Arthur,

Excellent. Each stanza could be the end of a good poem but then the next
takes it further. We have a taxidermist in the family and as for museums I
know well the contrast between the bright life outside and the statuesque
creatures inside. My favourite is the Bell-Pettigrew museum in St.Andrews.
It has a thylacine in it (now extinct as I'm sure you know) and it always
haunts me that it can be seen so life-like but never again in life.

One or two suggestions:

Suggest review of punctuation lines 1-4. The problem is that line 3 looks
like it is going to start a sentence but it doesn't. Should line 3 follow on
from 1 and 2 and then full stop or should it belong to lines 4 and onwards
in which case it would need the word "are" between "birds" and "caught"?

Suggest "Was it morbidity that drew me from the swings?...."  As it stands
morbidity isn't complex enough a motive for the visit. To put it in question
form would suggest more.

Suggest "semblance" instead of "mockery" of life. However that's just IMO.
Mockery sounds too negative, almost wishing the museum were to be closed
down. On the other hand it does enhance the contrast with the living world,
which is one of the qualities of the poem. So I don't know.

Suggest "About 12, older than I was,
tiny princess of the upper Nile.
(as less convoluted)

Suggest "stated" or "said" instead of "translated" in S4 = more direct and
the translation may be a bit of a red herring as far as the poem is
concerned.


Major questions over the natural history of S4. After the stunning account
of S1 this is a bit of a let down. Zoology has such a rich vocabulary, a
hardly touched resource for poetry but  S4 uses a lot of generic and
folklorist terms as if from one of the Ladybird books. I know it's quite big
issue whether description is to be exact if it's the metaphor you're after.
Do you want breadth or depth?. My feeling is that S4 could do to be more
heavily exact. It would fit the poem and by being more life-like would
allude to the transition that you are after with "will rise again. " As it
stands these things still seem stuffed and seen from a distance. What kinds
of birds swoop? Lots. So put in a swooping kind. Mute swan sings. Very
clever, but at the expense of the phenomenology of the poem. Do swans sing
as thrushes do? What kind of ape was it? A gibbon would sound good, even if
you had to make it up and gibbons have an associated activity (brachiating).
Not suggesting that a beefy word like brachiating has to go into the poem
but you could allude to it instead of "gibbers". Fox yips is okay for me.
Eagle soars with dripping beak. Too Edgar Allen Poe. How about bloody beak
or open beak? Spiders are particularly hard to preserve in this manner
because of they lack a hard carapace. And do they scuttle?

As I said it's great poem, one that I wish I'd written and as you'd say,
that's
something.

Just because I haven't said anything about the space opened up by the human
figure and the weight of ?ancient human civilisation brought with it, that
doesn't
mean that I'm not sensitive to it, but you handle it well, not over or under
done, IMO.



Colin



----- Original Message -----
From: "arthur seeley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 8:43 AM
Subject: New sub: The Mummy


         The Mummy

Silence hung like dust
in the light through high windows.
The still birds caught in flight,
the eagle clamped on heathered rock
rid a rabbit of its plaster bowels,
beak and claw red and bright forever.
The glass-eyed fox, “Vulpes vulpes”,
teeth shone in rictus;
I shaped the strange words with a quiet mouth,
my reflection wraith and vague in glass.
The sunlight, the silence, and the cases.

Morbidity I suppose drew me often
from the swings, the shouts and laughter of a spring day
into the stillness of the municipal museum,
where death glared and swung  in mockery of life.

The mound of her nose and pits of eyes
were all that called that yellow mud a face,
the slender slope of shoulders
and the taper to her ragged feet.
About twelve she was, older than I, tiny,
Princess of the Upper Nile,
and those were her toe-bones, the label said;
polished ocherous  pebbles.

‘When the four corners of the earth shall meet
you will rise again’: The hieroglyphs translated.
When the birds swoop, the mute swan sings,
the ape gibbers, the pinned spider scuttles,
the fox yips and the eagle soars with dripping beak,
those broken feet may dance again and mud laugh sweet as spring.