Collected Poems E-Book

Peter McDonald

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 244

Beschreibung

In the five volumes of poetry he has published since 1989, Peter McDonald explores an intimately known territory that becomes strange: pulled out of shape by history, made unfamiliar by distance, made new by the attentive imagination. McDonald's Collected Poems is a sustained meditation on place and belonging, loss and love. The classical world is a haunting presence; the landscape of McDonald's poems resonates with past voices, with memories and acts of remembrance. The assured and scrupulous craft that creates the telling detail, the unsettling depth, has made him one of the most important Northern Irish writers of his generation.

Leseprobe

PETER McDONALD

Collected Poems

For my children 

Louisa and Samuel

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

BITING THE WAX (1989)

The Dog

Paprika

Ether

Short Story

Some Figures

Cash Positive

Still

Wrong

Galatea

The Twilight Summit

Count Dracula Entertains

Deception

A Gift

Swimmer

First Light

Out of Ireland

Ideal Home

The Signal

The South

Killers

In the Hall of Mirrors

Silent Night

Grace Before Meat

Survivors

China

A Volume of Memoirs is Forthcoming

Mahogany

Still Life

A Prism

Tercets

The Deaf Wars

Totalled

The Hands of Juan Peron

The Green, Grassy Slopes of the Boyne

The Third Day

Sunday in Great Tew

ADAN’S DREAM (1996)

The Situation

Meissen

On a Good Day

Reno

Endtime

Breakfast

Bitter

The Brancusi Room

A Hard Place

The Glen

The Creatures

Peacetime

Five Circumstances

From the Porch

An Eclipse

The Passions

Delaval

On Show

The Glass Harmonica

About Lisbon

The Earthquake

Academic Sentences

1 First Principles

2 Point A

3 Eidolon

4 Walking in the Garden

5 Point B

Adam’s Dream

De Gustibus

The Authorities

A Pause

The Rival

The Dedication

In the Sketchbook

The Aftermath

In His Place

Lines on the Demolition of the Adelphi, 1937

PASTORALS (2004)

Two Trees

The Cup

A Gloss

Visitors

At Castlereagh Church

Pastoral

The Scald

Air and Angels

Work: 1958

Foreknowledge

The Victory Weekend

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Least Harm

A History Channel

The Resurrection of the Soldiers

Two Memorials at Gilnahirk

Spillage

Words for a Poem

The Cloud

August

At Rosses Point

Travellers

The Long Look

The Road to Rome

An Alarm

The Blood-Bruise

Standstill

A Fall

The Conversion

The Risk

The Mild Autumn

Two Spiders

Hush

Seashells

The Full House

Work: 1998

The Stand-Off

The Thread

Damon the Mower

The Way to Lose

Fireworks

Eclogue

The Company

The Proof

The Back Roads

The Watercolourists

THE HOUSE OF CLAY (2007)

San Domenico

The Hand

As Seen

Cetacea

Clearout

The Gnat

Literal

War Diary

The Moth

The Other World

Strongman

Spoils

The Overcoat

A Schoolboy

Windows

Three Rivers

Isis

Lagan

Jordan

The Pattern

Syrian

The Fob-Watch

Against the Fear of Death

Mar Sarkis

In Heaven

The Anniversary

Inventory

Forecast

Flex

The Walk

Quis Separabit

Late Morning

The Pieces

The Street Called Straight

Arithmetic

Vigilantes

Ode

44A

The Bees

Coda

TORCHLIGHT (2011)

The Neighbours

The Weather

Singles

Reversing Around a Corner

Rainbow Ribbons 1980

The Reeds

Green Tea

A Pair of Shoes

Oxford Poetry

The Interruption

Draught

Canopic Jars

1 Lights

2 Liver

3 Intestines

4 [Heart]

Slowest

Portrush

Later

Augury

A Castaway

The Difference

The Harbour

Penalty

Hymn

The Wait

Sappho fr. 58

Country

Riddarsholmskyrkan

Broken

Least

Childhood Memories

1 The Battery Boy

2 1966

3 Souvenir d’Ypres

4 Torchlight

5 Blue Skies

6 Petrol

7 Bits and Pieces

8 The Collar

9 Kenneth

10 Spartans

11 Saturday

12 Tommy

This Earth

The Cheetah

Notes

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

About the Author

Also by Peter McDonald from Carcanet Press

Copyright

BITING THE WAX

1989

The Dog

The dog lay there with one leg missing,

dead apparently, right in front of the door

all morning. We came out to move it,

but a crowd from somewhere catcalled and hissed,

then a stone or two clattered past us, hit

the window, took a chunk out of the wall.

We retreated, and the dog still lay there.

Silence from outside echoed in the hall.

That night, it was dogs barking everywhere,

glass crunching on the road. The TV

spat and flickered for an hour or more

until the pictures stopped, as suddenly

as lights blacked out and the phone died.

We must have fumbled with matches and candles,

for we made out windows shaking, handles

tried on the strong doors. Then voices outside.

The troublemakers wouldn’t show their faces

until the very last, so it was said.

The only time they’ll look you in the eye

(patterns of plaster on the sheepskin rug)

it’s then you’ll know that you’re as good as dead.

Still carpeted, the flat felt like a safe place

most days, although at night the noises started

and the locks got stronger. Now there was the dog.

At last, peace: dawn and a spreading silence,

fires burning out, maybe a car passing

and little else to be heard. By midday

one of us had emerged, and was standing

on a littered path, swiping the flies away.

The dog was there still, and the smell of the dog.

He called back, An accident. In the distance,

a helicopter with one blade missing.

Paprika

Behind them, the radio surges

its way into the conversation.

Early evening, and the noise of Europe

is Babel’s atmospherics,

the sound of dust and headaches.

Rising in the half-dark

they close a window, make coffee,

try to hold down the signal.

Florence this summer. And next

year somewhere new – down

the Rhine, Hungary maybe,

or that tour of Yugoslavia.

The birds are deafening, the radio

white noise by now, and even

the coffee is burning their tongues.

Something terrible is going to happen.

Ether

Those lovers in the attic

who scratch and cry their way

out of each other’s lives

gradually the night through

until at dawn they sleep,

are becoming the soundtrack

for the worst of our bad dreams,

those separate B-movies

where the lumbering, hurt monsters

turn out to be ourselves.

I look inside your lovers’ heads

to where you lie naked,

frozen blue on the soil,

and lurch away in terror

through mist and huge trees,

still hearing the first of your cries,

your moans, and gasps, and silences.

A brute, my hands fumble

from trunk to trunk, as if

the damp wood kept you there.

Kneeling at a rain pool

and about to catch the water,

I can tap your snow-dream

through fathoms of ether:

silence, but for the crack

and groan of ice

further and further north;

some creature’s wounded howl

for a face that shatters

at the drop of one hand.

Short Story

At last there was time to dream again,

or it seemed that way at least:

the sunset had changed only slightly

since yesterday, but it had changed.

The photograph he tried for became

a letter, and the letter became ash

in his own hearth before long,

even before the sun had set.

There was always something else to be caught,

or there would be soon, with luck;

his fire burned like the sun in Florida

where, slightly drunk by now, the last

astronaut alive was still wondering

how to make his way back to the moon.

Some Figures

The clouds were following one another south

and we were following the clouds, as if

that were the reasonable thing to do,

slowly for days, then slowly for a month,

feeling the ice begin to lace our breath

like men who had already come to grief

and were buried now in air and sea-snow.

But pressing on required no special skill:

the nights were full of drink, the days morose

and broody, staring down to a thick sea,

awaiting the time of arbitrary landfall,

then wading ashore in ones and twos, until

we stood, wrapped up like spacemen, close

together, in ourselves a single colony.

I think perhaps we wanted to begin again,

to have another try at that new start,

but the ice and sleet, as we huddled there together,

were making for cohesion, and the pain

involved in staying close seemed less in vain

than that of separation, being torn apart

to strike out freely, far from one another.

And so we stayed, and froze into our places

as snow-sculptures, first with faces half-defined,

then bolder, heavier forms with curious features,

and finally as abstract things, where traces

of figure or line are conjectural, and surfaces

are white and changing, leaving nothing behind

to hold us all accountable as living creatures.

Cash Positive

Two telephones all morning giving each other hell

in the highest office between here and God,

a desk polished black so you can see your face

and a silent screen that flashes messages

across cities, oceans and thousands of miles;

a printer beside it zipping away, murmuring

at intervals all day in different inks:

nobody says much except to the telephones.

I’d start by talking about securities,

though nobody is ever safe, and things

get sticky, dangerous – you might even

pick up something nasty from the keyboard

or the one love of your life, just think of that –

and what reply is there anyway

to the fax’s cruel jibing, its clever This

is the promised land calling, the poor boy on the line?

Still

Clutching his sides at the very mention of the name,

he looks, caught there, as though he might be

preparing either to laugh or to cry his heart out.

Around him most of the others are stony faced,

fixing their gazes on a point some seven feet

from the floor on the one wall that isn’t there.

Only the dark-haired girl is beginning to respond,

raising spread palms, opening her eyes wide

and training them just clear of his left shoulder.

Although there’s no sign of the unexpected guest

inside the frame, he’ll still be around somewhere,

keeping close to the wall, probably, just about here.

Wrong

Even if she had asked him, the blue girl, what

she might say or do just at that moment

or how she could ever ask the right way of things,

even if the music had stopped, or at least

had become softer, then there might have been a chance;

as it was, the spotlights flashed over her cheeks,

over her shoulders and back, the blue of her hair,

the music dropped down on top of her like lead

and down from the ceiling a thousand lethal

bubbles came floating, then confetti and streamers

came down and burned her; everything, even

the lights and the cold were pointing to the same

conclusion, and then of course her colours changed:

even the doorman was seen to wipe a tear

away with the finger of one white glove

as if, with that gesture, he too might bring the house down.

Galatea

Each night when they bring her face to face

with her torturers, when she

and the branding iron come cheek to cheek,

he’s in his box, watching from behind a curtain,

and before retrieving his coat and top hat

from the headless lackey, will have closed

his eyes just as she and the hot iron

kiss, opening them in time for her screams

and the rest of the action, live on stage.

Is he quite sure she felt no pain?

Alone at night in his private chamber

of horrors, locked in with her waxwork double,

he gives his doctor’s hands

the run of her body, smoothing out

blemishes and talking as a lover might do,

allowing himself one classical allusion

as he starts to unbutton Galatea’s dress,

biting the wax, abject, surréaliste.

The Twilight Summit

Imagine the scene:

it’s one of those places in Donegal

where the Volvos never bother to stop,

and this pub’s more of a dance-hall

that’s empty, near enough, all afternoon:

a cave for drinking in,

a cave of making and dreaming,

more real than O’Hagan’s paper-shop

or the road from here to Bundoran.

A pair of hardened raconteurs

are busy finding the words

to measure the distance between them:

each leans and leers towards

a bar where the different ambers

of two pints dwindle, beside them

each a glowing talisman

of Bush or Jameson,

where nation speaks unto nation.

By now, those hoarse, raised voices

are echoing so much

around this blacked-out dance-floor

that neither of them really hears

what it is the other’s saying:

there’s one last lunge and clutch

at a glass, and here comes more,

though nobody knows who’s paying.

Good man yourself, then. Cheers!

Count Dracula Entertains

Unfortunately, it was never simple,

though for years now you’ve been dreaming

of wonderful solutions. Did I scare you?

I have this habit of coming through

just at the wrong time, like other things,

hunger, love, sleep for example.

Forgive the accent: you will understand

what it’s like to be a foreigner abroad

or, for that matter, an alien at home,

where you curse it all, to the last bomb

waiting its moment on some empty road

that stretches out into the back of beyond

– which is my country too, of course,

completely surrounded by one blank sea

we call oblivion, despair.

Maybe one day you could spend some time there:

it’s just the place to write your poetry,

to go to the bad, and then to worse.

Our comforts, I’m afraid, will be few

and simple, but you’ll still have your visions

– a tree of light, then nothing but light –

and I’ll still have my victims every night,

for ours would be the finest of collusions:

the best dreams are of dreams coming true.

Deception

The narrow channel they call Neptune’s Bellows

leads into Whaler’s Bay, a lava beach

where tin cans from the fifties and big bones

are leftovers with few now to disturb them

along the dull fringes of Deception Island.

Mostly the penguins come and go, often

a conclave of fur seals makes an appearance,

and sometimes you can pick out human figures

among the oil tanks and dead furnaces,

like wanderers with nowhere left to go

who wind up here, the last place on God’s earth.

They’ll be scientists, perhaps, or crazy tourists

on a trip from Cape Horn to the South Shetlands,

viewing the litter and the whaling relics

in summer weather. They leave their marks, too:

soft-drink and vodka bottles, petrol cans,

or bold graffiti written out in Spanish,

signatures scattered among the other last things

where a rock by the sea reads Death To Pinochet.

A Gift

The maker of necklaces turns his back

on the latest customer. Before

you go, take this: silver and black,

a string of glass from London,

hand-worked silver, pebbles black to the core.

In the car doing ninety,

England is peaceful, the past

no more than a minute’s sky,

neutral, nothing to do with us.

We stop to the smell of petrol

and hot rubber, home at last.

With my one hand holding a glass,

the other ponders the intricate

weight of your necklace.

For a moment, I hesitate

before I speak, at one almost

with the heat of four black tyres,

the sky, the smell of petrol,

with the customer, and the maker of necklaces.

Swimmer

Stung, twisting in

and out of himself, he

gapes into the current,

swallowing its weight

to drag himself down

towards that continent,

an unmapped green

tortured with voices,

opening up, closing

over him. He can hear

his own voice bubble:

everything is possible

and probable;

for the dreamer, there are

no secrets, no illusions,

no laws. His fish-

eye could let her swim

back into the world,

holding the tiny

pebbles of Valium

safe in her palm.

The writing on her letters

runs, a hard smear

over the roof of light

that splinters, as

he dives upwards,

gasping in the air

of wherever she waits

for a stranger

to come from the water,

into summer heat

and a dull

mirage-shimmer

over the riverbank.

He climbs to a place

where everything is possible

as the sky levels

all its long spaces

to a dream of water.

First Light

Already, on the hills,

men are at work, tending

animals and whistling softly

to themselves. In a field

nearby, two horses

crop the grass lazily.

Elsewhere, coming out

of hiding, the professional

hunters have won again.

They rest in a clearing

and light cigarettes

as blood steams in the sun –

a neutral light

and silence that could yet

fill with music;

the alien sweetness

of nightingales (there has

been talk of violence,

madness); or the swan’s

last aria coming through

from springs high up

where fresh water

will break from rock

when the death-song is over.

About a mile off coast

a single yacht is leaning

into the spray.

Its sails fill

with the whole weight of morning

as it turns away.

Euripides, Phaethon

Out of Ireland

Just how far do you have to go

before you get to the world’s edge?

Today, a hard sun lights the snow

for miles, and deep inside his cage

your tame canary sings and dances,

ignoring winter. He has a voice

and uses it, taking no chances:

he entertains, as though he had a choice.

This summer you’ll be sailing west,

whether the sea is calm or angry,

until you drop. Your bird knows the rest,

he knows he’ll die hungry.

Ideal Home

As soon as you open the front door

on to a deep-pile hall carpet

and harvest-gold walls,

you begin the new life.

In the lounge, you sit

smoking, as your wife

fixes some drinks, maybe cocktails.

Already you’re asking for more.

It’s been like this from the start:

a kitchen that almost runs itself,

the TV, the sleeping video.

In case of emergencies

the basement has enough

food for twenty days,

a purring clock-radio

and an ashtray the shape of a heart.

The Signal

It seemed too long to wait, and the queue, a dozen deep,

barely moved in half an hour, so he took his hat and left,

went to open the glass door to the traffic and the people

in their winter coats and hats, when the man behind him laughed

and he looked and there behind him was another beard and coat

and another and another, and the heavy glass sighed shut,

for the people would not look, and he knew that he’d been caught

when the men came into focus with their faces grey like slate.

But the queue itself was silent, and he wondered whether now

it was time for him to speak, to ring a bell or cry for help,

though he kept his mouth shut all the same, because he knew

that the orders and sub-clauses in his case gave no hope.

No hope for him of moving any further now than back

to the queue of coats and beards, this time to the very end,

and his own face was like slate, and the slate about to break,

and the pieces when they broke would fall away and not be found.

So he stood his ground like Simeon, his beard began to grow

as the rain blattered and blurred the glass world of the door

where no one spoke or moved, and the light stopped coming through

when his silence rose in silence, broke in darkness like a flare.

The South

The story may not be true, of course: that pair

who’d lived too close to an airbase, or seen one

too many documentaries where bombs

exploded a mile over the dome of St Paul’s;

panicked, they hauled an atlas from the shelf

and searched out data on prevailing winds,

on rainfall, tides, and all the likely targets.

They came up with a location far to the south

as the safest place in either hemisphere,

sold up and moved there, having chosen then

(a year before that episode was played)

the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

Each time you hear that easy parable

it changes, gains or loses from the teller,

his sense of detail, or her sense of timing

(of course, a lot depends upon the punchline).

The best response to a story is to cap it

with a better of your own; let’s say the year

you found yourself on ice, much further south,

in the shifting deserts of Antarctica:

the Chilean aeroplane refuses to land,

so here you stay, stuck at a weather station,

listening for the news from the Malvinas,

a thousand miles from here to anywhere.

Killers

You could think of them as hunters,

achieved, professional,

ready for anything.

Their minds are on the job in hand

and their hands are steady.

They’ve gone by now, most likely,

but in the country, one by one,

the birds are falling

out of the sky, into

another shade of green;

just sparrows, thrushes,

nothing exceptional,

at least nothing you’d notice

in this weather, walking

the wet road home

at closing time, until

there are hands on your arm,

light as feathers.

In the Hall of Mirrors

To think that it should come to this,

seeing my own eyes stare me in the face

where the bigger I get the smaller I become,

vice versa, in a flash. Nobody said

anything about this, or what it’s worth

to you, or me, or anyone.

And how many mirrors would they need,

how few could they get away with?

The strip-lights flicker up like nerves

on all the miles of motorway

through the skulls of these giants and dwarfs,

assorted spooks and goons; but why

should my feet be rhyming with my head

on glass, like razor-blades with spoons?

Silent Night

Jersey, 1946

It’s summer now, or nearly. Out at the back door, my sister

shows the children how to feed birds, scattering pieces

of crust into the garden: some sparrows, a couple of starlings

come down and squabble, fly off at the children’s applause.

In the bathroom, I’m weighing myself – another stone – smiling,

hearing my name called, catching the smells from the kitchen.

Those weeks when they came to take my story for the wireless

I had to be coaxed at first; they seemed to be after

more than names, or names and facts; they wanted to know

how it felt then, and sounded, what it tasted and smelled like,

though really it was like nothing, nothing before or since,

which I told them, and they said they understood. But even so.

But even so, as they added, there was a story to be told,

and I was the man to tell it. First, there were questions

and answers, What did you see then? And what were you thinking?

But after a while, the story would come of its own accord

and there were the details they wanted, the smells and the sounds,

memories that never made sense, for once locking into each other.

The first place they took you. At Wilhelmshaven that winter,

when every afternoon repeated the frost of the morning,

and at night there was only hail to cut into the tracks

of their lights, they bundled me with a couple of dozen

newcomers into one of the big ‘huts’, my feet touching

the ground for the first time since the court-martial in Jersey.

How many in this hut? There were nearly a thousand,

crammed three to a bed, head to toe in the bunks and making

barely a sound. Near enough a thousand men. Packed

that tightly, you soon learn to sleep without moving,

and you learn not to speak, to lie still and say nothing

when guards are on hand to force up the value of silence.

It was part of Neuengamme, and I had been brought over

from France with the others – Jean De Frotté, Bernard

Depuy, just to give two names as examples: the first one

tall, wispy-haired and delicate, the son of a Marquis,

then Bernard with his square head screwed down to his shoulders:

they have their stories, still different, still parts of mine.

We had three things to talk about: food, sleep and work,

but no real need to think, for these were all taken care of,

especially the last. Once a day, thin turnip soup

and a crust of bread, a few hours of motionless sleep,

then a hard tramp through frost out to the Kriegsmarine

Arsenal, a day’s work to the punch and clang of the riveters,

avoiding welders’ blue clouds of sparks; sweat and iron;

then our convicts’ shuffle back to the camp in the dark,

their searchlights tailing us and filling in the distance

back to the gates, our hut with its three hundred bunks.

I mentioned guards: there were guards of course, but worse

were the chiefs, one to each hut. Ours was called Omar.

It turned out that he had once, like most of the others,

been a prisoner himself, a young man when they caught him

in 1933, some would-be radical journalist.

He had been through worse in his day, worse beatings,

work, cold, and the rest, and he was in for a lifetime.

Drop by drop, I expect, the fight just bled out of him.

So once the camps were getting busy they made him an offer,

to serve his time as an Alteste in places like Neuengamme

with at least enough freedom there to do as he pleased

and get on with the job. Yes, the words apply, yes brutal,

just like the others, sadistic. And yes, there are stories.

I try to remember my friend Bernard’s straight talking,

‘There’s no point in judging a place like this by the standards

of what we’ve all left behind: it has a code of its own,

a lunatic code, I know, but you just have to learn it.

Lie still and say nothing.’ So what is there for me to say now

about Omar? Just the truth, just what I remember?

But I couldn’t call it the truth then, and now that I tell you

the stories, does that make them all true? Does it make them

happen, happen really for the first time? It’s harder,

watching the sea relax under the first mild summer evening,

and waiting for dinner, too, harder to force those things

to happen again, and here, than just to keep silent, or lie.

Here by the bay, in fact there’s no such thing as silence,

what with the waves breaking all night, and the seabirds

carrying on as usual each day. On the wireless, they tell me,

you can do wonders, but the one thing you can’t get away with

is silence, the fretful noise of empty spaces, the worrying

gaps bare of music or talk, with just the sound of the atmosphere

sifting its way to your room. I can give you two stories

concerning Omar, though whether or not they go well together

I myself couldn’t say. The first happened only a few weeks

after we arrived at the camp: an Alsatian boy of sixteen

had been caught making off with food scraps from the plates

of patients in the Infirmary (though that was no hospital

as you’d understand the word – a dirty and crowded tin hut).

He came up before Omar, who glared, and let his face buckle

in on itself with disgust, producing the worst of his voices

– the fabulous, wicked giant, incredible even to himself –

then thundered down, ‘You, boy, you have committed

the one unforgiveable crime: you’ve gone and stolen

not just from your comrades, but from your sick comrades.

I’ll tell you exactly how you can expect to be punished:

you’re going to learn now all the meaning of hunger,

but you’ll dread the food in your mouth; when you leave here

you’ll be as good as mad, gibbering away in the corner.’

He was perfect: large as life and more monstrous than any

caricature. The boy just cringed and was carried away.

The customary stamping and shouting. Then wet blankets

for him to sleep in, nights on end: they starved him, next

force-fed him salted food, served up on a scalding

hot spoon, day after day, always refusing him water.

By the time they lost interest, he looked like a skeleton;

unable to eat for the burns on his mouth, on his lips and tongue,

he would scream at the sight of a spoon. He didn’t last long,

at the end gibbering, as promised. Now I can barely imagine

such things happening at all, but they did, they do still

I suppose, in places far removed from this island,

real horrors, more common knowledge now than before

and more than just hearsay: newsreels, words on the air.

Of course, there’s a second vignette: the very same Omar

– who was, he would tell you, cultured; had been a classical

musician in his time; still a diehard lover of Mozart –

in 1944, at Christmas, he laid on something special.

Picture a great hut that has been cleared for the purpose,

with benches there now and a stage, the audience silent

(though you wouldn’t mistake that for hushed expectation,

since it’s clearly enough the schooled silence of fear),

and then you make out a tree just to the right of the stage,

a piano likewise, the feeling of something about to begin.

Suddenly Omar, and six of the other Altesten

troop out like schoolboys, with their heavy, straight faces,

and this is a carol service, these fat men are the carollers:

if you listen, you can pick up Omar’s gentle booming

among all the voices. It happens that I was arrested

for ‘communal listening’; it might be played for the wireless,

but no actor could reproduce the sound of this memory,

such music in the hungry air, Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.

On clear evenings, those rocks on the near side of the bay

are a circle of broken teeth, soon blotted out by the tide.

I listen to birds roosting for miles along the coast,

then there’s just the sea noise, and the evening programmes,

the news, good and bad, the music of Victor Sylvester,

the Epilogue, the King; whisper and fizz from the atmosphere.

People are calling me in now: I’ll laugh with the children

over this story or that, sometimes catch myself thinking