Unstitching the Next Step
(One Hundred Lines in Praise of Maurice)*

Pale beach in a remote zone

Under history. You catch yr. breath

Turn hard & true, through memory

Lost in a forest of shifting synonyms

And a spiral staircase won’t stop going up

Spiked fences desklamps dream

I parted my hands to refocus

Feeling the pull of that nearby star the river twists and spins

A little clarified, a little

& no end to the wriggle of the mind &

Robin foraging under a hedge and I knew

It’s a game in hide & seek

“I say, look,” said Peter in amazement

& writing insects: bees, beetles, flies caterpillars

Deep in the furrow of a single underwave

Meadow Foxtail, Cats Tail, Cock’s Foot, Rye-Grass

I took my children to the sea

A cat licks a forepaw in the light

Go little thing be good

Learning takes a turn, butterflies pass

She left a leaf on my desk

Amethyst — ruby —

O you frivolous pussycat

Evasive shadows, a wall of absence collected

Envelopes, copybooks, notebooks, paper clips, stapler

Between this & this

(stung) o saisons o chateaux

Honeybee on passion flower irreparable past

If the smell of rain in the air brings rain

To land in silence

A shell, another shell coiled inside which

Breathing & creaking — O listen

Pebbles that clock on a wave’s recession

Through which music must once have passed, your music

Step foot hand dance fog

Have you jams?

A wren suddenly

So you’re another novelist? Tell me yr novelty

Wisps of it dripping along the tongue

She left a leaf on my desk

Each whispered connection I know you

The tenacious little details of daily getting by

Second thoughts, first steps in April

See I feel uneasy suddenly because of the.

It’s All those small vowels.

Birdsong flows down among the trees outside where light

On a map a timetable a list one egg

Living is intimately complicated

Picking persimmon by the waterway

But then night seems cut & folded up

I picked out a birdcall I’d never heard before

Rain unbending rain, amending rain, attentive rain

& a dozen keys turn simultaneously

Bright berry in a blackbird’s beak

Blackbird on a wall

My brother is dead. His wristwatch laid face up beside his bed

Land into each circle of silence

Whichever way you look at it

A fossil horizon, a dust horizon

Post office notice on envelope from Japan:

I see a globe wrapped up in occupied flight

& a ghost from another station.

What is fit & not. What is fit.

Black points, gold stars, oily inside upper of buttercup

Did he say: it’s yr mind or its in yr mind?

Who is that figure turning into

A little pale blue butterfly...-

Lay the space bare where you can

The tendril travelling

Purple Loosestrife – now. The verb: to see

O — at the window: look —

Kitten in the bidet / what did she ever say

To pick up the possible & go on with that from there

Remember: a noise a melody in the mind. Suddenly

A bedrock inability to earn a living

This door opened

In the landscape of the suppressed mystery

The past the sea

She moved closer to her & thought how odd

Honeybee on passionflower the irreparable past

Ripple-zeros on a roadside pool, crescent of shell in the sand

Fifty-seven seagulls on the parti-coloured roof

The bees forage in the foxglove and return

Flowerhead will get you a career

If you wake in the morning overjoyed before a tide

That slight movement

Once upon a time you were a baby. Now what?

Description & the absurd

Smoke on a pale blue sky

To hear the pages

Duck of urgency paddles off. Across everything you ever...

Ganzanti’s Grande Dizionario (riddled with curiosities)

Writing, deleting, writing again, patient, persistent,

Who’s that? Pale profile in skeletal light through slats

Of heart-stopping examples: wash-basins...

Quaint – quaint – quaint goes the pussycat by the fire

This & then this, one syllable

A colony of glinting ghosts

Here, and then here...tenuous

On flat green grass & (echo-tussled hair –

*Unstitching the Last Line is a collage poem written in praise of our dear friend, Irish poet Maurice Scully, who died on March 5, 2023. Maurice’s rare capacity to capture the quotidian with lyrical precision, ironic wit and musical instinct enabled him to write with depth, compassion and intensity. In addition, Maurice was one of the most genuinely kind and genuine friends we’ve ever come to know and love.

To write it, we both reread all of Maurice’s books, choosing by our fancy (& without consulting each other), one line per day for fifty days, to arrive by the end of the process at 100 lines. We then randomly shared our lines with each other, so that we each had 25 lines of our own choosing, and 25 lines chosen by our partner. Each of us was tasked with combining these into ten 5-line stanzas, which we did by different methods. I randomly alternated lines in what I consider an essentially Dadaist process; Gale organized his stanzas poetically, with each stanza containing lines chosen by both of us, either 3:2 or 2:3. To create the final poem, we alternated stanzas by “author” (Gale or Lori – though Maurice is really the author of everything here, with the exception of the subtitle and these explanatory paragraphs!).

Writing this piece was a bittersweet opportunity to reread our friend’s work in depth, to reconnect with it, and with him.