fly
Over to the springboard, hands raised to the sky,
And up they did mount, like coursers they flew
And with ipod and vodie, St. Stephen Fry too.
And then in a twinkling, they heard a great creak,
The board was too slender, the board was too weak.
The eyeballs of the Lauries--and the mice--rolled around
As their friends fell forward with a flubbering bound!
A bundle of bodies, some tight, some slack,
A veritable Moby spewing water from the wrack.
Their eyes--how they twinkled! their dimples how merry!
Their cheeks were all rosy (for the water was dam icey!)
Then Hugh and his wife brought them cotton terry towels,
As their friends bibble-bobbled and shivered their vowels.
Stephen, with magic, procured bottles of fine Port,
And they all raised a glass to Peter Kingdom and his Court.
Bill Bailey tickled ivories, and Bryden talked behind his teeth,
While Hugh got his head stuck in the old advent wreath.
Jimmy Carr told a joke bout garden gnomes and lubricant jelly
While Jo Brand watched David Tennant's Doctor on the telly.
Dear Jupitus sang a song bout a princess and an elf
While Trefusis and his dongle laughed in spite of himself.
Alan Davies and Sean Lock mimicked and told stories,
And had everyone laughing, including mice and the Lauries.
Then Stephen recited a moving stanzaic work
About a lingerie shop owner, Pumbleby Quirk.
Oh, the tears they did fall, they fell from each eye,
(Including the writer of this ditty, Ralph Patrick Mackay.)
They embibed some more port, and each blew their nose,
Arranging for photos in a jumbled group pose.
And then with a whistle, Hugh did show them their beds,
And told them breakfast was at seven for any sleepy heads!
Stephen visited each guest, and as he turned out each light,
Said, "Happy Dreams to all, and to all a good good night."

-by Ralph Patrick Mackay aka Chumley

A Fridge Magnet Childe Roland

Self

The profligate juggernaut scion
through arid vicissitude
by fusillade steed
and subterfuge
trod full
and brazen
lest
turgid
herculean pedagogue
festoon him
with unctuous
pithy droll.

{A handfull of fridge magnet words brought this out and they seemed to bring up, in my mind, old Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came--even if the young knight was afoot and not on a horse-- or am I thinking of some other Browning bit? (Although, to be precise, the magnets were on the dryer, and, as I waited for the laundry to dry. . . idle hands.) With apologies to Robert Browning}

Lightly Versified 1

Perusing The New Oxford Book of Light Verse edited by Kingsley Amis has, as usual with these things, influenced me. For some reason the following Limerick came to me as I tried to fall asleep last night.







There was a young man of Chambly,
Who incapably sang in a tree.
When asked why it was,
He said, "It's because,
I'm a descendent of Madame Albani."


A friend I used to know grew up in Chambly and told me of the young man there who was known to be a descendent of the renowned and extremely talented international opera diva Madame Albani, and how he lived off the name. My friend was a great opera fan, and he could see why this young man should be proud, but I think he grew tired of being reminded of this young man's relation to fame.

In the 1850s when Madame Albani was still the young Emma Lajeunesse from Chambly, she performed a number of times at the Montreal Mechanics' Institute Hall where she played the piano and later sang. The Montreal Mechanics' Hall on the corner of Great St. James and St. Peter streets (now St. Jacques and St. Pierre) was opened in the spring of 1855 and was later demolished in the 1920s for the Head Office of the Royal Bank of Canada. That building still exists in its massivity. An astonishing pile indeed. When it was built in 1928 it was the tallest building in Canada. Here is a view of the interior of the main banking level. You would feel confident with your money in this bank. Hmm, I think I have digressed rather far from Kingsley Amis and light verse, but, if you look very closely, you'll see that the man in the photograph bears a striking resemblance to the English author.