Joseph Macleod - Poem

Poem

From ‘Cancer, or, The Crab’, a section of The Ecliptic (London: Faber and Faber, 1930)

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,

Suffuses the veins of the eyes

Till the retina, mooncoloured,

Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab

Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape

A flat hot boulder it

Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums

Sidles

The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations

Mad and stark naked

Sidles

The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elephantiasis

Sidles

All three across heaven with a rocking motion.

The Doldrums: ‘region of calms and light baffling winds

near Equator.’

But the calms are rare

The winds baffling but not light

And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club

Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon

All in the pallescent Saragosso weed

And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance

For

What are we but the excrement of the non-existent noon?

(Truth like starlight crookedly)

What are we all but ‘burial grounds abhorred by the moon’?

And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we.

But there is no snow here, nor lilies.

The night is glutinous

In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps

Smoulder: distant fireback of copse

Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond

The constellations which have stopped working (?)

Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps.

On edge of a glowworm

Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp

Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn

And in the centre the rugate trees

Though seeming as if they go up in smoke

Are held like cardboard where they are.

Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move.

We trap our goldfinch trapping our souls therewinged

Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods:

We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer

We don’t. We drink and drivel. My

poor Catullus, do stop being such a

Fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is

gone. O, once the days shone very bright for

you, when where that girl you loved so (as no

other will be) called, you came and came. And

then there were odd things done and many

which you wanted and she didn’t not want.

Yes indeed the days shone very bright for

you. But now she doesn’t want it.

Don’t you either,

booby. Don’t keep chasing her. Don’t live in

misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.

Goodbye girl: Catullus is quite hardened,

doesn’t want you, doesn’t ask, if you’re not

keen – though sorry you’ll be to be not asked.

Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for

you? Who’ll now go with you? Who’ll be attracted?

Whom’ll you love now? Whom may you belong to?

Whom’ll you now kiss? Whose lips’ll you nibble?

- Now you, Catullus, you’ve decided to be hardened.

How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?

O Aphrodite Pandemos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn

Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind

Wind humming like distant rooks

Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal

Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth

These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars

Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality

Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization

Civilization being relative our to Greek

Greek to Persian

Persian to Chinese

Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction

Satisfaction a matter of capacity

Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram

Epigrams – poems with a strabismus

Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon

The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the

houses of the Zodiac

And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways

Circling from no point returning to no point

Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving,

Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.

Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?

Nothing.

Riddle-me-ree from An Old Olive Tree (Edinburgh: M. MacDonald, 1971)

I was afraid and they gave me guts.

I was alone and they made me love.

Round that wild heat they built a furnace

and in the torment smelted me.

Out of my fragments came design:

I was assembled. I moved, I worked,

I grew receptive. Thanks to them

I have fashioned me.

Who am I?