15 Master Virgil's Deceyte - Duncan McGibbon (best book club books of all time txt) 📗

 


Master Virgil’s Deceyte


by Duncan McGibbon


Master Virgil’s Deceyte

In the myth -spinning streets of Rome, stalks the figure of Virgil, the poet and necromancer. His was the claim to have seen Hell and Rome held him to it. In The Deceyte of Love (1560) in York Library, Virgil has a garden that streams with magic light from a magic lamp, where birds sing without end. Later, a burning, copper statue appears and a lamp. Finally a copper bow and arrow, which loosed by a distracted woman shatters the lamp and with it, the garden and the birds. A Thirteenth Century Romance, Cléomades, by Adenes li Rois and edited by Van Hasselt in Brussels in 1865, tells this myth among many. Virgil as a prophet of Christianity and yet one of the last pagans has a cardinal role in European literature. This is why I have used the myths to join the separate cycles of poems in this book. He appears as a refugee in the opening poem and the other cycles take their titles from the myth.

Both the garden and the lamp are to be found in my Cornwall sequence. The burning statue reflects the destruction of images by the English reformers. The “Man of Copper” expresses the realism of the thepoems in part three. A series of conceptual poemsin part four draw the bow and the erotic poems in part five release it in time to shatter the lamp, leading to satire as in the satyr play with which all tragedies ended in Greek drama.


Duncan McGibbon 


I Virgil’s Lamp

Virgil’s Boast

II His Garden of Light

1. Brighton Beach
2. Great Walsingham
3. Goonhilly and Coverack
1. I will speak though
2. I have searched these heathlands
3. The flies
4. On the Moorlands
4.At Gunwalloe
5. Kynance Cove
6. Lantern House
1 The Lizard Light
2. The Lloyd's House
7. Everyman’s Dragon
1.At the Seal Sanctuary
2. Truro Cathedral
8. Penwith
1.The Flowers
2. The Theatre on the Cliff
9. Marazion
1.To Charles Causley
2.The Seine Fishers
10 Tintagel
11..Land's End

III His Burning Statue

Girl Meditating
Motets for Our Lady of Caversham 1-14
Words for a Ward

IV His Man of Copper

Getting Inside 1-10
January 1856

V His Copper Arrow

Synchronised Divers, Seville, 1997
After the Gala
Trumpington Street
Mia in the Philosophers’ House.1-16

VI Touching the Strings

Matutinals
Metathalamion 1-3
Lifegames

VI Shattered Lamp

The Delivery of the Baboon Parts
My Last Model

After Bergengrauen
After Bousquet 


Virgil’s Lamp
 


Virgil’s Compleynte

Né creator né creatur a mai"
comunicio ei, "Figliuol, fu senza amore"
“No creator, nor creature,
as you know, Son, was without love.”
Purgatorio.17, 90-1

Neither on the earth, nor off it;
I staggered through migration channels,
weary with my father's weight.
I cut the iron city's badge
from my clothes,
but the sky's complexion
was still a giveaway,
seen through the holes
torn in my shirt

Who put you onto me? My spy,
my fan, my obssessive tail?"
The Western Daily,
the Home Office, or the Holy?
dragging my steps as I go down,
rustling Gold-Leaf on a nightshift
to clean the West End lavatory of guilt,
and spray my pagan scent about
to sweeten custom’s daily devotions.
I slink about your dummy eschatology
on permission to stay with a Christian visa.
printed on the margin
of scrolls and codices.
You exploit my reserved labourto show up my world with your stop-watch,
sweet, new life-style-God, accosting
embarrassed celebrities, passing by,
“Say hello to the heathen
who believes in love”
to out themselves.
It's a cuss, a piss-take: theology
wrapped around a love song.
I know you crave
that tarty Florentine housewife
you couldn't afford to wed.
Your light language pickles her
my Monroe-Dido , your Evita-Beatrice:
the wriggle of love-making
polished to an icon, that is nonsense
misted with your incense

I, justified the ways of love
to an audience of mercenaries
that knew only arms deals and defence
and jestified the awe of state. .
You liturgy is spotted; the sacred
never combats earth,
but follows whole to go beyond.
You throw a secular shadow
on my pagan shade
a tired, wounded soldier's
running from a burning town
with the skies of the past
written on my back.
I am the millions I spoke for.
I reach out to you in fellowship
barred in your secular shrine
to find you do not know my human grace.

 


Garden of Light

1.Brighton Beach

The Regency terraces
blaze white in the sun,
still as bleached relics,
futile as empty bone.

On the Pier, a fat little boy
paddles himself precariously
round a plastic river
in a pink canoe.

Here anything can happen;
gunfire regulates the air;
cars explode in yellow flames.

People are carrying
eccentric furry animals,
as if they were running
from houses on fire.

A shaven-haired little tough
is walked, crying,
from the ghost-train ride.
The Pavilion's domes glint
with the patina of dead wealth
as if bone could still tap silent ivory

On the beach
I pick up a stone
and see it has another inside it,
trapped in a cavity.
 
A tiny girl emerges
from the cold, blue sea,
which sucks and retches
at the piles below the pier.
As if she were walking on coals,
she hobbles to her mother
for whom no-one else exists,
who wraps her in a white towel
and lifts her into her arms
.
At a silent moment
the children, men and women
watch awestruck, as Punch hits Judy
to the sole sound of wooden strokes

Under the slimey groines
another boy, with a mop of red-hair
blazing above white matchstick limbs,
makes a barred cellar,
under the massive front,
echo to a mighty roar

The tour-bus microphone
intones the lore of the place
like on Attic chorus
"a torso in a trunk
another in a wardrobe."
Time decapitated
the Mistress’ story ,
worn, and never
identified, like
a prize Greek statue 
of an unknown God
While ahead, in the casino,
coins pile high onto the margin
poised to tumble at the next
rolling ten pence, promising
the miracle fortune,
denied to all others.

Here, anything can happen.
All that counts
is knowing you belong to it,
for those who belong here
always leave.

2. Great Walsingham

Here a river tumbles
like a dancing child
beside a revered church.
It is worn down to a pillar,
yet the trout still bite,
as they did for Cnut.
In a moment of boredom,
my daughter and her friend
plait reeds like their hair,
my rod tautens and pulls.

I see the flash of
a fish’s underbelly
a tremor of strength
then my line falls slack. 


We go home, tired, excited
wondering what the river bank
will make of plaited reeds.

3.Goonhilly and Caverack

i).I will speak, though…
I am this dust and ashes
ashes in the grey sand,
tinting the wings
of avaricious gulls,
veiling the palms
on this tropical stone
like faded Victorian grisaille,
in the lumber room
of an ageing home
with its own proud, fine dust.

ii)

I have searched these heathlands
for those I know, whom I have lost.
The sharp call of the owl
when the dawn disturbs its cover, night.
The steady melody of the song thrush,
marking its territory of quaking snails.

I call You in these bare places,
knowing there is nothing else, 

but poor grass, limp nettle and gorse.
Have mercy, Lord and pity the pride
of my stupid and everlasting heart.

iii)

The flies had taken over the house
their buzzing around "the lads are here"
a chorus of fifty lusty throbbings
each a semitone different apart
like a chair of mediaeval novices
become heretical and diabolic
out of pure boredom

They fly out of crevices,
like bats in a Dracula film,
out of innocent bumps
in the wall paper,
feeding on adhesive paste
glue and bars of soap
exposing the knacker’s knife
behind our household blandness.

The next day we struck.
A chemical Armageddon
mowed them down, though
they contrived to make
a stand on their fall

Then everything went silent,
the floors coated
with little black forms,
like dried out black current.
with theatre-dead legs
and lissome wings,
leaving us with our poisons.
The next day, a tortoiseshell
butterfly lay dead.

iv)

On the moorland,
vast ears hover
listening across the seas of time
for sound that is older
than the buried dead
in iron-age graves.
Neon lights fired red
glow throughout the moonlight.
On the horizon, a host
of slim white girls
dance and cartwheel
in exultation and homage
at the arrival of winds
and the lingering of earth.

4. At Gunwalloe

How can we tell
when only a fire blazes
on the consoling beach;
when trumpets thunder
from the lighthouses.
When voices clamour
to be heard in this graveyard
of forgotten fishermen
and upstart eccentrics?

How can we tell
when the jackdaw
leads up the scrambling step
to the cliff top
to our tower built
into the granite hoard
of your creation?

How can we tell
when the gathering angels
out number the electron sea?
when the censoring voices
are hoarse with an exact
retribution for the guilty few?
How can we know
Have we come, himself, to Him,
when aching arms
and the wearied mind
finds we are nothing at all
but a breath and cry of Your issue,
wanting to be an issue of Yours
5. Kynance Cove

Heather and bracken,
ferns and lichen,
a tapestry of fire
licking the hard stone
for a livelihood.
It covers this
sepulcre land
with a braid
of gentle ponds,
a home to the hedgehog,
to the fieldmouse and the shrew
shapes that move from
the head land's autarchy.
In the shimmering
rock-pools the goby dart
beneath wave-moulded rocks
while the seals howl,
yet every stone is dead
Wave after wave;
yet every living wave will vanish
and the land’s silence, too,
while a drizzle falls
on the dead stone
and livens the dry seed:
the tracks of little animals
in the fine silt,
a scrawling of hope.


6. Lantern Houses

i) The Lizard Light

The building becomes
a priory for mad ascetics.
The foghorns are
huge listening horns.
straining to hear
even a whisper
of a bird in the air.
tipsy with brine.
The lantern-house
is a steel altar,
floating on mercuric grace
while the tiny filament of love
tumbles through a labyrinth of glass
to glow, spectral with geometric
obesity through a four-field bullseye
which flares across the Sound.
with a two-second prayer between.
while black-cloaked jackdaws
man the chimney-stacks
gathering for an Easter-fire
guiding a creator demon
down to this poor heath.
 
i)The Lloyds House,

A glum cairn
of Eighteenth Century stone,
on a foreland, all alone
waiting for semaphores
from trade-worn mariners
of esctasy and pain,
of city loss and