I seem to hang around with poets in the bathroom.
I follow
Carol Ann Duffy's principle of keeping poetry handy to read in those spare moments. And I am probably one of only a handful of people living who can claim to have washed
Hugh MacDiarmid's bathroom floor when the cistern flooded.
Hugh MacDiarmid's bathroom sink in Brownsbank Cottage
Today I had an encounter with the poet
Norman MacCaig a Scottish poet of whom I am very fond. He was a friend of many including
Seamus Heaney. And I like the way he opens up a landscape and shows me how, by drawing its lines, we can see its shapes, patterns and pathways all the better. Something I would aspire to. Plus he used to hang out at nice pubs in
Edinburgh such as
Milnes Bar with other poets: always a good idea.
Coming across his Collected poems, I used them as a kind of divination tool and
I Ching.
The outcome was good. Section 3 of the poem
No end, no beginning written in 1968.
When you, in your unimaginable self,
suddenly were there, shut boxes opened
and worlds flew out coloured like pictures books
and full of heavy lethargies and gay dances:
when I met a tree, my old familiar, I knew
this was the first time I was meeting it;
and the birds in it singing - for the first time
I could crack the code of their jargon.
And the boredom and the loneliness
in the lit rooms of monotonous streets became
terrible and pitiful - you made me a member
of the secret society of humanity.
The future that had been failing muscles,
sagging flesh, cindering eyes -
all mine, all only mine - swarmed in the air
and spread its new meaning back
into every yesterday. Flux, revolution
emerged into sense, into their own
explanations. I could understand them,
not wholly, but I could understand them
as I could know, not wholly the meaning
of your still hand, quiet look, a way of walking
that takes you from the first garden to the future
where the apple hangs, still, on its dangerous tree.
Norman MacCaig
The only problem with this poetic dark art is that this poem literally has no end and no beginning. I don't want to know for the moment. I am only going to live in the present.
*****
You can find more on
Hugh MacDiarmid's sink here
http://www.poetandgeek.net/2014/06/hugh-macdiarmid-sink.html. And more on
Norman MacCaig at his
Scottish Poetry Library page here
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/norman-maccaig.
