The Sunday Posts 2015/Linguist

If we lived in a world where bells
truly say 'ding-dong' and where 'moo'
is a rather neat thing
said by a cow,
I could believe you could believe
that these sounds I make in the air
and these shapes with which I blacken white paper
have some reference
to the thoughts in my mind
and the the feelings in the thoughts.

As things are
if I were to gaze in your eyes and say
'bow-wow' or 'quack' you must take that to be
a dispairing anthology of praises'
a concentration of the opposites
of reticence, a capsule
of my meaning of meaning
that I can no more write down
than I could spell the sound of the sigh
I would then utter, before
dingdonging and mooing my way
through all the lexicons and languages
of imprecision.

 Norman MacCaig, October 1964.
Photo by Alistair

 

the Sunday Posts 2013/ The Neighbours Cat

Night is in the garden.
In both the black cat
is a small black sculpture
in the long grass.

I watch for ten minutes.
She never moves.

A plane flies high
over the city. She looks up.
her eyes steal the moon.

I'm tired. I go to bed
and stretch out in it.

Sculpturesque, I think,
as my eyes
steal the darkness.

Norman MacCaig
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts 2013/ Stars and Planets

Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

They seem so twinkle-still, but they never cease
Inventing new spaces and huge explosions
And migrating in mathematical tribes over
The steppes of space at their outrageous ease.

It's hard to think that the earth is one –
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,
Attended only by the loveless moon.

Norman MacCaig
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts 2013/ Assynt And Edinburgh

From the corner of Scotland I know so well
I see Edinburgh sprawling like seven cats
on its seven hills beside the Firth of Forth.

And when I'm in Edinburgh I walk
amongst the mountains and lochs of that corner
that looks across the Minch to the Hebrides.

Two places I belong to as though I was born
in both of them.

They make every day a birthday,
giving me gifts wrapped in the ribbons of memory.
I store them away, greedy as a miser.

Norman MacCaig
Photo by Alistair

The Sunday Posts 2013/Two Shepherds

Donald ran and roared and brandished
his stick and swore
in all the languages
he knew, which were some.

Pollochan sauntered. stood
six feet three silent: with a small
turn of the hand
He'd send a collie flowing
round the half-mile-long arc
of a towsy circle.

Two poets
Donysian,
Apollonian
and the sheep in a pen.

Norman MacCaig.
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts 2012

In the garden you walk the way

tall flowers would walk

in the music of Debussy.

The trees are fattening and heavy with blossom.

How slender you are

in their beautiful, podgy circle.

You call to your dog

who's bursting through the undergrowth

like a small black tank

on a tropical island.

He's filling himself with smells.

(A butterfly, crazy with wings,

is trying to go in every direction

at once.)

You stand still and the little dog
trundles flat out across the grass
to your feet. He sits down, panting,
and puts to shame the brightest flower in the garden
with two inches of tongue.

'Seen in the city'
By Norman MacCaig.

1982

Picture - Gitl on a bicycle, Joseph Crawhall.

The Sunday Post

Cockburnspath, Scottish Borders

LONDON TO EDINBURGH.

I'm waiting for the moment

when the train crosses the border

and home creeps closer

at seventy miles an hour.

I dismissed the last four days
and their friendly strangers
into the past
that grows bigger every minute.

The train sounds urgent as I am,
it says home and home and home.
I light a cigarette
and sit smiling in the corner.

Scotland, I rush towards you
into my future that,
every minute,
grows smaller and smaller.

 Norman MacCaig.

January 1989.

The Sunday Post.

Wanting to go,

all the leaves want to go

though they have achieved

their kingly robes.

Weary of colours,
they think of black earth,
they think of
white snow.

 Stealthily, delicately

as a safe breaker
they unlock themselves
from branches.

And from their Royal Towers
they sift silently down
to become part of
the proletariat of mud.

Norman MacCaig.
September 1982

photo: Alet Les Baines, Languedoc, France by Alistair.

The Sunday Post

PRAISE OF A DOG

 She was a small dog, neat and fluid –

even her conversation was tiny:
she greeted you with a bow, never a bow-wow.

Her sons stood monumentally over her

but did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
till it seemed he was his own mother's grandfather.

Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,

I remarked how dry she was. Pollochan said, ‘Ah,
it would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie.’

She sailed in the dingy like a proper sea dog.

Where’s a burn? – She's first on the other side.
She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind

But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled....

I grieved for Pollochan when he took her a stroll
and put his gun to the back of her head.

Norman MacCaig

January 1974

The Sunday Post

SLEEPING COMPARTMENTS.

I don't like this, being carried sideways

through the night. I feel wrong and helpless – like
a timber broadside in a fast stream.

Such a way of moving may suit

that odd snake the Sidewinder
in Arizona: but not to me in Perthshire.

I feel at right angles to everything,

a crossgrain in existence. – It scrapes
the top of my head and my foot soles.

To forget outside is no help either –

then I become a blockage
in the long gut of the train.

I try to think I'm an Alice in Wonderland

mountaineer bivouacked
on a ledge 5 feet high.

It's no good. I go sidelong.

I rock sideways... I draw in my feet
to let Aviemore pass.

Norman MacCaig.

May 1966.

The Sunday Post

Three men are pulling
at the starboard oar,
the man I am and was
and the man I'll be.

The boat sails

to a blind horizon.
Who's pulling on the port side oar
that keeps our course straight?

Pull as we may

We’re kept from turning
to port or starboard by that
invisible oarsman.

'Crew' by Norman MacCaig.

August 1985

The Sunday Post

Old man thinking.

Oars, held still, drop

on black water

tiny roulades
of waterdrops.
With their little sprinkling
they people
a big silence.

You who are long gone,

my thoughts of you are like that:
a delicate, clear population
in the big silence
where I rest on the oars and
my boat
hushes ashore.

Norman MacCaig.

May 1967.

Photo of East Lothian by Alistair

The Sunday Post

WILD OATS.

 Everyday I see from my window

pigeons, up on a roof ledge – the males
are wobbling gyroscopes of lust.

Last week a stranger joined them, snowwhite
pouting fantail,
Mae West in the Women's Guild.
What becks, what croo – croos, what
demented pirouetting, what a lack
of moustaches to stroke

The females – no need to be one of them

to know
exactly what they were thinking – pretended
she wasn't there
and went dowdily on with whatever
pigeons do when they're knitting.

Norman MacCaig

February 1968

The Sunday Post

The way it goes.
Reality isn't what it used to be,
I mutter gloomily
when I feel like Cortes on his peak in Darien
and then remember it wasn't Cortes at all
and feel more like him than ever.

Norman McCaig.
January 1979

The Sunday Post

{One of a series written in memoriam for his friend A K MacLeod. It follows on from last weeks Sunday Post}

Highland Funeral.

Over the dead man's house, over his landscape,
the frozen air was a scrawny psalm
I believed in, because it was pagan
as he was.

Into it the ministers voice
spread the pollution of bad beliefs.
The sanctimonious voice dwindled away
over the boring, beautiful sea.

The sea was boring, as grief is,
but beautiful, as grief is not.
Through beliefs dark ugliness I saw that beauty
because he would have.

And that darkened the ugliness... Can the dead
help? I say so. Because, a year later,
that sanctimonious voice is silent and the pagan
landscape is sacred in a new way.

Norman MacCaig
January 1977

The Sunday Post

A. K. McLeod.

I went to the landscape I love best
and the man who was its meaning and added to it
met me at Ullapool.

The beautiful landscape was under snow
and was beautiful in a new way.

Next morning, the man who had greeted me
with the pleasure of pleasure
vomited blood
and died.

Crofters and fishermen and womenfolk, unable
to say any more, said
"It's a grand day, it's a beautiful day"

And I thought, "Yes it is."
And I thought of him lying there,
the dead centre of it all.

Norman MacCaig.
March 1976.

The Sunday Post

I'd heard of a stony look. Was that one
you turned on me? Was I to be petrified?
But it seemed to me as beautiful as ever
and I walked from the house whistling into a sunset.

I took the look home and became uneasy.
I couldn't see it as other than limpid and shining.
Are you water? Or diamonds? I prefer things shifting
and lucid, not locked in a hard design.

I mustn't look at you with wrong eyes,
inventing what I want to see. Turn to me now
and let me know if I'm a millionaire
of water, or a pauper of diamonds.

'Means Test'
By Norman MacCaig.
June 1975.

The Sunday Post

Small Lochs

He's obsessed with clocks, she with politics,
He with motor cars, she with Amber and jet.
There's something to be obsessed with for all of us.
Mine is lochs, the smaller the better.
I look at the big ones – Loch Ness, Loch Lomond,
Loch Shin, Loch Tay – and I bow respectfully,
but they are too grand to be invited home.
How can I treat them in the way they'd expect?

But the Dog Loch runs in eights when I go walking.
The cat Loch purrs on the windowsill. I wade
along Princes Street through Loch na Barrack.
In smoky bars I tell them like beads.

And don't think it's just the big ones that are lordily named
I met one once and when I asked what she was called
the little thing said (without blushing, mind you)
The Loch Of The Corrie Of The Green Waterfalls.

I know they are just H2O in a hollow.
Yet not much time passes without me thinking of them.
Dandling lilies and talking sleepily
And standing huge mountains on their watery heads.

Norman MacCaig
December 1974.

The Sunday Post

This week's Sunday post is another one from the pen of Norman MacCaig. This poem is dedicated to his friend Hugh McDiarmid, a very well-known figure in Scottish literature. McDiarmid was a poet, author and political activist, famous as a founder member of the Scottish National party. He was later expelled from the SNP for Communist activities and expelled from the Communist Party for nationalist activities. His works use words and phrases from colloquial Scots dialects mixed with English and the occasional Gaelic word. His most famous work is 'A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle'


After His Death.

It turned out
that the bombs he had thrown
raised buildings:

That the acid he had sprayed
had painfully opened
the eyes of the blind.

Fishermen hauled
prize-winning fish
from the water he had polluted.

We sat with astonishment
enjoying the shade
of the vicious words he had planted.

The government decreed that
on the anniversary of his birth
the people should observe
two minutes pandemonium.

Norman MacCaig
April 1971.

The Sunday Post

If we lived in a world where bells
truly say 'ding-dong' and where 'moo'
is a rather neat thing
said by a cow,
I could believe you could believe
that these sounds I make in the air
and these shapes with which I blacken white paper
have some reference
to the thoughts in my mind
and the the feelings in the thoughts.

As things are
if I were to gaze in your eyes and say
'bow-wow' or 'quack' you must take that to be
a dispairing anthology of praises'
a concentration of the opposites
of reticence, a capsule
of my meaning of meaning
that I can no more write down
than I could spell the sound of the sigh
I would then utter, before
dingdonging and mooing my way
through all the lexicons and languages
of imprecision.

'Linguist'
By Norman MacCaig, October 1964.