A Book of Lives

by Edwin Morgan

  To jostle the crowds

  Where Mark might be whistling a snatch or a catch that would carelessly care for you and sain you.

  Harry

  – Tell us about Harry. – Harry the vanman? – The very man. Go ahead.

  – Where shall I begin? He delivered newspapers and the van was red.

  – That’s not too interesting. – We used to play strip draughts before we went to bed.

  We lit out for the Blackpool Illuminations instead of trolling the Med.

  I am sure there are many other things that might be said.

  – So he’s not a fixture.

  I get the picture.

  – Do you? I don’t think so. Wayward paths can be affectionately led.

  The Last Dragon

  Is it the mists of autumn? My mind’s dislodged, far back, far off, in turmoil, a memory trail

  To the grizzled warrior in Heorot hall whose heart inne weoll

  Thonne he wintrum frod worn gemunde and told his ancient tale.

  I too am old in winters and stories and may I never fail

  To guard my word-hoard before the dragon with his flailing tail

  Sweeps everything away

  Leaves nothing to say

  Either in turmoil or in peace, and neither poetry nor song nor all their longing can avail.

  Dragon on Watch

  My grandmother’s bronze dragon straddles my mantelpiece like a guard,

  Heavy, fierce, Chinese, and now quite old, he shows no sign of not being hard

  If activated. I have just been dusting his tongue which licks out like a flame. Fine, unmarred,

  His ears and horns are flames, his tail is flames, his arched reptilian back is unscarred.

  He will certainly outlive me, but to eat me – that’s barred!

  He can watch over Mark

  When I am in the dark.

  Polish him with respect, with a dry cloth, and the house will never be ill-starred.

  Scan Day

  Two scans in one day, CT and bone – they are certainly looking after me.

  Computerised tomography like a non-invasive Vesalius will slice me apart to see

  If I am really what I ought to be and not what I don’t want to be.

  In the giant redwood forest you are shown the rings of a fallen tree

  With the few blips and wavy bits that tell you it’s been a good fight, even with destiny.

  There are no chimeras

  Under the cameras.

  You are laid out as you are, imperfect, waiting, wondering, approximately free.

  Skeleton Day

  Bizarrely brought, demanding thought, the benedictions of the bone scan!

  There you lie, well-injected, clothed but motionless man

  As the machine lowers its load close over you and begins its creeping pan

  Downwards, while the screen unrolls a little skeleton, a blueprint, a plan –

  That plan is you! Skull, ribs, hips emerge from the dark like a caravan

  Bound for who knows where

  Stepping through earth or air

  Still of a piece and still en route, beating out the music of tongs and bones while it can.

  October Day

  Get the sun out, get it shining! It’s only October, and only a tenth of the leaves are yellowing.

  Prod a few white clouds out of their beds and get them billowing!

  We can sit a while and not batten down the hatches for a gale following.

  We can clink a glass and swirl the wine and still not rush the swallowing.

  We can smoke in a moveless dear afternoon till the late light spreads its hallowing

  Over everything

  And then we must bring

  The day to rest with good ease, recollections, far thoughts, love and dallying.

  Titania

  Scratch him between the ears, he is in excellent fettle, and when he listens to the tongs and bones

  He nods his head, brays gently in time, and his hurdy-gurdy drones

  Ravish Titania who has fled from pavanes and protocols trumpets and thrones

  To be with her beast, to cuddle her cuddy, to dawdle with her donkey, to translate his tones

  Into transports of love. So why is it touching? You don’t need erogenous zones

  For a parable of affection

  Doomed in direction

  But groping for the gold that’s panned from gainless pains and groans.

  Tatyana

  Tatyana sat at her little window table in the moonlight.

  First love forbade her even to ask whether it was wise to write.

  Her nightgown slipped from her shoulder as she made her heart naked all that long night.

  Her letter fell dead. Onegin thought her naive, provincial, and not very bright.

  Bright enough to marry money, but glittering at a ball, poised and mature in the candlelight,

  She knew that happiness

  Was really something else,

  Was once tak vozmozhno, tak blizko, so possible, so near, and now only remembered, receded, almost out of sight.

  Teresa

  Up here in Ávila, and grand the sierra, there’s so much air and space for vision.

  God must be nearer by a sky or two. It burns. He burns. And there is no remission.

  There’s love, and love, and then there’s love – and love – and if you are really aflame, who makes the decision?

  I’m a bustler, I’m a hustler, I’m a hussy, I have a mission, I make an incision, I court collision.

  Who do I love? My barefoot sisters, Juan de la Cruz who might be my son, the intuition

  I have of one divine

  Lover who will be mine

  But not till I die. Ah, muero porque no muero! God forgive my ardent impatient admission!

  John 1

  Nothing will bring him back. I know that, of course I know that. The days

  When I do not think of him are few, but if I turn my gaze

  On a phantom, on a plot of earth, on a faded photograph of great times, I raise

  Nothing, nearly nothing, no, not nothing, it is the something of a pain that stays

  Ineradicable and only to be mitigated when I breathe the phrase

  I loved you. You must know

  It was truly so, although

  As clay in clay you cannot catch my thanks, my steadiness, my lateness, my praise.

  John 2

  Once you dyed your greying hair with a black marker and the pillow was a mess.

  What did I care? What did you care? We were in such happiness

  It might have been peach pink or saltire blue. And as for dress

  My flares were wider than yours – oh no they weren’t – oh yes they were – confess!

  Faffing along the scorching Black Sea coast we were burnt too raw to caress.

  At Constantsa we were blest

  By a breeze from the west

  Unforgiving Ovid stared down at us, but even in that half-decayed port we could not share a smidgen of his distress.

  When in Thrace

  Ovid had to start wearing furs – layers of them sometimes – in Thrace.

  He said the winter winds and the salt sleet would cut off your face.

  He threeped and threeped that his exile was a conspiracy and a disgrace.

  Surrealistic metamorphoses of love and lust were hardly to be written about in that place.

  But once he learned to stop girning and moaning he uncovered a trace

  Of common humanity

  Cast off urbanity

  Wrote poems in the barbarian tongue which he hated but which was now, as a philosopher would one day say, the case.

  Lust

  Lust is a languorous pot of fumes in the hallway. Lust is steam-pistons. Lust is promises promises.

  Lust is a bead-curtain chinkled by a dancer’s nipples as she shakes and shines through the teasing interstices.

  Lust rides the wildebeest into oblivion. On its back are princes, blister
s, mistresses.

  Lust is the corer screwing and sloshing its juicy cock-shaped tunnel into the melon of your wishes.

  Lust is the holding of a sweaty glance across the gay disco’s heaving dance-floor and its bareback vistas.

  It is really not very good

  And we don’t think you should

  But we know you will. Dinners come brimming from the kitchen and you grin as you crunch the ashes from those hot hot dishes.

  Late Day

  There are days when, and there are days if, and then again there are simply days.

  After a long night, after a bad night, the sun did let out a few rays

  That filtered gamely through the grimy scaffolding. The poor wintry stuff gets my praise.

  If darkness kept the world like a closed eye, we could only get our nightmare to search and gaze

  From its rolling red and bridled eyeball as we ride it down and down where muzzles never graze.

  How great the winter sun

  When horrors are undone

  By gentlest flimsiest fingers lighting our fingers as we open the curtains on a day content to glimmer and not to blaze.

  Bobby

  Bobby on one elbow, stretched out in his red jeans on my carpet, thirty years ago

  Bobby at the Grand Canyon, squinting up, on the verge, fathomless purple below

  Bobby a bundle of nerves as the transatlantic plane comes down to land, heavy and slow

  Bobby mugged, compensated, an unexpected few thousands to blow

  Bobby with a stick and a cap and a fluttery heart in a basement café in our Glasgow

  Where we faithfully meet

  Take the lift to the street

  Having swirled out our foamy chocolate-sprinkled late but oh not last cappuccino!

  G.

  ‘Ah canny say Ah love ye but.’ ‘I know, that’s all right, it’s all right.’

  ‘Ah love ma wife an ma weans. Ah don’t go aroon thinkin aboot you day an night.

  Ah wahnt tae come in yir mooth, an see thee teeth a yours – see they don’t bite!

  Ah like ye right enough, but aw that lovey-dovey stuff is pure shite.

  Ah widny kiss ye, God no.’ But kiss me he did one afternoon, with a drink in him, at Central Station, on the lips, in broad daylight.

  It will not be denied

  In this life. It is a flood-tide

  You may dam with all your language but it breaks and bullers through and blatters all platitudes and protestations before it, clean out of sight.

  Tomtits

  Two twinkling tomtits were enjoying the scaffolding outside my window. Did they think it was a tree?

  Surely they are not going to nest in those hard angles for all the world to see?

  Against the filthy struts the sodden planks the louring sky they are new-minted fresh and free,

  Flashing flirting blue and yellow, dark eyes darting missing nothing, not even me! –

  A pair, an item, a unit, so magnetic to each other and so beautiful to us that we say they must be

  In love, what else could wind

  The springs of heart and mind

  To frisk through all that muck and murk in such precarious liberty?

  Arabian Night

  The runners through the darkness hear the hooves, is it behind them or all round?

  They are inured to the unknown and only wonder idly at the sound.

  They track the stony desert to bring back the bride, all braided and bound

  With silver and leather, silent, white-veiled and white-gowned.

  Why did one of them not hunker down and set his ear to the ground?

  Jealous riders jumped them

  Sabred them and dumped them

  But the bright bride had learned to hide, stripped off her braws, put on her shades, called her maids, packed a van and roared off, never to be found.

  November Night

  Dark and darker the year, late leaves flying, my thoughts turning

  Back to ’38, war looming, lectures distracting, feelings racing, engrossing, burning,

  Jean and Frank together within me smouldering shouldering laughing tugging churning,

  Frank the first, king of something, emerging, emulating, energising, a whole province of yearning,

  Gallus Russianist, stocky communist, quick-talking anti-somnambulist, your learning

  Was my learning, but then

  You were the first of men

  In that impossible dimension of love which now with unspoken groans and even secret tears I was approaching and discerning.

  Spanish Night

  And yet, en una noche oscura, as we know from the words of swarthy much-buffeted John of the Cross,

  In the darkest night, from a dungeon, a real one, rich in hideous shit and chains and slime and moss,

  It is not impossible to bribe a jailer and bamboozle his guttering god like a joss,

  Escaping from dark into dark but leaving great doctors to gloss

  What light he saw then in the stars he sent his thankful, his hot, his loving thoughts across.

  He sank onto the breast

  Of one whom he loved best

  Delirious among the dim night lilies where at last there was neither loved nor lover, but there was love and everything that was not love was dross.

  Whatever Happened To

  the young man sitting next to me in the Biograph (peace to its long-lost rubble!), in that smoky place

  Where it was too dark to take stock of anybody’s face,

  Who seized my wandering hand, laid it flat palm upwards, and with his index finger started to trace

  I.L.O.V.E.Y.O.U., clear as if he had spoken, letter by steady letter, crossing with quick grace

  My life-line and my heart-line and moving into a space

  He was not blate to invade

  But was he then afraid

  Scurrying off as if in shame that he had laid the train for some outrageous embrace?

  Absence

  Love is the most mysterious of the winds that blow.

  As you lie alone it batters with sleeplessness at the winter bedroom window.

  The friend is absent, the streetlamp shivers desolately to and fro.

  Your prostate makes you get up, you look out, police car and ambulance howl and flash as they matter-of-factly come and go.

  There is pain and danger down there, greater than the pain you know

  But it is pain all the same

  As you breathe the absent name

  Of one who is bonded to you beyond blizzards, time-zones, sickness, black stars, snow.

  Letters

  You sent a card from the Uffizi which took sixteen days to reach these shores.

  A pigeon might be better, it could home in on the scaffold and count the floors.

  The heart beats, I sit, I eat, I talk, I open doors

  But in the everyday I am waiting for the imagined but stormily cargoed shores

  Of joy and hope a letter in your upright hand tips out and restores.

  ‘Scrivimi!’ you write.

  I do, I will, all right!

  But this, though I do not send it, I give you to keep till the sun melts the rocks and the sea no longer roars.

  Love and the Worlds

  Scary is this tremulous earth, flaring, shouting, killing and being killed.

  Is the universe rippling with life? What sign is there that space is filled

  With anything but gas and dust and fire and rock? Are we the tillers to have it tilled?

  I think so! And with these red hands, an act of love? Why not? We cry but we create, we kill but we build.

  Dante was sure the stars were all – even ours – rolled out by love. They gild

  A dark that would truly scare

  If there was nothing there

  The horror of there not being something, good or bad or neither, made or found, willed or self-willed.

  The Release

  The scaffolding has gone. The sky is there! hard cold
high clear and blue.

  Clanking poles and thudding planks were the music of a strip-down that let light through

  At last, hammered the cage door off its hinges, banged its goodbye to the bantering dusty brickie crew,

  Left us this rosy cliff-face telling the tentative sun it is almost as good as new.

  So now that we are so scoured and open and clean, what shall we do?

  There is so much to say

  And who can delay

  When some are lost and some are seen, our dearest heads, and to those and to these we must still answer and be true.

  September–November 2002

  The War on the War on Terror

  This woman, I heard her say she could not bear

  To bring a child into a world so dreadful

  It scoops up smoking body parts like that.

  Did she mean she would rather leave them lying?

  Of course not, that’s just twisting what she says.

  Well, let’s be blunt, let us be damnably blunt.

  Would you rather not have a baby in a body-bag,

  Are you listening? – bits of a baby

  In a body-bag, would you rather not have that,

  Not see that, not touch that, not know that,

  Is it too much for you, for your sensibilities,

  Come on, I know what I am talking about,

  I have been right through life like an arrow.

  What child would welcome such a grudging mother?

  Stay in bed then; count the hours and wars.

  It really is a very simple question:

  Would you rather have something, or nothing?

  Sit with your back against some tomb, altar,