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Bounce by Duncan McNaughton ISBN 1-889960-13-6 $15 + $2 p/h |
Here is the inimitable McNaughton's latest collection of poems, delivered with the unrelieved honesty, acute hilarity and unadorned tenderness that have come to mark his work over a lifetime's attention. These poems are deceptively accessible, and delightfully intense.
Excerpts from Bounce
Still Life With Ears
Of the pretty graces, my favorites
are mischief and betrayal.
They care most.
Oh how I leapt up Bramante's staircase!
to see Rembrandt's negra, Museo
Morandi, Palazzo d'Accursio,
Piazza Maggiore, Bologna.
When you reflect in the mirror the
mirror wins. Unreflected, you depend
on the stranger in the bed.
An old building, of communal moment,
the granary, but after a while the
bosses moved in. A broad equestrian
scala mounted nobility might mount.
In Italian still is morte. Life,
natura. Form in poetry, that sense
of definition. Shutters thrown open.
For most of us live in a house. We carry
its picture in our pocketbook.
Want to see it...?
It Felt
As if I was a kid walking to school
in the morning chill, I suppose I was
twelve or thirteen. Up Rosemary Street
to the tracks. And ever since. A small poem
by Ezra Pound. It worked. It looked like a poem
should look, though when you read it, out loud, it's
too delicate, the words were, the way
they were themselves, one after another.
I couldn't say them right because I couldn't
talk like that. No one ever talked like that.
They were written. You looked at them. I could
hear them in their own silence, in
my own silence, but I could not say them.
They may as well have been engraved
on a headstone. That's more than
fifty years ago. Half a century.
Apparently that's not even as long
as a heartbeat.
Last night was a long one in the ER.
I couldn't move for the cables attached
to my body. Doctor Wong gave me
an aspirin. Death is not optional, he
said, as if his exasperations
were supposed to be important to me.
Later, when I asked him if that was something
he thought about a lot, he ran away.
ER docs have short attention spans. This one
wanted to bully a poet. An old frightened
poet with a tough pain in his chest.
A poet, as he is one, is a poor man.
Like the Egyptian fellah said, Our
lives are the cheapest in the world.
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