Three From Carapace 62 – Mahola, Dowling, Cullinan and More

Welcome to Carapace @ BOOK SA – the new (and only) online home of South Africa’s slug-ish poetry magazine.

To kick things off, three poems that feature in the forthcoming Carapace issue no. 62:

Priorities
For days now
The family dog has not come back,
Boycotting its gravy bowls
In favour of a festival
Arranged by a neighbour’s bitch.
- Mzi Mahola

* * *

Where Google has not been
I have asked so much of the Internet:

“Is it true what I once saw as a child –
an umbrella hoisted high in the mass?”
“What are the traits of a zebra?”
“Who or what is a senior wrangler?”

“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
when hot for certainties in this our life!”
– Who said that?

And I have found such answers
Along its fast electric autobahns:

“Meredith!” “Pugnacious!” “Odd-toed!”
“The opposite of a wooden spoon!”
“A processional canopy was what you saw –
holy things must be covered!”

I grew sick of Google’s cleverness
and I grew sly. And so I asked:

Where is Farah Fawcett Majors now?
Why won’t my mother die?
Can we hasten death?

And Google said

Try to limit the number of difficult situations
your loved one has to face
Distract her from her hallucinations
by engaging her in a pleasurable activity
Caring for someone with dementia
can be very rewarding

On another page Google offered
a photographic view of a vulva
But I have a thousand places inside
where Google has not been.
- Finuala Dowling

* * *

Visions
Sixteen hundred years ago
A puppy dog watched a saint,
And the saint stared out
To the light of God
And heard the ghost of St Jerome,
Eavesdropping gently,
Just out of sight.

It was a great vision,
Caught at this moment,
Ten centuries later
By the brush of Vittore Carpaccio
In a painting
As cunning and subtle in beauty
As a canal In Venice,
Loitering,
That glitters in its ooze
And tricks with its own delight.

A sage and handsome man,
Augustine,
He sits in a red episcopal robe,
White apron, dun surplice,
Staring out, dumbfounded,
Staring unaware
Of the gorgeous bric a brac
Of his study, his theatre
Of goods:
The casually opened
Yet opulent leather tomes;
The astrolabe above his head;
The gilt Saviour,
Half size, elegant,
Aloof on a pedestal,
Candlesticks at His feet;
And below
At rest each side of the altar
The bishop’s
Mitre and crozier

Five hundred years have passed,
Since the painter made
Sunlight saturating
Thin strips between the shadows
Slipping across the floor,
Illumining the sage at his desk.
So that art
Sustains the miracle:
The changeless light of God.

Sixteen centuries
Are nothing now
If miracles abide in paint
Or linger in the words
Of this great sage:
Time has no reality.
It is not infinite because
God created it.

And we who live so late in time
Are mortal like the saint,
Can savour joy in earthly things
But also grasp delight
In revelation clinging
Like a wisp of spider’s web
To a finger,
Or learn to sit
Like a puppy dog
Watching a saint.
- Patrick Cullinan

Notes
St Augustine’s dates are 354–430 AD. Vittore Carpaccio’s dates are vaguer. He was born in Venice between 1455–60. He died c.1525/26. The painting of St Augustine in his study was part of a sequence entitled ‘Scenes from the Legend of St Jerome’. It now hangs in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice.

Augustine’s vision was the ghost of the newly deceased St Jerome. The apparition had come to warn him that a treatise he was writing on the bliss of souls in Paradise was highly presumptuous and that he should desist as no mortal could possibly comprehend that blessed state.

• Carapace Magazine: In fine bookstores across South Africa, but especially at Clarke’s Books, Cape Town.

Did you like this article?

Share it

Print this article

Email this article