Haul your ass over here / pronto.

THE POET'S INVOCATION TO HIS MUSE

by Irving Layton

My alter ego, my diabolical other Self

where are you? A whole mouth goes by,

yet not a single peep from you.

Let me have it straight! Did you grow careless

from too long service? Or was it the tremors of old age

made you spiteful and prankish. You gone

invoking your attendance

my scribbles are as pale as a watermark.

No fire in them, no punch. Return, make my brain

boil again. Make it seethe with the blood

of electrified hitmen and of gallant warriors

dying in an odious cause. How many sheets

must I blacken before you [set?] a premonitory fire

to make my Self [shudder?] with familiar joy.

I'm serious, not even Coleridge's famous ode

on despondency cheers me, nor Shelley's moan,

marvellous and eloquent, while the bay's waters

around him sparkle and dance.

What hope for that mortal so lost to gloom even

another's misery fails to restore his self-esteem

[to rectitude?] with one of life's vital lies or illusions.

My case is desperate. Haul your ass over here

pronto. Abandoned, I'll sit here forever

like a paralytic, like a just-invented Frankenstein

waiting for that first charge to shock him back to life.

(One of Layton's last poems, found in Box 31 of the Layton collection at Concordia University in Montreal. A clutch of pages stapled together; multiple drafts of a poem the poet began, but never completed, towards the end of his writing life.  Transcribed by Donald Winkler, with help from Anna Pottier. Photo by Terry Brynes. Originally published in Books in Canada, March 2003. )

Via the véhicule press blog.