Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tía by Penelope Scambly Schott

Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tía
by Penelope Scambly Schott
Rain Mountain Press, 2009
www.rainmountainpress.com
41 pages. US$10

Review by Moira Richards

“During a stormy February and March, I was provided with a mountain, house, and magpies, for which I am most grateful.”

So reads the preface to Under Taos Mountain and, I wonder, what would I do with such a gift?

Penelope Scambly Schott creates a bright reflected/reflective picture of a mountain, a woman, and combative magpie. And she gets herself sucked into a verbal duel with that magpie; a duel in which Magpie always maintains the upper wing – right from the first meeting in which, kindly, ‘Magpie Invites Me’…

            Tía, my Auntie, we live;

            let us fly together
            above this mountain.

                        But the wings of my soul
                        are daubed with mud.

            Then stand in the round oven
            and bake;

            your pin feathers will toughen,
            your wings will strengthen.

… until, at the end of the acquaintance, ‘Magpie Dispatches Me’ and then carelessly invokes the narrator’s ‘Expulsion’ from that house under Taos Mountain:

Magpie flaps at my window:

Tía, it’s time to go home.
You’ve bothered me plenty

and I’m bored with you.

            Magpie, I thought you cared.

Don’t you get sick of caring, Auntie?

            I do, I do.
           That’s why I came here:

            my heart was so crowded
            that my brain was squeezed.

That’s very peculiar anatomy;
no wonder your feathers don’t work.

Magpie’s affect is clear from the quickest of scans down the titles in the chapbook’s content listing… ‘Magpie as my Patron Saint’, ‘Magpie Assaults me on Ash Wednesday’, ‘Magpie on the Afterlife’. Through the poems Magpie emerges not as muse, not as conscience, not as alter-ego but, irresistably, as amalgam of all three…

            Tell me your sins, Tía.
            (I, of course, have none.)

Or perhaps Magpie is just a teasing magpie; the poet leaves the possibilities wide open – and uses her Magpie to invite as much uncomfortable introspection as the cover image suggests.

Magpie variously taunts the poet narrator and here, likens her nest to the writer’s work:

            See how it all connects.  Pull one twig and the nest unravels.

                        My whole life is like that, Magpie.

            Someday you will go back to being a pile of twigs.
            In our dry climate, you will decay slowly.

            Every word you have written on the rough bark
            will remain legible

            for awhile.

            That will be enough.

And other times, when least expected and never for very long, the narrator elicits comfort, soothing words, magical imagery, from the mercurial Magpie;

                        Magpie, why can’t I sleep?

            You write too much, Auntie.
            Let your dreams lie in peace.

            …

Drop your pencil           

            I will rock you back to sleep in a basket
            woven from the tails

            of shooting stars.

So the poems for this chapbook… lots of soul-searching (only by Tía), lots of quarrelling – maybe more intense than terrible – the magpie a formidable verbal opponent and, tantalisingly, there’s no real resolution by the end of the tale – except of, course, Magpie gets to say the last, sly, words.

            That’s why I like you so much, Tía,
            whenever I like you at all.