angina pectoris

angina pectoris

and other poems

Angina Pectoris and Other Poems

First published as a print pamphlet by White Craw 2012 This edition 2016

This is a freely licensed work, as defined in the Free Art License 1.3, the text of which can be found at http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ This license grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform this work without the author's explicit permission.

Acknowledgements

Front cover illustration: graffiti art from the Hillhead Book Club, from a design by Calum MacAulay. The original design can be found at: http://calummacaulay.design/hillhead­bookclub/

Back cover illustration: digitally remastered from a photograph of a working drawing by Douglas Robertson. The original image can be found at: http://www.douglasrobertson.co.uk/wordpress/?p=143

Angina Pectoris

If half my heart is here, nurse, the other half is in Beirut with the people flowing along Rue Minet al Hosn.

And every morning, nurse, every morning at sunrise my heart is put up against a wall and shot.

And every night, nurse, when the patients are asleep and the hospital deserted, my heart is extraordinarily rendered to a run­down old house in Istanbul.

And now, after forty­six years, all I have to offer is this apple in my hand, nurse; one red apple – my heart.

And that, nurse, is the reason for this angina pectoris; not nicotine, lifestyle or arteriosclerosis.

I look at the night through the window; and, despite the weight on my chest, my heart still pulses with the most distant stars.

Wishaw General Hospital, November 2005

Yesterday and today spring begins again…

Off the antlered tips of yearling trees, the air tells you: yes, it is possible; it can happen; there is a chance.

You stand in showers of cherry blossom. and know all of your longings.

Your hands reach up, seize pieces of the sky.

Post­Revolutionary Poets of the Future

They constantly enter their poems, day and night.

They do not wait for the works’ gates to be opened by literary criticism, by refined and delicate thinking.

They enter their poems as they enter factories, plants, full of energy, noise and anger.

They churn the sirens, switch on the machinery, begin work.

The façade of the poem dirls with drills, with lathes.

The grey metallic air shudders with vibrations.

They mount the scaffolding of their stanzas.

With welding­torch in hand they fuse rhythms and tender rhymes, testing with micrometers the calibre of their thoughts and passions.

i.m. Christopher Murray Grieve

gothic

ghosts wear clothes suave, sexy clothes like valentino and monroe romantic, gothic, victorian flow­in­the­wind clothes fleshless mist dons favourite hues lipstick, nail varnish, blush coats, hats, shoes, purses, belts and assorted personalised hairstyles boneless bodies hold ghost­gatherings light ghost­cigarettes with fingerless fingers pour ghost­wine down gutless gullets smooch with lipless lips the disembodied dead coalescing in translucent forms decked with paraphernalia complete with personality and pets ghost ships, trains and planes

Blowing Bubbles

Having just sent seven drifting off, he stops to catch the last on the hot green wand, before freeing it again to see how it will end; this time, death by branch tip, an accident of timing and an errant breeze.

He makes another, chin up, eyes slightly crossed, as if awakening from a dream, breathing smoothly and patiently to watch the way oceans churn on its own taut skin.

His is a delicacy only recently acquired.

He fills the empty loop again, taps off the surfeit of his infancy on the bottle rim, and sends a last lullaby floating skyward, to people the world with breath and joy and other slight significances.

for Matthew on his eighth birthday

annars staðar

Who dreamed us here? the inhabitants of the village ask in their dreams.

They try on waking to renegotiate the covenants they inherited from their ancestors, the iron­bound concrete of their houses, the crooked shanks of their streets.

Their undreamed dreams accumulate, light the northern night with ululations of colour.

They forget to ask.

They ask.

They forget they’ve asked.

They ask: W ho erased the road that was never there?

Who stole the v egvísir f rom our sense of direction?

They dream: W ho dreamed us here?

Did you? they ask. D id you?

haiku

scent of mint

table spread

and lacking only her fragrant dishes,

joy!

for polyxeni stavrou

The Hills

The curse of Scottish psychology has been its insatiable itch to domesticate as a grudge or grievance every issue with which it has been concerned; and the curse of the national party today ­ as of every political party ­ is its desire to foresee and guide the course of events. Nothing that can be so foreseen and guided is worth a curse; Scotland needs a great upwelling of the incalculable.

­ Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’

Late last night I heard a muckle noise outside my door.

Without so much as a ‘by your leave’ the hills came into my house, flinging off their snow on the doorstep.

Silent and wise, without a single word, they let it be known they had come from afar.

A few torrents tumbled down their laps, capricious yet shy, like laddies in awe of their grandfathers.

Wolves howled at the lampshade, mistaking it for the moon.

A sly landslide was proffered as a hassock as hill­sheep knelt to watch the news with its myriad murders and financial chicaneries.

Early next morning, at the cock's crow (if you will), they departed, without farewell, without a backward glance beneath an unkindness of black flags.

And later that day, when the laddies came home from school,

I watched as they played in the moraine, building castles that would never fall, each stone borne up by three of its neighbours.

three haiku

a heron flaps past, pointed bill and trailing legs the tools of its trade

among fallen leaves, a butterfly wet windblown seeks its lost summer

walking in the woods, I lose the path/find myself in a sunlit glade

A Winter’s Tale

Snow still clung to the north­facing flank of the tree, where the sun could not reach.

A thin blue shadow lay taller than the tree itself on a satin surface of unbroken whiteness.

A crow lit nimbly on the tip of the topmost branch, sending small clods of snow gliding to the ground.

Its black plumage shone brightly against the ice blue sky.

A dark glint of sunlight flashed from its eye.

From nowhere, a leveret with a broken leg lunged fitfully through the snow.

The crow shivered out its feathers and settled down to bide its time while the shadow lengthened.

barcelona antonio gaudí

vienna’s solemn decadence stockholm’s staid massiveness neon paris this city of snails and ants exotic houses inspired by the warm breath of africa a puff of cubism masked balconies windows flowing down the walls shellfish glittering bronzed armies of ants plundering libraries snaking along the spines of gothic books

the snails stay on the beach massive buildings of fantastical decadence reposing under velvet skies while glittering ants refine the details abstracting art

demon joy

he tortured frogs in his acne years magnifying the sun’s fiery gaze into pinpoints of fury that curdled their emerald flesh scorched their beryl beauty crucifying totems of his boyhood with demon joy

dalí and gala at port lligat

as easily as water might walk they were attached at the hip like two apples on a thin branch waiting to become apple sauce easier than mist grabbing at purple lilacs on a June morning

back then that same water tip­toed drop­by­drop to stand on white stones near their doorstep and they listened as time took two parts hydrogen for each part oxygen they shared

Raven

When he flies, he flies through solitude, as through a hollow within a hollow, which escorts him, perpetually recreating itself.

When he swoops, his wings imitate the voice of the wind, of a scythe.

At times he flies in twos. Even then his flight is but a falling into circles of solitude.

He maintains a quiet distance from himself.

His wings don't touch.

He flies in the space of two circles.

He sings in three ways, in three distinctive tongues.

All three are meant for himself, for his ear, for conversations with the self.

No imitator, this bird.

If he imitates, he echoes himself, his voices, an intricate language of curved calls.

And when he flies low, on his wings glimmers a black defiance.

Thistles

You can argue the finer points of hoe or trowel, thrust reluctant fingers into our prickly intentions and pull; but this means nothing to us.

You seek solace in the docile flowers, the whisper of violets, the reverie of roses, the sunflowers hanging guilty heads burdened by future generations; but we will not be silenced.

We are blue voices repeated, rising from the last white taproot, from each silky seed thumbing a lift on the wind.

Blind weeders of tame gardens, you are all the same to us.

We are the savage offspring of an unnatural mother.

We crowd the columbine, bite bare ankles, tangle your thyme.

We wear the purple.

You are never safe from our sharp daggers.

Glasgow Airport

On a rack of plastic chairs heads bark orders to invisible functionaries, thumbs text glossopharyngeal prayers.

Beside me, suits power into conference calls, confident that not a fart will depart before an executive decision has been made.

Babel­masts tower above us.

We are circled by an electronic bullring; some argue with blackberries, others suck­up through a blue tooth, all with a cellular fear of disconnection.

The airport makes me grubby.

I am a broken fly­zip, a black sheep in transit, the dull yellowed pages of my Oxfam paperback.

I imagine myself in earlier times, standing beside a foggy runway, trench coat flapping as propellers roar and I turn to leave the aerodrome.

In a faraway hanger, under a solitary wind­sock, a black wall phone rattles unanswered; the beginning of a beautiful friendship awaits my arrival.

a gift for my grandfather

an april afternoon their voices a squall of storm­flung gulls careening across bleak wide skies

we searched for my grandfather’s grave caravels adrift without chart or compass among moss­capped monuments

they ran leaving me only their footprints they found what I sought a chiselled name their fingers caressed the cold cross

hands pressed against stone bodies strained towards a wailing wall they wept for their histories

bouilly cross roads military cemetery easter 2009

Stag

The shepherds left the high summer pastures to winter in the lowland glens, tramping down the drove paths, talking loudly about women and laughing, the water of the burn bubbling from well to well.

An old stag raises its head from the earth and sees the pale grazing. Then it leaves to join its sons, whose minds too are on the does.

Hungered, it too abandons the high pastures and follows the murmur of the burn, a fiery instinct, a wanderer in search of warmer pastures and winter grass.

When they killed it, the shepherds pried its eyes open and saw in the pupils the reflection of many deer drinking water from the burn.

Norman MacCaig

By now we all know the old story: a poet tearing away at the page, struggling to write an important poem, then going out for a smoke and to wait the dawn, staring up at the night; a single errant star dangling from the handle of the plough, almost lost in the half­moon’s gaze, but wavering there at the moonlight’s edge, throwing off its own halo; the arc and sizzle of a cigarette in the wet grass, as he goes back in to write about just that .

monance

three chess pieces remain

a rook full of doves a window full of may a turreted gate to the village

nearby a hermit coueries doun in a neuk the sea has hallowed from the broken clod of fife

poesis

the nodding of my rowan tree bespeaks the blowing of the wind which otherwise I cannot see

Beyond Our Thresholds

Here in the countryside, where land enfolds water and journeying defines land’s end, we are contained by the dimensions of vision, made tame by the breadth of the sky.

Beyond our thresholds the sky absorbs us.

We are the ascents and descents of the hillsides, old roads that cling to skylines; caught by the winds that stroke green fields, the surging bores of cloud­shadow, we mumble with the voice of journeymen, hold horizons in our hands.

Beyond our thresholds the rain knows us, the cornfields think about us, silos fill with grain; and further, to where oceans start and end, we need not venture.

counting deer

there are five of them – perhaps six

there is always the invisible when watching deer in the woods

the group is inlaid ­ set into the background stippled light shaping not their appearance but the momentary flickers of their disappearance

deeper in the trees there are more many more walking numberless paths stepping through an innumerable stillness

and if you stand at the edge of this dappled wood with ears uplifted to branches of sunlight and count with eyes half­closed you will reach the exact number of the seen and unseen it takes to fill your heart

when we lie in the grass

when we lie in the grass the tree is bright and goes on above us forever

out here where silence becomes still emptier there are cows that crop grass like old tractors waiting to rust

there is the low grass the bright tree the two of us and the silence and cattle too

and that is all not even a cathedral sky above us not even the wind

Burn

Forget the path or road.

Breenge through sapling and gorse and walk into a burn.

The thing about a burn is that it knows where it is going, has a gift for finding the shortest route.

A path or road can lose its nerve, peter out in a thicket or sheuch, divide inscrutably in two.

(We have all stood at that fork and weighed the choices, weighed and checked again, while mist crawled over the hillsides like sheep.)

But when a burn divides both streams are equally sure.

Each wins its own way: the slick of moss, the fast rush over an edge of rock.

And each, if you let it, will take you to a journey’s end.

Fog

A flock of geese graze a fallow field, elbowing aside slick coal crows; the fog swallows everything in its path.

Yesterday it pressed against my window, an unexpected visitor, waiting politely on the threshold.

Today it doesn't meet me on the hill but lies claimed by the valley.

Soon it will lift, opening to expose the fertile earth, whose raked grooves of raw sienna cleanly divide baulks of woodland, the hills kissing where they meet at their lowest points.

being dead

I will live without speaking to anyone and commune only with animals and plants

how lithely and serenely I will dance about

I will share everything with them and as infinitely rich and trivial as the world I will dance airily over mountains and fields

I will be on nodding terms with the fishes birds will send me their secret signs the wind will tickle my ears and whistle my skull and say only what is necessary

I will be a dwelling place for insects and worms they will inhabit me freely I will be mountains and rivers solidifying and flowing sometimes thundering burning and roaring sometimes belching and farting

apart from this I will be utterly silent and end up flying through space like the earth silently growing no older

checkmate

check checkmate the game concludes like the last notes of a symphony bishop knight and rook have left my father's king nowhere to go he sits in the corner trapped humbled

the board dissolves leaving a table by a window chairs squeaking and the snow outside suddenly falling faster

During the Interval

Not a single beat did my heart skip during the interval: a pause filled with chatter; footlights suspended in the globes of our drinks, through which strings of bubbles rose and glittered their surfaces.

A point had been reached where we had nothing to say; we gazed into the middle distance between us, at the star around which our companionship orbited in our closed solar system.

The din of a universe swirled around us and coalesced into nodes of dust, forming worlds and conversations which had nothing to do with our own cosmic transience and beyond which the darkness of the theatre was littered with remnants of the torn words of others.

Then you found a lode beneath a fold of silence, the glisten of which you raised to the surface of your voice; something trivial but pretty; fool’s gold.

From the subtle irony of poems like ‘Angina Pectoris’ and ‘being dead’, through the political cynicism of ‘Thistles’, to the delicate feeling of his nature and love poems, McCallum reveals a refreshing versatility of tone and style which is far removed from the constant nagging of ‘Me! Me! Me!’ confessional poets.

Henry Churton, Southlands Poetry Review

Intelligent, lively­minded and thoroughly engaged in pursuing the muse!

Joy Hendry, Chapman

McCallum’s poems possess a layered allusiveness; they are both discovery and invention... The cadences are carefully measured, the poems’ endings often sliding shut in an underplayed tonal closure.

Tina Barr, Boston Review

white craw 2016