T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label The Compass (1993). Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Compass (1993). Show all posts

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Two Poems from The Compass


The Clothes of the Dead

I have worn the clothes of the dead

a second cousin's sweater,

already frayed when he died, I wore it

another dozen years;

my stepfather's scarves--

blue wool from Scotland,

white silk, and a yellow

Viella shirt. These were their

second skins I pulled on

inhabiting the shape of their

old clothes for years before

the clothes wore out;

days governed by clothes

unfolded and worn,

then thrown into a laundry hamper

or balled and kicked across

the floor. Now those clothes

are gone—eaten by moths,

torn into holes and rips

not even good as rags. I wore

my own clothes

like the clothes of the dead:

brown corduroy trousers, a sweater

shapeless and small even when new;

I pulled it over my head and assumed

the facial expressions of an old man--

these clothes aged me

into someone twice my age

sexless and afraid of life thinking

of retirement and paying off a mortgage;

the penalty of a marriage of lies

held together by threads,

thread-bare of love

a wardrobe

of secrets and despair.

Today I burned six shirts,

two sweaters and trousers:

I burn the past out of my

life, return to living

from dying, take what

I have been,

clothes that made me

someone I didn't want to be

or someone I was but never liked,

clothes that are days and months and years

of a life I gave up

to fear and despair.

Now those clothes are gone:

ashes of clothes

ashes of former selves

ashes of time and space

ashes of words and notebooks

ashes of thoughts

and flesh and blood

ashes of one who surrendered.


Two Tales


1. The Well

She wakened the sleeping giant,

now he struggled to escape

the bottom of a well

where once he lay curled and fetal,

half-submerged in mud.

He could see her above gesturing to him,

holding her forefinger and thumb

together in a circle, then

her hand opened revealing

a message only he could see

written on her palm. He climbed

the cold stone wall of the well,

back pressed against the opposite

wall; gradually he

mounted the well

stopping only to groan

and scratch words on the stones

with his finger nails.

She held out her hand;

oh, she had helped him

all along this journey. Now he

was climbing over the lip

of the well, afraid

of what he might find above.

He remembered the long

fall below him, the

seemingly bottomless well,

the circle of black water so far

below that should he fall

his bones and spirit

would be broken, he would

disappear into the nothingness

of the well's great darkness.


2. The Amphora 

Retrieved from sea-bottom,

caught in a fisherman's net,

two ancient amphoras

containing honey, still liquid

and golden after night's darkness.

Decorating one amphora are images

of men and women in positions of love:

fondling breasts, couplings

of various fashions, the man

between the woman's legs,

the woman eased on top

of the man, the man

from behind thrusting with

hands beside her hips or on

her buttocks. Still other

images of perfection on

the second amphora:

the bee-keeper at the hive,

the farmer in his field

standing in full sunlight

admiring the season's crops;

not far away

lovers transform themselves

into God and Goddess, lose

the illusion of separateness

and return us wholly

to ourselves awakened to love.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

The Compass





Here's the poem referred to at CNNGO. 
 ________________________________________ 

The Compass 

On the four corners of the bed 
the body becomes a compass 
describing the direction of passion. 
Months of desire arrive at this destination, 
rocking on a single almost silent wave 
we are sheltered by darkness. 
The body is a compass needle; 
you turned me from east to west 
awoke a sleeping giant that moves 
between your mouth and breasts and legs; 
the room illuminated by static electricity 
thrown off by our bodies. 
How many decades did I sleep 
waiting only for you; 
I lust after you in all 
the directions of space. 
Meeting at the airport 
your foot touching my leg 
beneath the restaurant table, 
we secretly entered an empty 
banquet hall where the caterers 
chattered and poured drinks behind 
a wall partition then quickly leaving 
we found a deserted hallway of open 
office doors where we embraced. 
All the others in my life fell away, 
I was ready to abandon my old life 
for you, for the touch of your hand and mouth, 
the apple red and delicious cut in half that I eat. 
Tied to the four corners of love 
as to a bed which becomes a compass, 
I find you on your stomach, on your back, 
in the morning lying pressed against me. 
It is not possible to return to sleep now, 
it is not possible to forsake your touch 
and love, black lace, fingers, wetness, 
your mouth, words. The compass needle 
turns finding north switched to east 
and west to south, night becomes morning; 
nothing remains as it was. You pointed my life 
in a new direction, towards a corner of the world 
only dreamt of before. Outside the sun is red 
descending behind a row of trees, 
shadows fade into the other unexplored 
regions of night. 

 (Published in The Compass, Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1993)

Sunday, May 23, 2010

The Compass in Hong Kong

You never know where your work will show up in our still "new" internet age. Someone in Hong Kong found my poem, "The Compass," the title poem of my book The Compass (1993) and inscribed it on a real compass. Someone else wrote this article on finding a compass with my compass poem on it, and this article was published by CNNGO, located Hong Kong, an affiliate of CNN News. The complete article is below:

-------------------------



An unlikely object of desire found at the Cat Street Market

An engraving on an antique compass spawns a search for answers. Thankfully, a reader comes to the rescue

We saw a beautiful antique compass at the Cat Street Market, which we got for HK$19, thinking it would make a great Christmas gift for a relative. However when we looked inside the cover of the compass and read the long engraving, we thought otherwise.

We've typed out part of the engraving here as we thought you might enjoy it:

“On the four corners of the bed the body becomes a compass describing the direction of passion. Months of desire arrive at this destination, rocking on a single almost silent wave we are sheltered by darkness.

"The body is a compass needle; you turned me from east to west awoke a sleeping giant that moves between your mouth and breasts and legs; the room illuminated by static electricity thrown off by our bodies.

How many decades did I sleep waiting only for you; I lust after you in all the directions of space. Meeting at the airport your foot touching my leg beneath the restaurant table, we secretly entered an empty banquet hall where the caterers chattered and poured drinks behind a wall partition then quickly leaving we found a deserted hallway of open office doors where we embraced. All the others in my life fell away."

We were left wondering. How on earth could this have ended up on Cat Street and what kind of romantic souls with a penchant for bondage play could have possibly owned it? A pair of star-crossed lovers forced to live in separate continents, perhaps? Or an epic extra-marital affair between a poet and his muse? Something mundane like a member of the Cathay Pacific mile high club and a mistress from Lockhart Road.

Thankfully, CNNGo reader rgucci came to the rescue, pointing out to us that the engraving is actually from a poem by Stephen Morrissey, aptly titled "The Compass." We feel a wee bit silly that our literary knowledge didn't extend that far. If you want to read the full poem, or any other of Morrissey's works, click here.

We wonder now whether the author is happy his poem has made it to the new antiques of Hong Kong's Cat Street.

The eclectic market sells everything from Mao memorabilia to sex compasses. The Cat Street Market is located on Upper Lascar Row in Sheung Wan. It is between Lok Ku Road and Hollywood Road.

The street is also called 'mo lo gaai' (with 'gaai' pronounced as 'guy') in Cantonese by residents in the neighborhood and is how it should be referred to when asking for directions to the market.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Notes on The Compass (1993)




The Compass (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1993) is the first book of the Shadow Trilogy, books I wrote between 1989 and 1997. I had several titles before I decided on The Compass, which is also the title poem of the book. It is possible that I considered "The Home Front," because of the irony that it can refer to both a war between countries being fought on the home country’s border and to “home” with its suggestion of the promise of love, comfort, and happiness; I think, as well, of the title of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, of World War One, and of the unhappily married caught in a War of the Roses scenario. However, now I wonder if this was one of my working titles, or was it for a book that was either never written or for a possible title for a previous book, Family Album? I don’t remember

    Just today, I reread the poems in The Compass and the book is not quite as I remembered it. If anything, it is much more affirmative and positive than I had thought. It is divided into three sections: “The Whip,” “Hades,” and “The Compass.” “The Whip” is a continuation of Family Album (Caitlin Press, Vancouver, 1989), my book immediately preceding The Compass. The poems in “The Whip” are poems of family life, memory, observation; they are a continuation and development of the poems in Family Album. “Hades,” the second section, is made up of post-divorce poems, the outcome of the emotional and psychological experience of the divorce-- which was an emotional journey to Hades--and it is this section that is "confessional." The final section, “The Compass,” celebrates rebirth, sexuality, marriage, and romantic love.

    I would like to explain the psychology that leads one to write three books on the human Shadow, the Jungian archetype encompassing the psychology of shame, projection, taboos, and self-loathing. I was always intrigued by Shadow content of consciousness; I always wrote with the intention of what C.G. Jung called individuation even before I had heard of Jung, that was always my concern in my writing, from when I began writing in 1965. I knew for many years that the way I was living was not right, but I was incapable of changing myself or the circumstances of my life. Fortunately, the soul will not allow stasis, we can not escape for long the demand of the soul for an authentic life. Thus it was, that after many years of avoiding life, events conspired to do for me what I could not do for myself, as will be explained below. I wrote about the avoidance of transformation in the following excerpt from a poem in The Mystic Beast (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997):


            Lines From Magritte:

        The Forbidden Universe (or Olympia)


A man refused

transformation—"not

yet" he argued "too busy

with family, job, mother,

no time"—always he held

back, remained in

a chrysalis state,

like putrefied matter, undigested

food, or a giant tumour

in his body

clogging all arteries

that lead cosmic

energy into the central

nervous system.

For forty years

a giant organic blockage

grew in the middle

of his body

until he bulged

at the waist;

it was a tumour

on his soul

or the soul

itself expanding

disproportionate

and constricted

by its cage of ribs

and internal organs.

He was sick

with undiagnosable

illnesses, his face anguished,

even walking across

a room became difficult.


In my experience big changes in the soul do not happen because of a series of insights and epiphanies; nor do they happen in a linear progression, or build to a final perfection. The soul does not care about time and space, or even about talking and discussing; change is not an evolution, not even a convoluted evolution, but something that happens to us, something that is beyond our conscious insistence, or desire, that we change into something that is unknown to us and of which we have no experience. I am not referring to the kind of insights we all have with some regularity, but to “the development of the soul,” to the kind of profound change that seems to seldom happen and can’t be made to happen.

    The ways in which we attempt change are hit and miss: years of prayer result in nothing; years of meditating in a cave result in nothing; years of therapy result in nothing. These activities have a nobility to them, perhaps they lay a foundation for change, but there is no causal guarantee that they will result in the desired change. Indeed, I am not saying that these methods for changing the soul are without value or always fail to effect change, only that in my experience the kind of change that I am talking about comes, as it did for me, through what might be called “Divine intervention,” through fate or Providence, or something that comes to us without invitation and by its own volition.

    Around 1986-1987, I was beginning a Pluto transit over my ascendant, which is when my marriage began to unravel and finally collapsed in the winter-spring of 1989. There were other terrible events around the same time, but they must wait for another discussion. A Pluto transit over the ascendant devastates and wipes out one’s life; this was my experience. It was a time when my old life was wiped away so that a new life could be created.

    I, myself, soon came to affirm what had happened to me; I soon affirmed the annihilation of my old life as I knew it; it was the only way that I could embrace life and grow into the person I was meant to be. I felt that my old life was like a giant tumour growing in my body and I was unable to do anything about it, I was unable to cut it out myself, and it was not possible for someone else to remove it, it was the tumour of a psychological complex. I know what an unrealized life is like, I know what it is like when the compass that guides our life does not read accurately the direction in which we must make our journey if we are to find spiritual and psychological wholeness.

    Change and transformation is also possible when we are loved by another, when the other focuses their love and attention on us and we reciprocate with love for the other. Love can move us closer to wholeness, change, and creativity. For many of us, what love means is to be animated, or brought to life, by another. This is a gift that must motivate us, who have been loved, to return to life the blessings of love that we have received.






Here’s the title poem from The Compass:

        The Compass

On the four corners of the bed

the body becomes a compass

describing the direction

of desire and passion. Months of desire

arrive at this destination,

rocking on a single almost silent

wave we are sheltered

by darkness. The body

is a compass needle;

you turned me from east to west,

awoke a sleeping giant

that moves between your mouth and breasts and legs;

the room illuminated by static electricity

thrown off by our bodies.

How many decades did I sleep

waiting for only you;

I lust after you in all the directions of space.

Meeting at the airport

your foot touching my leg

beneath the restaurant table,

we secretly entered an empty banquet

hall where the caterers chattered and

poured drinks behind a wall partition

then quickly leaving

finding a deserted hallway of

open office doors

where we embraced.

All the others in my life

fell away, I was ready

to abandon my old life for you,

for the touch of your hand

and mouth, the apple red and delicious

cut in half that I eat.

Tied to the four corners of love

as to a bed which becomes a compass,

I find you on your stomach,

on your back, in the morning

lying pressed against me.

It is not possible to return

to sleep now, it is not possible

to forsake your touch and love,

black lace, fingers, wetness,

your mouth, words. The compass's

needle turns finding north switched

to east and west to south, night

becomes morning; nothing remains

as it was. You pointed my life

in a new direction, towards a corner

of the world only dreamt of before.

Outside the sun is red

descending behind a row of trees,

shadows fade into the other

unexplored regions of night.


(Stephen Morrissey, The Compass, Empyreal Press, Montreal 1993; ISBN 0-921852-04-5; The Shadow Trilogy, including The Mystic Beast (1997) and The Yoni Rocks (1995), was published by Empyreal Press in Montreal.)