Poetry

Ma Mère L’Oie and One Brother Grimm

Figures trace their orbits around my stories

in purer words and higher forms,

leaping nameless with the muted whisper

of a growing vine. I have listened and

entwined my self in more small lives,

noted minute twitches and cleansed.

I do not believe in synonyms, and blunt

every word with familiarity. All folklore

shall take its root from my travelled ledger.

I was the first to steal the Geist, and stamp

my name in hard, cooling letters. Wet ink.

The neatness of these scars forming

and deforming roles, but never faces.

For there is always the ugly and the beautiful,

fixed to market at illiterate masses.

*

that’s it my dear, just you pull up

some carpet, near to the hearth

       thrust out your tongue and taste the air

       hush now, hear the ‘twining

       of their place and past

don’t you look too near

at the whites of a fire

now close them eyes and

breathe in so deep

       feel the pulse in your throat that

       ain’t your own

the best is us who hears the stories

and you ain’t gonna best me yet, my lass

       these murmurs in all of the desolate corners

       just the lilt as a word slides into the next

       the creating of something that’s

       already here

don’t fret, my dear, you’re already begun,

my wheel is a-spinning

now i’m lending to you

       music that bucks and weaves

       and is jarringly sparse, just an accent, a hint at

       notes on the air, now burnt when the moment

       is reformed anew in a twist of your mind

you’re talkin’ in rhythm now

you hear that swish and that sigh?

i’m spinning your tale, lass,

and stretching the yarn and

carefully spooling the thread on a reel

       its creamy an’ coarse, with the fresh breathe of

       an untamed summer that plays in the spaces

       between my worn palms 

*

I am trying to conquer this distance

of histories, recorded in bewildering alphabets.

I’ve no memory of this even learned as I am

yet no mould no craft can hold these

incessantly archaic tongues.

The pigments will not paint the picture

I’ve wrought. These borders won’t hold

my beginnings or ends, for they loop back

and brush, on a witch’s reel, and then

my puppet’s are asking for the shape

of the future and I just can’t deliver in a

contract or writing. When my ink dries its

another voice lost to the past - now I am

frightened of these things unimagined

outside of my frame - a story already lost.

*

that blank, exposed thing you

might call, say, a page? bare,

my lass, and too often hungry -

personally i feed ‘em all to the fire

and - you do not use that reading voice,

d’you hear?

       how would you like it if i

       whipped you raw?

there’s the corpse of a story, good only

for pressin’ t’your weak breast -

       like some warped metaphor

now come my dear, rest those hands,

and i swear there ain’t no hardship involved

       the expression is found in the creases of smiles

       in the corners of eyes and the folds of skin

       the flush of the moment cradled exactly right

in the pain of your old body

them’s where the questions are found

i ain’t got this name all for nowt, my wee lass

i’ve lived in more worlds than those rumours can tell

       but i always left ‘em again - just as i found - for

       ‘twas not my landscape to carve, or conceive

Catriona McLean

© 2014