Showing posts with label poetry by Margaret Gunning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry by Margaret Gunning. Show all posts

Sunday, July 10, 2022

As I Went Out One Morning (after W. H. Auden)

As I went out one morning






As I went out one morning
Walking the primal road
My shoulders were bent over
With an invisible load.

And down by the creek where the salmon
Sing all day in the spring
I heard a man with holes in his clothes
Say, “Love has no ending.”

I wondered at his heresy
He wasn’t supposed to speak
Of things he did not understand
And shouldn’t even seek.



“I love you, Lord, I love you,”
the ragged man proclaimed,
although his face was badly scarred
and his body bent and maimed.

The man was clearly crazy
For as he spoke his rhyme,
The salmon danced in the shallow stream
In fish-determined time.

I didn’t try to love him
But I loved him just the same
For he broke the diver’s quivering bow
And called his God by name.



“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”
I cried in my anguished state,
“What is the secret of the world?
Where is the end of hate?”

And all at once his face had changed
To an evil, ugly mask
His body had become the hate
About which I had asked.



“How stamp this mask into the mud,
How keep despair at bay?”
“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,
“But my God can point the way.”

“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,
When God’s abandoned you?
How dare you use the Holy Name?
He doesn’t want you to!





Your life’s just spent surviving
With the sidewalk as your bed
And taking poisons in your veins
And scrambling to be fed.”

The man just stood in leaves and mulch
While the salmon sang and spawned:
“Just see the other side of me
And tell me I am wrong.”

Another face appeared just then
A face all beaming bright
Its eyes were streaming like the sun
With pure mysterious light



“You blinded fool, you stand before
A drop of mist made rain
An eye that Paradise looks through
That holds both joy and pain.”

“I cannot understand you, for
You play such games with me!
How can you masquerade as God
And tell me how to see?”



“No one knows how Life began,
From Nothing came our birth.
A stir of seething molecules
Sparked all the life on earth.”

“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one
Who made this world come true!
Imposter, get out of my road,
I cannot look at you.”



“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,
“For no one knows the why.
But you will be forever changed
By looking through my eye.”

Margaret Gunning


Thursday, March 9, 2017

Two men named Bill (and other poems)




Blogger's note. It's been a while since I felt like sharing my poetry with anyone. Having it "rejected" - booted back in your face for decades - leaves scars. It is traumatic, as is hearing, several hundred times, "We really like your poetry, BUT. . . " 

One editor said, "I hate to turn away what might turn out to be the next best-seller, BUT. . . " (we don't think it has the quality we're looking for). That kind of casual cruelty disguised as compliment is nearly universal in publishing.

The horror of the Stephen Galloway affair ripped the veil off Canada's publishing Mafia, and I am now relieved I will never be a part of it (though I spent the better part of my life longing for it, jumping at it like a balloon that always popped up out of my reach).

It's not that I haven't been published at all. A dozen or so poems over that many years simply wasn't worth the grief. But here some of it is, mostly written a while ago. It means something to me. More than I can say. There's quite a bit of it here, because I've found in the past that if I do a Part 2, no one reads it.





I would say     

I would say that you are springtime,
That lambs
could not be lovelier: laughing bells
Of eyes bright with seeing,
the shining, shone of you.

I would say that you are a
Renaissance painting
of a beautiful woman:

So restored
that the paint gleams; its sheen
Fresh from the brush; its wetness
smelling new.

I would say that you are living
Water:  I see tiny
perfect selves, suspended
upside-down in the silver
Merriment of your eyes.

If true, then I would say that you are
Not my brother; but some other; some
me not yet thought of; next year’s

Reflection

cast lightly (God’s amusement)
over waters

rendered still.




                                                
Gina

sweet shy
dark girl          I’ve seen her

here before
  
she always wore the best clothes
(silvery things/bangles
feathered skirts
necklace made
from the teeth of a wolf)
  
now I see Gina in the ward

kitchen.        Still beautiful
big-eyed
part Cree                            her hair tied back

she shows me the tracings of
partly-healed               gashes
sewn back together in
a gridwork


                                                           hands/
on her arms,                                            wrists.


She must be twenty or so
No one comes to visit

Once she had a boyfriend
but he got sick too


  

                                                        
 Delivery

This is a strange
Horse I ride, feet
Pointing up, all bloodless and blue
On a long trail of ether.

My brain swims in a vault of chrome
through the removed murmur of voices
and a distant
Clinical clanking.

I will emerge now, slick and
purple as a baby.  The surgeon’s eyes
Crinkle over the mask.

Hands cool as paper, hands that have never
Handled a snake, patiently suture
All of my holes.  The work is true.


Emergency waiting room  
  
Which is worse:  the spilled
smell of
accidents
or the sound
of magazines
slowly
growing older
in this
ticking house of death?
  

                                           

Sorry

My heart unclasped
One day in your office,
Suddenly, all in a shot, the catch
Broke loose, andit
Fell behind a pile of files.

I did not mean to;
It was an accident of gravity.
Earth reached up and pulled it down.

I stood dizzy,
My centre lost, the core
Riven.  It felt silly
to lean over like that.

My face grew hot.

There was no way to put it back.
The space had grown over already;
The fall had changed me.

I left that place different,
Looked outside.  The light
Hurt my skin.  The world
was a new color.

I wiped my eyes, and kept on walking.
A small place
in my chest
Grew still with singing.


                                          


THREE-PART INVENTION


(a)     indigo eyes

I am the salt
you are the sweet

hair/
        My heartsprung

(horse) of the air,
au clair

ah! care,
           clover
to the/stables,
We.
     Drenched with the scent
of hens of hay
                   dear
of tree:  your/      odor

(of salt
(of sap
(of sea


b) cunningerotic

Lip, let me laugh
You.  Set the salt
           Sally, sashay down
               The hay of my mind.
                                            Seashorn,
                                      feverworn
                       hairborne:  Your
                         face a chiming, a
                                     Brining.  The
                                        (stainglassed
                                           seahorse
                                          of your
                                   (voicy
                                (ice


         

c)       Fifth chakra (for ray lynch)

a blues tunnel
blamed open

pitched down
to the base of the soul

                                                                 Mermaids spinning
                                  in your throat, Dear
                                                          heart:  shining vessel,
           
opened for a song,
shut open,

Wept for a penny
disabled


                      the               
             by / dreaming 
                  door






Love is no quick thing

(a halfsonnet/explanation)

Love is no quick thing, Saltstream surprise
Unevening your pearling teeth at dawn:
Quick!  like a foxglove/silvertail is gone,
It tips the world’s rude balance/wild surmise.
Inside my glands the trump of lovedoom cries;
with white kidgloves I’d pluck your soulstrings’ songs
(Inside my brain your lovebeat
dongs and dongs

dongs and dongs

dongs and dongs
                                                                                             and      dongs

                                                                                                                        dongs)                                                                                                                   



Saxophone (for Bill Prouten)

i don’t know who invented this
reflexive question mark of an instrument

but i think it was a good thing

for it’s great to look at,
with fat keys like frog eyes
and a big bell like royal jelly
you could keep flowers in there if you wanted to,
extra socks
or even a clock

Snakes kink too
and this sound is snakey
purply mauve as the deepest bruise
and raunchy
as a man in love

smoked as some cat of the night
disappearing over a fence
it makes leaps
(but only because it has to)

There is no
morning saxophone

this is a sound that
pulls the shades down

a hangover
howl
fading to twilight
or the blackmost
belly button
of the night

Few can wrap their lips around
this gooseneck
without some harm coming to them
for this is an instrument
with a long history of
hollowing out
all but the most hardy

Bird flew into a pane
of glass and was
smashed

we don’t know why it does this to people
(maybe it was mad at him
for taking it all to such extremes)

but how could you blow this thing
halfway

i ask you

how could you rear back
in some great pained whiplash of the spine
without a sense of
terrible commitment

i never much cared for
saxophones myself
until i heard one blown correctly at last
jazz is a genre i will never understand
but perhaps that’s good
for like the priesthood, one must enter into it

without question
reservation
or doubt




two men named bill

i love two men named Bill
and one of them is fancy
one is plain
i love one for his looks
the other for his brain

and when we are together
(and especially when not)
such yearning for his body
pulls apart
the art
of the life i’ve made
here in this patch of shade

one Bill plays the saxophone
the other Bill washes the floor
one writes songs and sucks on bongs
and one’s worth dying for

i’d run away with one Bill
but that doesn’t mean i’d have two
the laws of the world don’t work that way
i’d have to choose
or lose
both Bills
(which would kill

me.)

one Bill made two babies
one just made me rue
one Bill’s a restless bachelor boy
the other is painfully true

there are two
sets of eyes
one brown
one blue
four eyes i love so well:

see my soul reflected in the
searching blue
fall in cognac amber
‘til i drunken drown

i love two men
and both of them are Bill
there’s a cost to loving them
so well
when god presents his bill
i’ll have to pay my way
and choose
or lose
both Bills
(. . . which would kill

me.)




Gone west                                                         

It seems in my life I have always
moved west, New Brunswick, Alberta,
the boardwalk behind the Quay;

it’s a left-handed sort of life
driving me heartwards, though never,

no never,

heartwise.

                                           that day
when I thought I saw you/  on the boardwalk
my guts jumped:                       it
jerked the hook in my colon
(you always knew about bait)

You know how it was:    I wanted to stand on my desk
on the last day of classes
and shout:  o captain!  My captain!

But you had your own rotation – I saw
it reel from view, and

(helpless to catch you)

watched your spiralling apogee

What is the remotest segment of an orbit?
Booze, blondes.  Too much of
a good thing.  But I did love you.
We wandered, Pooh and Piglet in an
Escher maze, searching for heffalumps.

You calmly said, “Watch this,” and set fire
to my mind.

I saw you as the human yoyo, bobbing up and
                                                                   down,
sleeping, walking the dog, in and out
and ‘round the world.

I knew you’d be back, like hounds,
like a cycle of blood, like black
fruit springing into tree.  When the
string broke, I hid my eyes, and
said, but it’s only a lute,
it will heal itself,
half-hoping I was wrong.

I don’t know why or how God looks
after you, beached like Stanley’s whale,
stared at by the curious.  I don’t know
how God manages.  It was beyond me.

And so I kept on moving.



Sunday, May 26, 2013

Poems from the Land of Random (or: it's my painting and I'll cheat if I want to)




                                               
 I would say

I would say that you are springtime,
That lambs
could not be lovelier: laughing bells
Of eyes bright with seeing,
the shining, shone of you.

I would say that you are a
Renaissance painting
of a beautiful woman:

so restored
that the paint gleams; its sheen
Fresh from the brush; its wetness
smelling new.

I would say that you are living
Water:  I see tiny
perfect selves, suspended
upside-down in the silver
Merriment of your eyes.

If true, then I would say that you are
Not my brother; but some other; some
me not yet thought of; next year’s

reflection

cast lightly (God’s amusement)
over waters

rendered still.





 Smile                                                               

The one thing we shared
that day, after the wrench
and wrangle of misunderstandings,

pride, ego batted back and forth
like an exhausted bird,

was the look, that precious, that infinite, the
tinkling of camel bells
five thousand years ago on the Syrian
desert, with one gleam

(a star the size of Christ, or a
small diamond
briefly appearing on your
perfect front tooth)

Sideways, barely caught, like the music
that breathes over the horizon at very dawn,
hush of Bach unravelling in the
midst of my tears, fragile veil of flowers
pulled aside, revealing a shyness, a sweet

almost succulent, bashful ripeness,
all this bloomed, bloomed in less than a second –

then
quicker than a cat off a windowsill,
your face relaxed into its
Forty-four years of God knows what:

but for that flash, that flush, that sprinkling moment of
stars pale as laughter,

I turned; I saw.

    

Dressing for death

I just don't know what to wear

to the funeral

even tho I know

she’s not really dead


I don’t know why flowers                           /why?


I bought this skirt
but it was for a recital

She was alive yesterday
though
/   not eating


then I saw her face in the crowd
knowing she was in the hospital


I don’t know what to wear to the ceremony
     almost
It’s/as hard to figure out as

where they go







Sorry

My heart unclasped
one day in your office,
suddenly, all in a shot, the catch
broke loose, and it
fell behind a pile of files.

I did not mean to;
it was an accident of gravity.
Earth reached up and pulled it down.

I stood dizzy,
my centre lost, the core
Riven.  It felt silly
to lean over like that.

My face grew hot.

There was no way to put it back.
The space had grown over already;
the fall had changed me.

I left that place different,
Looked outside.  The light
hurt my skin.  The world
was a new color.

I wiped my eyes, and kept on walking.
A small place
in my chest
Grew still with singing.

                                                     


THREE-PART INVENTION


(a)     indigo eyes

I am the salt
you are the sweet

hair/
        My heartsprung

(horse) of the air,
au clair

ah! care,
                 clover
to the/stables,
We.
     Drenched with the scent
of hens of hay
                                dear                       
   of tree:  your/odor

(of salt
(of sap
(of sea


b) cunningerotic

Lip, let me laugh
You.  Set the salt

Sally, sashay down
The hay of my mind.

Seashorn,
feverworn
hairborne:  Your
face a chiming, a
Brining.  The
(stainglassed
seahorse
of your
                        (voicy
                        (ice

  
c)       Fifth chakra (for ray lynch)

a blues tunnel
blamed open

pitched down
to the base of the soul

Mermaids spinning
in your throat, Dear
heart:  shining vessel,

opened for a song,
shut open,

Wept for a penny

disabled
    the
by/(dreaming
      (door







Blogger's note. NEVER explain poetry. Ever. So now I will explain it a bit. I sometimes trawl/crawl through the files to see what I can see, and so I won't have to write anything that day. Lately I've happened upon poetry, stuff I mostly wrote a long time ago. But there are surprises. The stuff I was SURE was good then has somehow changed. Now it's not so good. The really slight stuff, the ones I felt I tossed off, feel better to me now. I actually like some of them.

The paintings, well. . . I originally painted these during a fever of creativity that I would never want to repeat, the type that requires medication. I was sure they were the best things ever painted, so I kept them. When I found them I went, whew, oh sure. The paper was all yellowed and bumpy from using too much poster paint. So scanned them and basically forgot about them.

Then every so often I'd find the file and fool around. My computer wasn't up to much on altering color, focus, etc. Then I got a new computer, and bam. I was inverting them into negatives, increasing saturation to make up for the fade of time, turning dials and knobs. It's cheating, I know, but is it really? It's my painting and I'll cheat if I want to. I still have to fool around to get the effects I want, or (better) to happen upon things I never even counted on. Somebody has to do it, I guess, and if it's me, isn't it still my painting? And I'll cry if I want to.