McKay - Lependu

LEPENDU

LEPENDU

Nairn
Coldstream

c Don McKay, 1978

ISBN 0-919626-10-6
Nairn Publishing House
Box 219, Ilderton, Ontario
Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada

When Lependu loves you

When Lependu loves you
he's the shadow they discover on your lung
that whets each breath.

He murmurs in the heart, his foreign accents
are the babbling in the blood, valuable, valuable.

The hand of Lependu on the fevered
forehead is the thin, suddenly you see through, but
too late, only a screen a membrane a
last bus
disappearing
down the street and
ONE SIZE PANTY HOSE
says its backside in good-bye.

Lependu isn't easy to pin down having just
vanished leaving stupid messages
like rabbit turds from the dream you can't remember

Absence is Edge
Corporeality is Florida
One Size Panty Hose

and crap like that.

Nevertheless
when Dundas Street expects Lependu
to be in the air on Friday night she grins
like an extra long unplayed piano.

The Relic

Two dimensional, to begin. Walk block by block down Ridout Street past York and King, past the courthouse, Dundas Street and the buildings restored by Labatt's, to Eldon House. Read the historical plaque, stuck like a thought balloon in the city's comic strip.

And enter. An elegance depthed in age and wealth, each room cordoned into a stage set from a forgotten romance: you must know, Charles, I can never marry, for I must not break my oath to Cecil, and so forth. But elegance spiced with unusual objects an elephant's foot umbrella stand, a rhinoceros foot wine bottle holder. Hallways lined with trophies, the skulls and antlers of exotic animals : Hartebeest, Waterbuck, Sable Antelope, Eland, Keidu, Roan Antelope, Soem-mering's Gazelle, Thompson's Gazelle, Gemsbok, Duiker, Springbok, Walker's Gazelle, Cape Buffalo, Lion, Mpallah, Warthog and (slight pause) Cornelius Burley. Less useful than a rhino's foot, the skull sits in a wooden box. The top half is missing, so that your eye can slide down its inner curves, soft as foothills and women. It holds your gaze, first in surprise and then

seductively, you find your eye begins to play and
swirl in its yellow-brown
bowl like water in a toilet, you may feel
a certain limpness of the tongue, a certain

Wait a minute. Slowly. Read the inscription.

This is the skull of Cornelius Burleigh, first man ever to be hanged in London (1830). He was also the second man to go to the gallows in London. The rope broke on the first try! His skull was given to Orson Squires Fowler, a young Yale student who happened to be in London, and he toured the world with it for 50 years, lecturing on phrenology. He became a multi-millionaire and in the late 1880's again found himself in London, when he gave the skull to the Harris family as a souvenir.

The comforts of fact. The happy if-thens of phrenology. Souvenirs. After this first clumsy attempt by our ancestors to make Cornelius Burley permanent (so says an eye witness), the condemned man behaved in a most helpful manner, uttering no complaint but opening his shirt to receive the new rope and climbing willingly back onto the scaffold. It seemed as if the world was lost from his view.

The skull consumes its history. Cornelius Burley, murderer, arsonist, horse-thief has long since vanished down its throat hole. And the wound, the entrance, exit, still remains here, sucking on your eyebeam like an immense appetite outside that sucks this pinprick in the eggshell of the world.

Le rve du pendu

He does not dream backward into:
daisies in a hayfield, swallows in the mellow
wealth of an evening's aleflavoured
light
longing toward him as a look.
Lependu is not hungry for
perspective, all those vanishing
points,
persons in crescendo and diminuendo as he spins
beyond their gravity the skinny needle
spinning free from all the
ping pong of attraction and repulsion, spinning
out beyond us, entering
his pain he wears
the twisted smile, the question mark
couchant
Lependu
who no longer looks to us for answers who is
casually hunting,
trolling his smile the way the talons
lazily trail above the slow circ
circling of the earth

his silence acrid as aspirin on our tongues, the fear
dangling its diamond fishhook (life insurance)
in our bloodstream.

Nothing There

But
whenever we stumble he lifts his lid.
You sense him inconspicuously coiled
on the unexpected stair, an old belt
perhaps a child's shed overalls he is waiting
to lurch bottom falling out back.
At dinner a smile of knives, a glimmer
of moon in a puddle may seek you out in lanes.
And after a near thing
he hangs about in whispers of cordite or burnt rubber.
Back home
some shapeless overcoat has occupied your chair
is leafing through your diary, sipping a crme de menthe
is bored :
You've been a naughty boy, neglecting me
keeping me caged in dreams when we've so much to discuss.

A child's cry paws the latch
scrabbling at the edge of sleep.
I blink to wipe it clear. See?
Nothing.
She knows she
knows I've only thrown a stone to fend him further off.
She also waits interrogator for the falter that betrays
a loping off, oblique, in darkness.

The lips the teeth the tip of the tongue

That final syllable, so hard
in plain English Canadian:
the narrowness of u
suggestion of a zed
Lepahnd(z)u:
say it like sipping very dry wine, perhaps
with fingers clustering in air.
To tell the truth in French (says Conrad)
n'est pas possible, and so also
(says Lependu) is the truth untold
dans la musique.
Scales and exercises, tude, sance,
technical pursuit until
you catch him by mistake

London Life

The pastures of heaven are not more finely manicured
than the grass surrounding London Life
that monument
that ahem that
massy pile
built on uncertainties so solid it defies the grass
to look unlike a rug.

Sits square
in its invention, London Ont., as in the application, then
extension, then reaching out to Byron and beyond
the later ramifications of the thought it thinks
over and over to itself:
[security]

Sits square, and yet
so like a mausoleum no one's likely to forget the fear of death
it's founded on
except

secretaries maybe, inside
daydream itch scheme or just
ebb quietly within
their bravely uneternal lives, slipping
out at lunch crossing
Dufferin to sit in the park on real
grass which tickles their bare feet in the patch of
soft translucence just above the arch I hope this
is true as well as beautiful as possibly they feed some
popcorn to the squirrels and dream of two
husked lovers fondling opening
the birthday presents of each other Christopher
Columbus walking through his newfoundforests
whispers mama mia to himself.

Portents

They begin to appear quietly
as scruffy, balding squirrels
limping across the road so you have to slow down
and see the snarl that shows how small
their mouths are,
how many bites it would take them to consume a body.
Then curled up in gutters,
little black catastrophes.

And then

it was the first really warm day last April, not that there wasn't a