Poetry Day - Norman MacCaig

I was zipping through some books entering them in Delicious yesterday, when I came upon one I picked up second-hand somewhere, that seemed a likely candidate to be purged, called Worlds – Seven Modern Poets (I have too many poetry anthologies/collections, picked up second-hand once upon a time, and am slowly getting rid of them). But then I looked inside it, which was always going to be a threat to the purging, and it is a worthy book. It has a few pages of artsy black and white photographs of each of the authors (which include Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes) doing what they do and a spiel about their life. I came upon a poet by the name of Norman MacCaig, and read a few of his. I like them. Here are two poems about what lies beneath. And all the many things that people never can say.

Picture from here.

Incident

I look across the table and think

(fiery with love)

Ask me, go on, ask me

to do something impossible,

something freakishly useless,

something unimaginable and inimitable

like making a finger break into blossom

or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes

or remembering tomorrow.

I will you to ask it.

But all you say is

Will you give me a cigarette?

And I smile and,

returning to the marvellous world

of possibility,

I give you one

with a hand that trembles

with a human trembling.

Among the Talk and Laughter

Why does he fall silent?

Why does that terrible, sad look

tell he has gone away?

He has died too often.

And something has been said

that makes him aware of the bodies

floating face downwards

in his mind.

Norman MacCaig