Peter Dale Scott

MOSAIC OF ORPHEUS:

Five Canadian Poems

OCCITANIAN SPRING

to Susan Burgess Shenstone

A half-century of silence
and now thanks to a friend’s email
I can write to you for the first time

about our bicycle trip together
after that freezing winter in Paris
when my new friend P went insane
and I myself my socialist
faith having foundered
in the intrigues of post-war Europe
between the Communist graffiti
and chars blindés in the boulevards                           tanks
was reading the letters of Van Gogh
waiting as I thought for my own 
inevitable madness to kick in

when two Americans proposed a tour
of the churches in southern France
I was ambivalent from guilt
at my many absences from Sciences Po
and you who had just gotten engaged
only joined reluctantly 
because Chuck and Lute would be there
as necessary chaperones 

We bicycled from Périgueux’s
cathedral so restored
a century earlier by Viollet-le-Duc
it looked like a railway station
to the cave of Lascaux
opened just three weeks before
where we all stood in darkness
until the tour-guide lit his match
so that we too could discern
the galloping silent bison
hidden away in this cave
for twenty thousand years

It was thus our eyes opened 
to the art of the Middle Ages
Beaulieu where the angels danced
above the opened coffins of the dead
the basilica at Conques
crammed into a small canyon
we looked across as the dawn sun 
came down the opposite hill 
through blossoming almond and crocus
to where they opened for us the crypt 
of the tenth century gold virgin
whose stiff imploring arms were 
for better or worse encrusted
with Roman cameos and gems

We biked unwittingly down
the same narrow roads where
Eliot and Pound had walked together
only thirty years before us
the wave pattern cut in the stone	                       Cantos 29/145
to Albi’s fortress cathedral
austere outside sumptuous within
memorializing the struggle
of the church against the Cathars
in an inscribed world of saints 
heretics suppressed cultures
and sublimated adoration
I had never conceived of 
in my Protestant corner of Quebec

And then disaster – the missed
rendez-vous at evening
with our chaperones simply gone
us panicked at being alone
and you red-eyed insisting
we must return at once to Paris
but there were no good connections

so we didn’t We took a bus
up up to the high bare
causses of the Massif Central
with crags like agonized dolmens
barely sheltering the sheep
and down to the warm paradise
of Lodève and Montpellier
for me at least an entrance 
into a new and menacingly
fragrant Mediterranean world
of flamingos landing in the Camargue

the courses de taureaux 
in the Roman arena at Arles
the ruined abbey at Montmajour
we explored alone at sunset
whose stairwell I descended into darkness
step by step until suddenly
there was nothing more to step on

All my life I have tried
to recover this. Next spring
I at La Pierre Qui Vire                                           Burgundian monastery
walked among jonquils once again
After that with my first wife 
I hitch-hiked through the Dordogne
en route to Bosnia
Finally with my second wife
I toured Provence in a rental Lancia
It could not be the same

as that first awkward trip
with fumes of diesel and cherry
over wet tarmac
or crushed thyme on the hillside
and the hot breath of the mistral
in our face as we struggled back north
(towards the broken bridge at Avignon
and the inevitable train station
back to our Canadian lives)
pedaling by the columns
of a restored Roman city
and the very olive groves which
unbeknownst to us
Van Gogh had painted
from the small nearby asylum

When you left I was still 
as inhibited as when we began
We never even kissed good-bye
nor did I receive any hint
if your heart had melted
like mine and Bernart’s  	                            B. de Ventadorn
at the faint falling cadences
of the skylark tumbling overhead
after the sunny rainburst
still heard after decades
of teaching Bernart here out west
Can vei la lauzeta mover
When I see the skylark beat 
With joy its wings against the sun
Till he forgets to fly, and falls
From the sheer sweetness in his heart
Ah! what envy I have then
Of those whom I see rejoicing
I marvel, that from desire
My heart does not melt at once

as I a self-made medievalist
came slowly to realize
I had not been ready at twenty-one
for the deepest mysteries in life
but was blessed to have suffered
intense Petrarcan yearning
with pains I cannot now conceive of
to open my eyes and heart
in that miserable first year
of my supposed adulthood
and disengagement from my private past
I would not now change
for anything in the world.

                 Renvoi

  From Susan Burgess Shenstone

And then your email reply: 
we had stopped for a rest 
above the side of the road. 
with the hills behind us, hills 
which had sheep grazing
it was after we had missed the train

and we heard this sweet haunting voice singing 
Il y a des moutons blancs
Belle rose du printemps
Nor could we see anyone near us 
It just seemed to float down from the hills 
as the day was ending. 
It was quite magical. 

I remember only				
that I sang it afterwards for years		
on the road by myself --			
Belle rose du printemps. 
                                          
                                 1950, 2007

SOMETHING PRECIOUS

These novels promising
sexual insights and delights
why does something wake me before dawn
and murmur in my own voice No!
I do not want to read them? 
Am I still at seventy-eight				
just being inhibited
or am I like those in our republic
and those others outside our republic
who consider it shameless?

And why do I instantly remember
Geneviève half-blocking the doorway
to her room in the Austrian chalet
with a half-profile stance that somehow
seemed to beckon me in
when I knew nothing about her
except that she had a French title
and was intently sexy? ---
As I retreated in confusion
from the voice clamoring No! 
I was filled with self-loathing
at my failure to be like my friends
a normal Benthamite 
pleasure-seeking animal

like J at a near orgy
the serene take-charge woman
who confronted me in a doorway
kissed me hard on the mouth
and said, You know I love you ---
She was my best friend’s wife
I fled Montreal
I had to start life over

or years later in Geneva
the British diplomat C
with whom I shared fondant
and slightly drunken flirtation
while Maylie was back in Ottawa
pregnant with our first child --
our walk back was so auspicious
I thought that after I left her
at the large door of her room
in the Hôtel du Rhône
she must have been puzzled if not angry
at the uncouthness of this Prufrockian  	    
Strether out of Woollett

or the dyed and acned blonde
who strode into the Canadian pavilion
where I sat in for our Embassy
at the Poznán Trade Fair
and told me what good times
she had had the year before
with my predecessor O---
my instantaneous revulsion
had nothing to do with my sense
that she was bait from the UB	                          Polish secret police

or the student in the ‘60s
who in my office hour
sat on my desk and told me
with her calf grazing my knee				
it was wonderful
how the new permissiveness
enabled students and faculty
to become more intimate –

by then I was thirty-five
and opening to the erotic
electricity of a new age 
but a voice still whispered No! 

or B the writer in Manhattan
on topics we both shared
who ordered in for lunch
three dozen oysters on their shells
and whose urgings to reschedule
my flight home to Berkeley
I eventually declined –

for all this I am now grateful
I have arrived where I am
in a place where it is o.k.
to be (like Eliot and James)
a tad abnormal



It wasn’t ever that I was 
or was even trying to be virtuous --
between my two marriages
thanks to the stratagem
of a friendly go-between
I lived with someone for years 
and was quite at ease
after I had overcome
the initial ambivalences of shame

It wasn’t at all a matter
of virtue resisting temptation --
at times this was stronger than fear	
an involuntary warning
something precious was at stake
something perhaps in the right lobe
a Socratic daimon
that might be lost
or even something sacral
unto all generations

or even if it were nothing more
than to do with my dear father
with his nighttime absences at work	
his two trunks full of love letters
(Not to be opened until
fifty years after my death) 

and his books not finished --
to me now it would still be precious

I suspect I was selfishly			
protecting in myself				
a source akin to what 
is celebrated in music
and easily translatable
into so many languages
yet nowhere in the vocabulary
of our left-lobe Western science
 

which I recognized
in the Thai woman 
who called me her  or grandfather --                       	  
we talked together for three years
until when we said Goodbye
she finally for the first time
hugged me 				  
and her tears fell like pearls       

* I have not included the Hebrew (nefesh), the Chinese (ling hun), or the Thai (duangjit), because for historical or other reasons these terms do not make the bicameral distinction between mind (animus) and soul (anima).

Confession

   for Paul Almond

I saw myself as a humanist 
searching the right way to love
our religious species

who became a theist 
accepting God’s will 
that texts be critically examined

and slowly released
from their burdensome and divisive
contexts of external practice

but at last seeing myself 
as a child of Jewish observance
and of Buddhist compassion

a small voice inside me
has persuaded me to confess

I am a Christian			
seeking to be enlightened		
		      
enlightened: not in the sense
of Naipaul’s Beyond Belief

or the gnosticisms
of Yeats and Pound

but openness to the simple
living waters of the Lord’s Prayer                       Song of Songs 4:16

in the spirit of Merton’s
I am a Jew and a Moslem	                         Merton, Striving Towards Being 137

open to other precepts
love the Lord in Hebrew	                                              Deut 6:5

love thy neighbor in koine Greek	               Septuagint Leviticus 19:18
the straight path in Arabic                                     Qur'an 1:6

all things are impermanent		                         Mahaparinibbana Sutta 14
the nameable name is not eternal	                  	         Tao Te Ching 1

precepts unburdened 
by the travails of past Councils

like the priests in Utopia
of exceeding holiness 

and therefore very few                                            More Utopia 2