A Bell Curve and Other Poems

by David J Murray

Overview

In A Bell Curve and Other Poems, poet David J. Murray divides 118 short poems into seven separate sections; each section holds a common theme but includes a different number of poems from the other sections. The poems of this collection offer photographs of moments in his mental life, while the collection as a whole uses the bell-curve concept to allow him to stress the unified nature of this poetry collection.

The first section, only three poems long, is about children. The second section, nine poems long, is about the author's professional interests in psychology and philosophy. The third, including seventeen poems, is about the arts, especially literature. The fourth section-the middle-includes fifty-eight poems addressed to the person who is the heroine of Murray's previous book, An Artist's Model and Other Poems (2012). Sixteen poems comprise the fifth section on women Murray has met in the past and whose influence on him led him to write about those encounters. The sixth section contains twelve poems about the changing views of Lake Ontario as he sees it every day. The final section includes just three memorial poems, two of which concern his deceased wife's gravesite in Kingston's Cataraqui Cemetery.

These numbers-3, 9, 17, 58, 16, 12, 3-resemble, in outline, a sharply peaked bell curve, illustrating roughly how much time Murray spends thinking about each topic at the present stage of his poetic experience. This form offers exploration and a snapshot of his current thoughts on a wide range of subjects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491709269
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/21/2013
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d)

Read an Excerpt

A Bell Curve and Other Poems

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By David J. Murray

iUniverse LLC

Copyright © 2013 David J. Murray
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-0926-9

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CHAPTER 1

Children

    At the Zoo

    I sigh and count the minutes' soulful hours;
    Time, like today, can pass and sunny be.
    Contentment lies in a child's contented hands
    Who walks with a Popsicle with her parents and me,
    While the sun shines down on territorial lands
    Where treasures bask in baskets bathed in flowers.

    Contentment lies in the slow-unfurling necks
    Of giraffes who idly chew as they watch the crowd,
    Or the slow inforwarding of a camel's knees
    As it strolls its walk with its youthful rider proud
    Of his haughty height and his power to highly please
    His upstaring parents, although he's only six.

    And so, in contentment, can days pass by
    While I count their minutes' soulful hours and sigh.


    Ancient and Modern

    Back in the raucous years of empty youth,
    I plagued the globe with curiosity;
    I went to where the ancients pried the truth
    From what they thought oracular, the sky,
    And the pitiable wastes of falling day.

    So Rome I saw, whose untopped columns stood
    For money and for roads that combed the fields;
    And Greece I saw, whose temples, once of wood
    But now of stone, were carved to timber shapes
    Intended as more enduring monuments;

    And of Ephesus a portalled library
    That stood as symbolic epitaph of Life,
    Masquerading as idolatry,
    Welding the Greek Diana's archery
    To a new religion, Christianity;

    And everywhere, on fallen sculpted stones
    That spread their placid flatness to the sun,
    Adorned with roundels and medallions,
    Heaped into cascades of broken artefacts
    Of cavalcaded masonry and rocks,

    Everywhere I saw, spread out on ledges,
    Living lizards with lidded eyes and lanky
    Tails, soaking up sun, as they had done
    From ages when the town had suffered sieges
    Till now, when tourists, packed on adult cruises,

    From irreligious universities came,
    From campus towns across the dappled West,
    To see the sources of ancient fallacies
    And superstitions crowned with uncouth Beauty,
    And words that smoothed a soothing way to Science.

    Later, in Canada, when the banks had grown
    And folded the modern world into their armoury,
    Their buildings had their pedestal stone fronts embellished
    With sculptures of porticos Grecian and graciously furnished
    With keystones and columns and carvings that clearly established

    A heritage of antiquity magnified;
    And, later still, when those buildings were uprooted,
    Doomed to be rubble 'midst towers of steel and glass,
    Some of their treasured carvings were removed,
    On the backs of trucks that just withstood their weight,

    To a park on Toronto's edge, where one now sees,
    Through vibrant pines and firs and sky-lit trees,
    Porticos like the porticos of Rome,
    Columns like the portals of Greek libraries,
    And grey-cut half-height columns in the grass;

    And I saw two girls, near-teenagers, climb up
    Onto a grey-cut half-height quasi-plinth,
    Modelling, with their limber mouvements,
    Ur-ancient rites of life-a-giving lore,
    Unscripted, upon those stones from yesteryear.


    What My Grandfather Said

    When I was young and aged about twelve,
    By Edinburgh's shore,
    My grandfather went out one night
    And didn't return before

    The midnight hour, it was, I think;
    Kindly as ever he was;
    I had been finishing reading a book,
    And was pleased he'd come back because

    I didn't have to wait up for him now;
    I could flop my weary head
    On the drowse-inducing pillows and sheets
    Of my comfortable bed;

    But suddenly he stopped to talk,
    Bending his face down to mine;
    I could see the bald crescent of his head
    With its opalescent shine;

    And he said to me quite quietly,
    As if a confidence
    He wanted to impart to me
    But felt some diffidence:

    "Be careful of strong liquor, lad;
    Avoid it when you can;
    You must only rarely drink when you
    Grow up to be a man."

    As he said this all the while his face
    Was poised so close to mine
    That the smell on his breath was obvious,
    But it can't have been of wine,

    For only beer and Scotch I'd seen
    When visitors came to call;
    And this was the first time in my life
    I'd known him to smell at all.

    And so I remembered what he'd said.

    The words above aren't correct;
    Their gist is there, but his breath smelled so good
    It seduced my intellect.

CHAPTER 2

Psychology and Philosophy

    Human Outliers

    Bleak and out of kilter with their time,
    Outliers are tempted into crime
    Or maybe feel a force to write in rhyme.

    Oh, for a normal's platitudinous calms!
    Oh, for a saint's propensities to psalms
    That offer soporific cooling balms

    All in a heinous eagerness to please
    Divinities whose edicts feed the trees
    And cap the skies with high infinities!

    So, idly I fashion and calibrate these lines:
    Either divinity encompassed bad designs;
    Or humans strove to stem their own declines;

    Or laws of genetics functioned hit-or-miss,
    Engendering human runts who vent like this.


    Nature's Sway

    How, in a world so rayed with gorgeous colours,
    Can any thought of darkness dim the day?
    A lucent, faintly yellow, sort of blue
    Covers the sky, but a cloud flat seems to say
    That its darkness will not go; it's here to stay.

    Although some incompetent ruler of the world
    Might argue that he or she knows every way
    To trim the indulgent, or to puff the small,
    The fact remains that Nature wields its sway
    To ensure that, however gorgeous its display,

    Life will go on, with reasonable chances
    That manoeuvring outweighs what dark advances
    Threaten to tilt composure into anger
    Without which darkness never poses danger.


    A Shopworn Day

    When is a broad, bright new display
    Symbolic of a brighter day?

    When the broadness of the light
    Signifies an end to night;
    When the brightness of the red
    And yellow leaves unfolds to spread
    Its active colours on as yet
    Untreated treetops, dull and wet;

    But the trees still lie open in the park,
    Not only to the mist and dark,
    But also to a sun grown cold
    And bored and tired and worn and old,
    Symbolic of a shopworn day
    That failed to chase the clouds away.


    I Have No Time

    I have no time for simple games or pastimes;
    If it's not serious, life-or-death, or work,
    I feel I waste my time and lose the spark
    That energizes all I undertake;

    And so, I lose some women with my ardour;
    I'm so eager-keen to over-tout my wares
    That warranted suspiciousness upflares
    And people avoid approaching me with offers;

    And so aware am I of my social drawbacks
    That sometimes I dress too over-formally,
    Trying to make people think I'm that way normally,
    When all I'm trying to do is act acceptably;

    And, worst of all, although I always try
    For musicality in poetry,
    I've grown so to dislike all noisy revelry,
    That a Saturday night with nothing to do is heavenly.


    Early Morning Train #1

    A rising sun can look as if it sinks
    When, on the train, I'm heading to a place
    Where, on the one hand, ecstasy might wait,
    On the other, I might lapse into disgrace;

    And so, bewildered by uncertainties,
    I settle down to the paper and look away
    From the window, to what it is I'm trying to read,
    Hoping my hopes will rise, not sink, today.


    Lingering

    To linger long in empty pleasure
    Is not to re-court loneliness;
    Each preparation shows endeavour
    To perpetrate ambitiousness
    Into hours of lingering leisure.

    Nature is king, but also queen
    Of the domain of her high command;
    There, beneath Venus' gown, unseen,
    Lie spreads of open wonderland;
    And none of your lingering will have been

    A wasteful chore in a chariot-bed,
    Pulled by capricious horses across
    A waste-lot sky demerited;
    Your lingering longing never will be lost,
    But win you storm-felt happiness instead.


    Parties

    No matter how grimly a fellow first reveals
    That he is not immune to those appeals
    That are offered by women who participate
    In social occasions, he will accumulate
    More social worth if he brings a female guest,
    To help him move and mingle with the rest
    Of the couples who roam the room and laugh
    At beams of banter and amusing chaff;
    Happy to show that they are couples firm—
    But meanwhile succeed in making that fellow squirm
    And fall to a child-like voice in deference
    To their mutual ease and mutual reverence—
    Shame will apportion him when witless he stares
    At someone's wife, while his female guest just glares.


    Lightning Storm

    Almighty forces, busting their belt-buckle sky,
    Proclaim, in ravenous verses, that there's no reason why
    Reason should not remove its raiments to score
    A shimmer of glamorous madness for evermore.

    For only when reason has done its best to kill
    Whatever amorous feelings grow in us still,
    Does lightning flash its belabouring, arrogant sword
    To delete from our nightmares every belligerent word.


    After a Miserable Winter

    Mostly, the greens are from the conifers
    That stood stout-heartedly through the winter's cold;
    Lawns are dull brown from soaking snow and seepage,
    And flowers are far too small to see from here:
    A vantage point for macro-worlds magnificent;
    And yet a whisper in this soft-sighed air,
    Something not of cold, but of incipience,
    Suggests that buds are starting to embrace
    The many-coloured branches of the spring,
    And that new life, iconic in its reference
    To life, albeit new or dark or coloured,
    Has started to salve all conscience from the air,
    And thereby to communitize the cells
    That, animal-like, are jettisoning death.

CHAPTER 3

The Arts

    Thinking of London

    Sometimes a nightfall takes so long to fall
    That darkness's dangers seem imperceptible;
    Time lasts so long it's indestructible,
    And Death seems to play no part in this at all.

    I can look out feeling—well, unfree,
    (Because no booze or bubbly am I allowed)
    When I lunch in teashops that rarely see a crowd,
    At tables where elderly ladies sip their tea,

    Talking of Klimt, not Michelangelo,
    Watching their elderly selves slip slowly off
    To a delicate land where, still, Rachmaninoff
    Gives them a voice that tells them where to go

    When humdrum falls like Lucifer from the sky,
    And noisiness rakes its gravel over the streets,
    And rickety textings, camouflaged by tweets,
    Send trivia where Tennyson once rode by.


    The Social World

    No brutal, worrying grindstone do I bear
    On which to whet an axe of sheer despair
    That sometimes cuts into my joie de vivre
    With nothing but sad tidings to deliver,

    Namely, the place of inequality
    In a social world that's veined with cruelty,
    Because what most men want is easy to name,
    But what most women want is not the same.

    One answer to this drastic difference
    Is for men to modify their pure impatience,
    By raising sentiments to gilded arts
    And hiding angers deep within their hearts;

    And timing their minds so that the world's imbued,
    For kindness's sake, with wantonness subdued.


    Homage to Strindberg

    A poet is a miscreant made
    From sinner and from saint.
    He brandishes a fervent spade
    On myth without complaint;
    But let the Truth peer in the door,
    And he's corrupt and taint.

    A poet is a lackey made
    From a saint and from a sinner.
    Goodness spreads its masquerade
    Within him like a winner;
    But respect's so cold it maddens him
    And makes him fear all kvinnar.

    No poet was e'er an offspring true
    Of his father and his mother.
    Whatever they'd wanted him to do
    Would inspiration smother;
    And wherever he finished in the end,
    His goal had been some other.

    And no poet ever quite fulfilled
    The dreams of his mother and his father;
    Ruefully his words he'd spilled
    On anyone who'd bother
    To befriend him and to hold him tight,
    To keep his souls together.


    Homage to Housman

    The Attic verse of golden Greece
    Can seize a handful of the brain
    And turn it upside down to show
    It won't be right way up again;

    And the rhymes of stodgy-hearted Rome
    Have little more than fumes and grace
    To strain and filter out desires
    Into a dry, but dignified, place;

    But when I think of thee, my lad,
    My thoughts go thundering, far away
    From Greece and Rome, to the placid peace
    Of an English farm on an English day.


    Homage to Thomas Mann

    The peak of madness is reached when all one's work
    Becomes too single-minded to be borne;
    Prizes and rewards go to the jerk
    Who wants to drink and sleep his way around;
    No wonder the inborn artist feels forlorn,
    When he or she can find no common ground.

    I've just read a book on madness and on art
    By a writer who'd fill the vacant slot
    Of "muse" to a playwright; but her generous heart
    Could not be happy in a world of drinkers,
    Who stressed and claimed it was their rightful lot
    Through "freedom," to "find themselves" as "artist-thinkers";

    Thereby, they claimed, they'd find themselves for real
    And harbour cocooning novels, poems, or plays,
    Or sculpted works, or paintings that appeal
    To the rich, who'd feed the "artists" with real food,
    And fatten their bank accounts and stuff with praise—
    Reviews on which they'd base their livelihood;

    And, through these appalling junctions of pure stress,
    Our authoress, as yet unfamed, kept on,
    Aiming to give to others such redress
    As she could give, with hand or hope or purse,
    And try to reverse their blunt oblivion,
    And shield them from rejection or from worse.

    Her playwright she married, but "inspired" (he said),
    He would saunter, clutching her cash, quietly out
    Into the night (while she remained in bed),
    Claiming (he said) to be "inspired" by bar
    Or brothel, while she, resistant to all doubt,
    Assumed that his growing art would take them far.

    A baby came; "her child" it's called throughout
    Her book on art and madness, where "her child"
    Is everywhere; "her child" cries out and screams
    If she leaves the room to join the other guests,
    At a party at George's where she's reconciled
    To no longer being astonished at requests

    To make the evening eloquent with gin,
    Or let a stranger place his sweaty hand
    On her thigh, as if she'd later let him in
    To her oh-so-mature, sophisticated stance,
    Where love is not possessive; nothing is banned
    From the mutual duetting in this dance;

    And her playwright husband, there across the room,
    Talks in enticing ways of Gide or Proust
    To somebody's wife who's trying to hide the gloom
    Of her mental homeliness from would-be flirts
    With would-be giftedness, who tried to boost
    Their would-be minds by fingering her skirts.

    So she left all that for her child's sake and renewed
    Her staider earlier ways; for Thomas Mann,
    Society could be worse than solitude;
    And art that was worlds away from what she'd known
    Could foster and distil a future plan,
    Where nobody feared to reap what they had sown.


    Homage to Baudelaire (In
    Memoriam Patricia Soberman)

    No curse of mine is strong enough to stain
    A strengthened wall of Light bereft of pain,
    For Light is what upholds the fortress wall
    That shelters all the arts for one and all;

    Yet Darkness also holds a velvet plate,
    On which lie artefacts of greed and hate,
    And sometimes the Darkness holds a chandelier
    That throws a light on what is not quite clear:

    Namely, the "evil" in Les Fleurs du Mal,
    Which never is really lacking in morale,
    But, rather, rouses thoughts inapposite
    Made soft by sonnets cast from sound and light.

    These span the passing years and, even now,
    Bewitch us without our understanding how.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Bell Curve and Other Poems by David J. Murray. Copyright © 2013 David J. Murray. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................     xi     

Preamble: A Bell Curve....................     xvi     

Children....................     1     

Psychology and Philosophy....................     9     

The Arts....................     21     

My Inspiration....................     41     

Other Musings....................     101     

Space and Sky....................     119     

Memorials....................     133