Songs of
Kenneth Leslie

List
Halifax Citadel
Prospect Road
Glooscap's Eye
Go, Lank Rover
John Angus
California
Cape Breton Lullaby

CAPE BRETON LULLABY 

Driftwood is burning blue,  
wild walk the wall shadows,  
night winds go riding by,  
go riding by the Lochie meadows,  
On to'the ring of day  
flows Myra's stream, singing,  
Cadi I gu lo, laddie, sleep the stars away!  

Far on Ben Breea's side  
wander the lost lambies  
here, there, and everywhere,  
and everywhere their troubled mammies  
find them and fold them deep,  
fold them to sleep singing,  
Cadi I gu lo, laddie, lo, laddie, steep the moon away!  

Daddie is on the Bay;  
he'll keep the pot brew in'  
keep all from tumblin' down,  
from tumblin' down to wrack and ruin.  
Pray Mary send him home,  
safe from the foam, singing,  
Cadil gu lo, laddie, lo, laddie, sleep the dark away!  
  
  
COBWEB COLLEGE  

(an Antinomian Parable written for Robert Frost)  

A batch of freshmen came to Cobweb College;  
the Spider looked them over, frowned and said,  
"These boys are ghosts of boys, cracked wide with knowledge,  
their dreams dried out and left the dreamers dead.  
There's not a meal among them, no illusion  
to sharpen up my tooth on, no romance  
for me to ridicule to red confusion,  
no creed on which to slake my poison lance.  
I've drawn their blood tooo many generations  
and spoiled the breed. Their fathers, when I wrapped them  
in causal web and silken strong equations,  
would lunge and writhe, grimacing when I snapped them  
with categoried claws. These modern schools  
condition them until they yearn to yield;  
their wills are like the blown pigskin that drools  
November muck around a soggy field.  
They murmur, "Say, Professor, skip the prodding,  
just dish it out, the ifs, the ands, the buts!  
who'd question fifty million miles of wadding  
engendered through the ages in your guts?  
Welcome the warm cocoon of cosy thought  
through which we gain the world but lose surprise!  
we'll answer by your book, old man, but not  
pretend amazement,'  

thus the pampered flies  
and those who hope for pampering . . . the rest  
nursing a schoolboy grudge within the core  
of mangy-bearded justice are at best  
a thin and scanty ration for my store."  

So modernly at his wits' end to find  
food for his pattern-maw: as when old cries  
were battle banners for the foolish blind;  
or wisdom knelt before the prattling Wise;  
or doddering knights clanked forth as to a feast  
and opened old wounds for an empty tomb  
while on their heads the stupefying East  
poured her unholy oil to their sure doom;  
or as when that rough shepherd whose wild head  
ached noisily pulled from the pasture mire  
her heavy brogues and herded kings instead  
and burned two kingdoms in her fagots' fire;  
or as when hare-brained Shelley turned the tack,  
unwigged the judge, lifted the felon hard  
out of his cage onto the judge's sack  
and placed the moral guardian under guard;  
('twas Shelley solved it) he would find a poet  
and pen him just beyond the edge of knowledge  
(tether him well but never let him know it)  
to be a milch-fly for old Cobweb College.  

"Come, then, quaint poet, feed them hints of God  
my hounds of two-plus-two-are-four will chew!  
Cast over them your old divining rod  
and draw their deep springs to my sultry view!"  
Thus came the Ageless One to Cobweb College  
and said, "It is incumbent upon me  
to be the thing that I was dreamed to be;  
the word I say and live will not divide;  
it must be born complete."  

His voice cross-grained,  
he said it sitting on a class-room table,  
not lotus-seated but let swinging free,  
a very Yankee Buddha (if a Buddha),  
leaving it once to look abstractedly  
out of the open window at the sky,  
smiling to welcome in the coming storm,  
the quick low murmur and the sudden dark,  
his voice the thunder's texture and his hands  
its muscled wind, veined lightning. The storm broke.  
"Lately we hear much talk about selection.  
I'll dip some random uses of that word  
out of the pot where words boil up in deeds:  
'What is your selection for the Derby?'  
'The new headmaster is a good selection.'  
'Out of these evils I select the least.'  
'The most important thing you learn at college  
is how to live your life selectively,  
to recognize the seal of excellence  
the caste-mark of those persons one should know,  
the hallmark of those books that one should read.  
' Easy to note the part selection plays;  
yet here's the antiphon, the song's recoil:  
(what we forget is that it works two ways)  
the seed is chosen by and chooses soil.  
Not difficult to choose things ready made  
and marked with price-tags, plainly stamped and signed  
or guaranteed by cliques and claques of critics;  
but making things is more than choosing things.  
It is the hardened artery of the soul  
that delves in objets d'art, jostling the good  
and bad of artists' and no-artists' leavings  

conducted by a melancholy dealer  
who wears upon his one and only eye  
a disc of gold and rubs his hands to hear  
the dry voice of a dowager exclaim:  
'What a pretty crucifix,  
Only seventeen and six!  
Just the thing I want to fill  
that bit of wall-space . . . what a thrill!"  

"Here is a simple parable of life:  
The bark upon a tree is wood; it peels  
year after year while holding to its form,  
its form tradition, and its peeling off  
the yielding of tradition to the sap  
of new creation . . . so we have the tree.  
Now teach the bark its business with steel bands  
and twist those bands until they choke the sap . .  
steel bands for the pharisee, for him  
no living tree but stark unbending branches  
on which to nail the Life that loves through death  
steel bands for the graceless scholar; he  
tallies three kinds of grace, A, B and C,  
snuffing the living flame with adjectives  
saying 'how quaint, how quite Wordsworthian!"  
The slowed-up poetry of speculation,  
the Martha role of keeping things in order,  
the retail merchant sorting and arranging  
the world's goods on his hierarchic shelves . . .  
there is a deeper thing on which these bud,  
a passion that is too much in the blood,  
too moving in the marrow of the loin,  
too much the chosen itself to mould a coin  
whose metal face would blind the human face  
and shut it from the inner holy place.  
Rather than moulds invisible in the air  
into which petals pour selective milk  
I seem to sense a partnered  
agony of creature and creator in the rose,  
and in each act of mine there dwells a host  
of that same pair, a host with the strange power  
of swinging wide the door for them to enter  
or slamming it against me, I that host."  

There was a frantic scurrying in their minds,  
a rush to find appropriate pigeon holes  
for all this tangle; nothing seemed to fit.  
The Spider sidled in with a quick squeak  
and a suggestion born of sudden  
fear that rather than a lecture once a week  
a better plan would be one once a year.  
The Ageless One heard (not the interjection)  
the scurrying to and fro within their minds:  
yet he went on in that most subline faith  
that ever life goes seeking for its own  
leaving the indexed husks . . . here in-this very room  
might brood a boy with hunger strong enough  
to smell the truth. Now there began to sprout  
in Doctor Spider's brain a horrible doubt . . .  
What gender was this animal? What ilk?  
Gin for his tender babes if this was milk!  

"The hundredth sheep was not a select sheep,  
but just a sheep that happened to be lost.  
Mary would have loved her Son as much  
had he been but the unrepentent thief.  
Do lovers tally points of excellence  
as if they were self-breeding animals?  
(I speak of breeding; it involves selection.)  
You may breed long legs thus, even long heads,  
but love is neither bred nor educated.  
Love knows no grammar, yet the stiffest lock,  
the dullest door, may open to his knock.  
Tradition, once as subtle as the film  
that wraps unfelt the living nerve and vein,  
begins to choke the vein and lull the nerve  
to liking it; the film is wire now  
and coalesces to a band of steel  
so that a good professor is a blacksmith  
or combination smith and spi- . . .  
"The Spider  

dwindled with a squeak until his gown  
seemed hung in mid-air on a wire hanger,  
his mortar sagged upon a shrunken peg.  
The storm had passed beyond the folded hills,  
only its curious echo in this room,  
this man's rough voice its far threat of thunder.  

"From soil somehow the poet's word  
and from that word the spreading tree  
where swells all fruit, sings every bird,  
whose strong trunk is philosophy,  
whose branches thrust in legal maze,  
whose leaves are myriad windows green  
sifting the one to many ways,  
tinting the unseen to the seen.  
Your teachers list the birds and fruit,  
the trunk and branches of the tree;  
but they forget about the root,  
because the root they cannot see.  
Yet have the roots a ray to find  
their road between the stones and clay;  
like Raftery, the singing blind,  
better than day they know the day!"  
  
   

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