15 Master Virgil's Deceyte, Duncan McGibbon [highly recommended books .TXT] 📗

/> 10. Saga

That night I sat in the dark
at the Nuyorican slam night
and did not read
and walked back up Broadway.
past officers of the law.
I thought of the innocent
dispatched,
Dialou, Peach.

The next day we sat
in the departure lounge,
remembering tall viewpoints.

Returning,
under the reading lamp:

“All the men were
slaughtered like this.
“Then that left
only the women,
for no-one wanted them dead..
Freydis said
“Give me the axe...”Early in Sprin,g
…they loaded the boat…’’
..Then they put to sea.”
 
January, 1856;

Darkness, winter lands;
the Ohio river
is frozen over,
near Kentucky.
On Sunday night,
seventeen slaves,
the work of
several masters
race stolen horses,
pulling a great sledge
over the bare,
snowy ground.
By daybreak,
mad with torpor,
the horses,
bring them to Covington.
They cross the empty,
waste river on foot
and filter separately
into Wester Row and
some from there,
underground
to Canada.
Simon and Mary
with their son, Robert,
his young wife, Margaret
and their three childrenstay in the town.

Later they are seen
asking for Kite,
the purchased slave,
in the house
below Mill Creek.
Fat tongues talk.

Within minutes,
owners and masters
and a posse of officers
surround the barred,
wooden shack.
A woman's voice,
commands
she will kill
herself and her children
rather than return.
They splinter
the window
with a post and
rush the house,
until a crack
of pistol fire
stops a marshall
and they turn to
the door to ram it open.


Robert fires several shots,
and bloodies a lawman
but he is overcome
and dragged out .
Margaret Garner,
takes a meat knife
from the table,
and with one stroke,
cuts the throat
of the little daughter
she loves the best.

She goes for
the other three,
but she was
overpowered
and then to kill herself,
but she was hampered
before she did anything.

All are jailed.

The trial takes two weeks,
bringing throngs
to the courthouse

The defence
brings witnesses to say
that the fugitives
have been permitted
to visit the city
at various times
previously.
It is claimed
Margaret Garner
has been brought here
by her owners
a number of years before,
to act as nurse girl,
and according to the law
which liberates slaves
who are brought
into free States
by the consent
of their masters,
she has been free
from that time,
and her children,
all of whom
have been born
since then- -
following
the condition
of the mother,
unfortunately
an infanticide, - -
are likewise free.

The Commissioner
decides
that a voluntary
return to slavery,
after a visit
to a free State,
re- attaches 

the conditions
of slavery,
and that
the fugitives
are legally slaves
at the time
of their escape..

But in spite
of appeals,
of pleadings,
the Commissioner
remands the fugitives
back to slavery.

The river is flooded
and the shackled effects
stand no chance when
the little boat
taking them back
sinks in the unaccustomed tide.

The Commissioner
says that it is
not a question
of feeling to be decided
by the chance current
of his sympathies;
the law of Kentucky
and the United States
make it a question of property.

Source: Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (Cincinnati, 1876).


Letters From Rodolpho.

She sits long-leggedly in front of me,
a battered table in between, on which
she writes, at my correcting pace, with glee
that she can spell and phrase without a hitch.
She's dreaming of the man that Tiffany
will natter on about tonight, in local pitch,
when, home, she drops down to watch TV,
forgetting these letters scrawled for G.C.S.E.

We barely know the text and wouldn't care,
in any case; it's finishing school now.
"Rodolpho's just a crazy man whose dare
to break the law got grassed and anyhow
his brother knifed the grasser, so it's fair
in'it, Sir?"
A teacher, I take my story-book bow
and wait for you to take the pupil's share
of the action,"What's tragic's what you wear."

It doesn't matter knowing why they spar,
these people of shiny print. Critics can
undress, or dress up Monroe as the star,
should they choose. Truth follows its own plan.
High tragedy's too separate, too far
away for us to reach. To act this man
means searching. What you've found distain,
as finding loss confirms what losers gain.


Copper Arrow
 
Synchronised Divers, Seville 1997.

Paired, the swimmers climb to tall springboards,
as if to find a higher view of us;
to give them sights in which they could abide?
And yet they stand alone and poignant
in a statement of shared uncertainty
that might speak of a losing, a gaining.
Their skin and lycra, buff and black,
tacitly tell that they cannot tell
what kind of place it is they wish to make.
The bareness of these girls cannot be worn
for to be clothed ,or to be naked
points to a heart outdoors, or home.
Except as a pared singleness, being
too far into uniqueness that it cuts off
their leap into nothing from brief premises.
In search of an exact resemblance,
a mimicking of isolations,
they tumble through the neutral skies
Like heavy birds, to fall at last, through staves
of air, cadencing what informs them
to an explosion of silver water.
They agitate to risk sheer freedom
in a shared contrariness that is;
the medium of friendship's art.
They have become as close to absence
as they dare, imposing a vanishing
act on the blue, elsewhere-reflecting pool.


Trumpington Street

The mystery of existence is deepening
and all the people coming out
of the museum's vault
are carrying a look that spells
they're either victims or suspects.
Through the revolving glass,
the Brown's girls are crowded
by the serving hatch
a Caravaggio Masque
for the triumph of Candarel
with linen cloths worn
over worn black tights
which subtract figures
from substance.
The curators are closing the doors
on the silent busts of dignitaries,
on the vengeance of marble
over the professors of Geology,
of confession over the form of every passion.
We all did it, or it did us
and will be rounded up in the end.

Meanwhile we could still live a real alibi.
Try to find a new language
that stumps sharp detection
to explain away our guilt.
Fully feared and fearful,
we are primitives again
waiting for experience, here
in this afternoon of pushy blossom,
showing up the relic trees
to bring us newer signs.
The old ' I ' is a feeling
hiding a thousand ' me's '
that smile clean surrender.

Mia in the Philosopher’s House

1.Footage for an Opening.

It was just her round, no doubt,
with Maya in the pub, to dote
on gin and logic, when hell broke out.

Mr Thought wore a 'thirties overcoat,
with his hands thrust in his pocket
and a brutal look on his face to note.

He reached for his identity, as Mia set
off for the loo. Maya, her accomplice
followed in, to call her her debt

"Why don't you call the police just once"
said,Maya her face blushed with shock
“He's from the Ministry of Appearance,"

Mia blurted, twisting her frock.
“He is the police, the real security.”
said her friend, “We’re in the dock.”

"He really is. That makes me an illegal."
"I lied before. Now they're after me."
Maya's face changed."Let me play the pal.

I'm sure I can get you let off free,
you understand."I don't think so"
said Mia, staring in the mirror to see.

"Do what you think you can, though”
Maya ran back to the agent
"I'm sure it's all a mistake,"she spoke low

"Listen," said the pale, young gent
"We've been after her for weeks.
We're not letting go now we’ve been sent.

The place is surrounded with beaks.
If you want to help her, go tell’er
come to Thought who seeks.

Maya went back to Mia
who stood before the mirror
and read in her friend’s fear

that she was framed in her idea.

2. In the Thinker’s House

In flight, the act is all.
Yet Mia heard Plato’s
voiced ages say “You see,
they may not ever be.”

Caught by a thinking thought,
she finds his house larger
than her thought thought.
Shadows come, as if to charge her 
from a library on the wall.

Daemons, like cats in shade,
slouch, vanish, crouch and purr.
Everything grounded is half-made,
half-shadow, all demur.

Yet they grow towards truth’s aid.
Every night the unhappy stir
as dinner-guests arrive, afraid.
The Platonic show lights up to whirr.

3.In the Cave of Fantasy

Experience in fishnet tights submits
to the thinker’s knives. Her showgirl’s uniform
won’t save her now. He’s trained his hits
closer and closer to her bared form.

Nonetheless it is her ambition
steals the scene and spurs thought now
to release his anger and to shun
that she’s become a spy, made a vow.
to use her charm and her allure
to connive and urge him on,
hoping the skeptic’s keen exposure
of self-doubt and evasion
will save her at the last.
Yet she knows Aristotle’s flight
from the circus of her past.

4. Under Judgment’s Spell

All sequins and ostrich feathers,
inspiration enters the magic box,
a pagan alien in surplice tethers.
She’s idea’s babe and shakes her locks
as Augustine performs the trick
in a way that only can astound
to sunder thought’s body, so thick
from real feet on the ground.
A scream cuts the silence.
Idea’s abstract hand falters
as inspiration’s made a dunce
by a falling act that alters
this ceremony of sense.
How the dumbfounded love it.
It’s their turn for once.

5.Under Suspicion

It was an accident
the tight-rope walker fell’
The line of argument
told, as tongues may tell.

between illusion and reality
and yet it was the heart
of Lady Wisdom that rescued sanity,
despite imagination’s art.


6.In the Lawyer’s Case

Experience is led away,
crying out her innocence
of unseen voices in her pay
of conscious nonsense.

The dumbfounded think she is the ‘show’
of circus pawns Bernard proves fakes,
escorted from that tradition’s shadow.
to be planted during breaks?

Everything in the end
is put down to her,
yet still she didn’t offend.

7.Under the Body’s Sway

Images come in the dark with their team
those beautiful bodies with fashionable hands
that bathe her forhead with a curing cream
and bring her clothes and laurel head bands.
They rub her wounds in Neo-Platonic lore regaled,
remembering to prounounce her name
and yet they leave experience jailed.

8.In the Dock of Guilt

Experience stands speechless
in her shame, still shining
with the image of instress
a ceremony of showingInspiration still clamours loudly
for vengeance, converting new arrivalsenvying her beauty inwardly,
while shaming her before her rivals:

Descartes distances thought and image
with whom she plans more damage.

9.The Boundaries of Love.

Jealous inspiration, works on thought and