The Last Vision of Angus McKay – poems by doctors

Angus McKay, Queen Victoria’s piper, went insane ‘over study of music’. He was admitted to the Crichton Royal from Bedlam in 1856 when he was 43 years old. ‘His most prominent delusion is that Her Majesty is his wife and that Prince Albert has defrauded him of his rights.’ (Crichton case notes)

Let it be noted (in copperplate), Angus McKay

is a gentleman to watch. The stoutest furniture

is firewood to him; a mattress, within a day,

he’ll disembowel. He has been known

to drink his own urine; to spit, shriek, howl

and hoot like an owl:

though this last

does not appear

in his case notes from Bedlam –

“hooting and howling” in southern parts

being thought not

abnormal for a Scot.

Nevertheless, there is enough on his native ground

to amaze and perplex his keepers.

Fuck it! Angus McKay has done with them all.

He eases himself into the rivercold waters of the Nith

across which lies Kirkconnell Wood

and his freedom. At that moment

(to which the record is blind,

no body being found, never mind

testament forthcoming)

something catches his eye – a sudden flurry and a bird

with two necks intertwined; one black, the other –

bodiless – a shimmering Islay malt brown.

Angus McKay watches, mesmerised

as the cormorant lifts its white-cheeked head

till its brassy twin – the eel – lifting with it,

unwinds like a flailing clef and falls, bit by bit,

into perfect darkness.

This, thinks Angus McKay, is how

the bagpipe has devoured my life.

He lies on his back, drifting downstream,

shadowing the black bag of a bird through flanges of light,

past two gracefully disinterested swans. The eel rages still –

the cormorant’s neck rising and falling

in a helpless hiccup. Up ahead, the bird will calm,

its neck settle again on its shoulders –

but there, the quicksand waits to welcome Angus McKay,

sipping him, limb by limb, into its dark and clammy hold.

That evening, owls will keen – in Gaelic –

from Kirkconnell Wood, where Angus McKay

perches, pale and dripping.

Will a soul never find peace? he asks.

Oh, where has my plump little lover gone –

and what’s become of that shit, Prince Albert?

From Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (Salt, 2008). We have also published two other poems by Tom Pow, The Great Asylums of Scotland (June 2011) and Night watch, 1842 (September 2011). Reproduced with permission from Salt Publishing Limited B Tom Pow.

Chosen by Femi Oyebode.