Peter Dale Scott

from:
MOSAIC OF ORPHEUS: Five Canadian Poems

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).

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