Margaret Scott 1934-2005

On the Monday morning of last week as I was driving off the Tasman Peninsula taking resident artist Melanie Mowinski to the airport to fly back to the other side of the world (and over hurricane Katrina), our dear Margaret Scott departed as well; aged 71. Not, however, to another world. Her spirit and body will remain here, in and of this earth.

It was only a few months ago that I presented Margaret with her portion of the Windgrove Peace Mandala and officially dubbed her a Windgrove Laureate (by kissing her twice on each marvelous cheek).

On a hillside cemetery near her home yesterday, son Marcus and daughter Sarah met with a Tasman Council officer to discuss her burial. I was present because the family had asked me to design a memorial—something subtle, something subversive—and I wanted to get a feel of where her physical remains would rest for the next long while, undisturbed except by time itself.

The design will come. The task now is to plant thoughts and ideas like seeds into my heart and mind and allow them to do their thing and blossom when ready. Part of this preparation has been to go back through some of Margaret’s books of prose and poetry and re-familarize myself with her work.

Out of these readings I am particularily drawn to this poem Margaret wrote for her beloved second husband Michael Scott when he died:

Elegies M.F.C.S. 1928 -1984

1
At ten to twelve by the grandfather clock
in the hall you stopped breathing in your sleep.
I put down the telephone and came back
to the study door—as I’d come for years
with questions, news and jokes —
meaning, I think, to tell you you were dead,
but the light of the lamp beat down
on the arm and seat of your chair
and the darkness filled with glimmering books
reeled and shook with your absence as though
from the long stroke of a black bell.
The cat was mewing, mewing down in the kitchen
and I went as on ordinary nights to open a door
but this was the first meeting with life
from the new world in which no search
could find you, so I watched wary of strangeness
as the pleased arch of its back wound round
my legs, and it strolled, taking breath for granted,
down the path. There was no wind.
Nothing but garden trees rising against
the glow of Saturday night and the pulse of silence.

2.
Friends who mean to be kind speak of a happy release
and it’s true that in the week before you died
you couldn’t eat or walk, your mind was going.
You spoke of prisons and woke at night from
tormenting dreams of actions for negligence.
Between sips of Sustagen made at three in the
morning you called for documents, gave contrary
directions concerning capital trials and execution.
On the day of your death, your compassionate
philosopher’s face broke in chaotic fragments —
a nose sharp as a fin, a flake of dark moustache,
ulcers, a tooth, a harsh bubbling snore.
But time like your bones collapsed in on itself.
Your waking eyes were blue. You said, ‘Dear love,
dear love’ as tenderly as on that summer night
in the dunes beyond the yacht club.
Holding your hand, I remembered how you sat
by my bed on the day our child was born and,
to take my mind off the pain, gave a most lucid elegant
disquisition on contingent and necessary statements.
The hearing’s over now, the case is lost,
our past locked up beyond the reach of proof.

Margaret Scott (from ‘The Black Swans; published 1988)

portrait photo of Margaret Scott by Alan Moyle for the book ‘Margaret Scott: a little more’