Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Sunday Poem


PAUL MORPHY IN PARIS*

Saturday, the First of November

I open with the Sicilian Dragon
the clock quiets and the room starts,
voices expand. I climb over the chair.

Monday, mid-December:

A good enforcer of the touch-move rule,
I make the bastard play it, mop his pawns,
capture his Carthusian rooks.

Somewhere in the Month:

Bogolyubov and Botvinnik sing five octaves
in the French Defense. I interrupt only to sip
their wine, nibble their gambits.

At The End of This Horrid Month:

I'm in jail. In Paris. My torturers make me
confess to my wife's shoes--in a half-circle.
And what of it? It is a perfect half-circle.

The Late Nineteenth Century:

I wish I could fly. This queen's knight
pawn forwards two squares, the Orangutan
sits under the canopy in a glass tree.

The Circle at the End of Time:
"He will plant the banner of Castile
on the walls of Madrid, with the cry:
The city is taken, and the little king will go away."


                                                    --S.K.


 

*NOTE: Paul Morphy was an American and one of the world's greatest chess players. At the peak of his career in 1859 he withdrew from tournament chess, became increasingly psychotic, and spent his days arranging women's shoes in half-circles in his bedroom, pacing his room and muttering in French, "He will plant the banner of Castile…”

14 comments:

Silverfiddle said...

Sounds like an interesting cat. Thanks for the poem!

Anonymous said...

shaw...a heads up...your resident troll is bashing you over at silverfizzle's blog...

Shaw Kenawe said...

@Anon,

Oh the poor idiot gets off on doing that. There's so little thrill in his life, let him enjoy bashing people on an internet comment thread.

The rest of us actually have lives.

Shaw Kenawe said...

SF,

I had to learn chess terms in order to write this one. Thanks.

BB-Idaho said...

Glad I gave up chess!

Shaw Kenawe said...

BB,

I gave it up after I kept losing to a computer.

KP said...

That took a lot of focus for me to digest. I can only imagine what it took to write it. Well done, mate.

Shaw Kenawe said...

KP,

The poem was imagined from Morphy's point of view as he descended into madness.

As I told BB, I had to research references on chess moves. Many of them are in the poem, including the Orangutan.

As well as the Sicilian Dragon, the touch-move rule, the French Defense, plus the names of two famous Russian chess champions, who weren't even born in Morphy's time, but this is a poem about a mad man and chess, isn't it.

I was inspired to write it after reading a long article about Morphy in The New Yorker about a dozen years ago.

thanks for reading.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Oh, and the months and dates at the beginning of each stanza are the time line of when his psychosis began, and as the poem advances the dates become confused and less specific.

Silverfiddle said...

"I had to learn chess terms in order to write this one. Thanks."

wait a minute... You wrote that?

You are a talented gal!

KP said...

Brilliant!!

The Orangutan Opening:

This opening (1.b4), also known as Sokolsky's Opening or Polish Opening, got its name during the New York 1924 tournament, when grandmaster Tartakower visited the Bronx Zoo, encountering Suzan the orangutan. The next day, in the 4th round, Tartakower played 1.b4 against Maroczy.

KP said...

@Shaw BTW, I am really enjoying the Irish literature. Just read the theory that people who ride iron bicycles over rocky roadsteads get their personalities mixed up with the bike's due to exchanged 'mollycules'. According to some, the owner takes on the personality of the bike and the bike becomes more like the homo sapien!

That would explain why I am feeling as flexible as titatnium after I have logged over 135,000 miles on my Litespeed steed since 1999.

Shaw Kenawe said...

LOL! You're reading The Third Policeman! I vaguely remember a passage in that book where someone who's been taken into the police station looks up at the ceiling and sees a map...haven't read it in so long.

The Hard Life is another great one by Flan O'Brien. It'll have you laughing while it breaks your heart.

KP said...

Close! I am reading the comic fantasy "The Dalkey Archive" by the same author. Apparently Flan O'Brien uses the same theory in both books. In one instance the local police decided to 'hang the bike' instead of the man convicted of the crime :-)

O'Brien is entertaining for sure.