by Sean O'Brien
Sean O’Brien
It Says Here
In Memory of Michael McCarthy
In the end they are not spared. In their turn
everything happens to them. Of any half dozen
one has a secret vice, one an incurable disease,
one a deep faith in God and the rest don’t care
one way or the other. But they see it happen.
Ken Smith, ‘Part of the Crowd that Day’
Contents
It Says Here
I Found My Way
Three Songs
Referendum
If I May
The Settembrini Bulletin
The Party
Diu Nahtegal
An Assignation
Memento Mori
Hyperbole
Archonography
An American Activity
Names
Hammersmith
Little Pig Finnegan
The Trespasser
The Long Field
Cicadas
Your Kind of Town
Scene of
Meet the Monster
Anger
Metro Tunnel
Wood
The Shirt of Nessus
The Golden Age
The Sea-Coast of Bohemia
Blue Afternoons
Comedians
And There You Were
The Rendezvous
Januarius
Note on Hammersmith
Acknowledgements
It Says Here
That the way through the woods runs out in a blizzard.
That the ocean does not, is eternal,
And still for a while you may cross the great ice-dome
By dog-sled, though at your own risk.
That the book you are reading is one of a kind,
That its door opens inwards and cannot be closed.
That the train going over a bridge at night
Has somewhere to get to that even the driver,
Heroic and faceless and bathed in the heat
From the firebox, never discovers.
That the sky is a page where with a flourish
The birds write the truth in invisible ink
And the eye is too slow to be certain
That this word and that word are never to meet,
Or the poem will sicken and die.
That when you glance up from your reading
The rivers divide and divide till at last
You step down at a halt in the woods
With its name painted over,
And there in the evening the bride and the gamekeeper
Wait with their faces averted, wait
For the signal to shift and the lamp to glow red
And a train to arrive, but not yet and not yet.
That though this is August the snow is beginning.
You blink, and the woods are half buried
And the travellers gone, and as for the fire and the rose
That it now seems you set out in search of,
That is a different story, or so it says here.
I Found My Way
I found my way, the worse for drink,
Through petal-storms, the white, the pink.
The place was all significance –
The goddess in the jasmine’s shade,
Sequestered in her green romance,
Arch on arch in deep recession.
Inaudibly the fountains played.
The seasons fled, as England slept
And I could not, a trespasser
On ground I’d owned. What business
Underwrote my being there?
Yet an appointment must be kept.
The roses, hooded for the frost
Like hangmen, saw that I was lost.
And yet this place was all I knew,
While how I came there and for what
Had never troubled me till now:
But now I walked that blessèd plot
Green avenue by avenue
Past royal rose and bergamot,
In residence yet passing through.
So what conclusion should I draw
From this arboreal baroque,
When every way led only here,
Whose silence waited like a clock?
And how should I enquire within
To learn the nature of the sin
For which I was arraigned? And then I saw:
This is the centre of the rose,
An empty sepulchre designed
To quench the tongue and close the mind,
The perfect, heartless, silent o –
She never cares to speak in prose –
Where there is neither stay nor go
Nor any means of saying so.
Three Songs
the memory of rain
falling into the water
the railway runs between
the wooded quarry and the river
high summer in the wood’s throat
black and green, the brazen light
crackling with dryness where
returning only takes you further off
the air too still the pool long drained
and yet time haunts itself
and sees you as a ghost
*
my place that was low hills and marshes
grids of drainage winter floods
and once the story goes a Roman ford
all that was confiscated sown
with salt and caltrops
never had a name to call itself
from the poems of the era
you would learn responsibility
and the laconic scale that might
encompass the catastrophe
cities of brickdust and sewage
migration and the death of names
who cares it is a fact
*
in the soliloquy of Fortinbras
the soldier has most royally
put on his iron eloquence
as though he were a mercenary
in the employment of the facts
in the burning cities breakings on the wheel
burnt books the leisured relish
of annihilation places just like this
that in the scale of things can mean
precisely nothing till the armoured gaze
should pause above them on the map
the index finger point the iron mouth
be understood without the need of speech
Referendum
We posted ballots in absentia –
Three for the Miami Showband –
Due on at eight-thirty
And still sounding grand.
Asked Derry and the Romper Room,
Enniskillen and Omagh
To put the x’s in the boxes
Where all the bodies are.
We recalled the dead
From their state of disorder
And asked them to safeguard
The wide-open border.
Ave and vale
And how do you do?
Ten to a mile
They’re waving us through.
Ten to a mile
They’re waving us through.
If I May
The palace oh the palace and its undeserving opulence
Are not enough for some. There are episodes of stropulence.
A sealed coach slips the silver out in the disguise of night,
And at the torpid bourse the nation’s capital takes flight.
There is talk of revolution, there are whispers of reform,
And anything seems possible except departure from the norm.
The mirrors on the miles and miles of aimless corridor
Are preparing their e
xcuses. They have seen it all before.
M. le Dauphin – how to put this – well, sir, it is late.
The clerks are sneaking off and there are hangmen on the gate:
And at this hour, sir, you choose to sit and masturbate.
The Settembrini Bulletin
for Peter Porter
The creatures with the shears, whom you imagined
Spitting while they wait next door in Hell,
Have access to all areas. They come
As wonks and spads and black ops cybermen,
As keepers of the sweating corridors
With many ports but no way out.
They know our names and what we love.
Though you could not abide him, Dante shows
Damnation as a place of practicality,
Infernally productive – we make pain –
With every moment an eternity
Of manufacturing or services – and even
In the deepest vault, where Lucifer himself
Is nailed up on the wall of ice to weep
His river of unmelting tears, there’s action
Of a sort, if there are witnesses: so cue
The poet and his psychopomp sent down
To do the job in depth and pacify the Muse
With product placement. Work or die?
Then best be doing in the daylight world –
Ergo the wetwork Barbariccias,
The whores and bailiffs helicoptered in
To clean up in between the massacres.
We’ve had enough of experts now, but still
You would have been at home, as though
This were a gallery where slaughter loans itself
To art’s attention – ‘No one seems worried
And the detail’s beautiful’, while out of shot
The leering creatures spit for England but
Since time is money will not stand and wait.
The Party
In the distance there sits the retired volcano
Blowing absent-minded smoke-rings,
Bent to the darkening book of the valley
That tells us its story of panthers and serpents
And roses forever, as if we were children.
Here at the party the beautiful women
Flicker like the long-ago estrellas
de cine, in monochrome Balenciaga,
Almost gone, still smiling on the men
Who will have everything and more,
The horses and the women and the moon
That rises from the dark caldera –
For desire, they will tell you gravely,
Is a duty much like death, its give and take.
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. The murderers
Will raise their scythes to join the carnival
Among the floats and masks and children
Dancing to the lakeshore. There at dusk
A coffin will be launched to bear away
The sins that flesh is heir to, free to drift
Until it beaches on the property of those
Who celebrate so grimly here tonight
The beauty of the women they have killed
And mean to kill, and the secret death of politics –
Which is, we learn, another name for sex,
The shallow graves and cellars where the monsters
Swim in blood to be reborn. And somehow
We are here with them, as if we’ve dreamed
Too long to wake. We ought to go. The horns
Strike up, timbales snap, and the assassins
Take their victims in their arms to make the moves
They’ve known since they were boys and girls.
It is the custom, and for us to vanish now
Would be discourteous. We join the ring
So smoothly we might be professionals.
Diu Nahtegal
Schöne sanc diu Nahtegal
Vogelweide, ‘Unter der Linden’
Schöne sanc diu Nahtegal
In the willow trees at dawn
By the Glienicker See
The blue song inexhaustible
If I could hear so could the Vopos
Nosing in their grim grey boat
Down among the rushes-oh
It was the shore of history
Another lake where legions drown
We told each other with no words
Schöne sanc diu Nahtegal
We told each other with no words
The saturated alphabet
Came flowing to no end at all
Schöne sanc diu Nahtegal
That history is for the birds
An Assignation
I will see you in the white square
Once again beneath the plane trees
By the church of St Eulalie.
It will be the middle of the afternoon
When everyone has disappeared
But you and I approaching secretly
By different streets. My life is
Nothing but this rendezvous, my love,
No past, no afterwards, only the breeze
That fidgets like a horse kept waiting
In that distant corner of the square,
Where I can see you now,
Already seated and expecting no one.
Your dress is blue, your book
Lies open by the empty glass you’ll raise
As if in toast to no one while I pass
And raise in turn my non-existent hat
In token of this infinite commitment.
Farewell, then. Farewell. À demain.
Memento Mori
The old, since they are mad, think all the others mad
And all a good deal older than themselves, though this
Is relative, and most of them are relatives somehow.
Among these old and mad is one convinced by rage
That money knows no owner but herself, and thus
Is in the wrong hands certainly, and must be as it were
Retrieved, with blackmail as the righteous instrument,
According to her old mad lights. Meanwhile
In old mad Hampstead houses and in basement flats
Among the old mad Chelsea bombsites, life goes on
Signifying death in general, while the telephone
Provides a personal inflection when a voice
Adapted for each doomed recipient remarks
Politely: ‘Now remember you must die.’ Can these
Be human voices that awake the old and mad?
The great detective with his weakened heart thinks not.
To say ‘Remember you must die,’ and then ring off
Is not the kind of thing the well-heeled old and mad
Immured in their brown studies at their time of life
Prefer to hear, when there’s still sex or money
To be dwelt on, where a child may visit on his makers
Complex economic loathing, and where all this weighs
Like bags of useless gold upon their injured hearts.
There is a private madhouse where an Irish lawyer
Called O’Brien thinks he’s God. He sees His starry fields
Blaze cold against the velvet black of noon. So he’s all right.
But up in town the slow disintegrating minds
Grind on like almost-immortality, and lights
Switch on and off in random circuits like the stars
Of a capricious heaven, as the servant plots her way
To minted doom, and time is money. Meanwhile death
Is all there is and more. This is a comedy.
Hyperbole
You might think you’re talking about history.
Or politics. You’re talking about poetry.
Likewise with art and love and death or guilt
Or loss – you’re talking poetry. I mean it.
For the world, dear friend, is full of pretexts
And occasions whose disguise
; Is that they look like meanings when in fact –
Need I go on? We’ll say no more about it.
Archonography
Sean Scully: Inset 2
Believe you me, we understand the urge
To rectify. So much is chaos, so much
Mere filler to surround the thrust of things
Across the next horizon. So then, let
The field be unified, each part the whole.
Let ground be figure; figure, ground.
We can foresee – but somehow in reverse –
An empire’s late cartography in this,
Minute and rectilinear, layered on itself
As if to charge and frame a sudden depth
That has no room for cities such as ours,
Nor for the names of those who build
And bring them low. Here geometry
Is God in all but name, and where we stand
And what we stand on must be nothingness,
Which leaves us with the meantime
In the latticework of ‘ordinary life’, to reach
Across the gulf, as though we ever could.
There is an art to this, as absolute
And terrible as politics or music,
And it must be very late, the harmonies
About to shriek themselves apart,
The old simplicities, the muted greens
And browns of pastoral retirement
Long dead but honoured in the parody.
Much more of this and we’ll have neither
History nor grievance, cause nor consolation.
So for a moment you delight us, yet
Whichever dispensation operates,
The corridors by which you came
Lead only here, to this small chamber
Where, when you’ve been shown the instruments,
We put you to the question once again.
An American Activity
For Tamar Yoseloff
As a boy I read the death that Roethke dreamed of:
Running out of road, and then the vehicle stalling
As the windscreen filled with snow.
It stayed with me, that resting-place,
Although in time the car itself became confused
With other wrecks from Dickey and Dave Smith,
Where kudzu coiled like sex among the rusted springs.
Today I find the poem again: now Yeats and Stevens
Look on unamused at Roethke’s borrowed robes.
And yet that piety he carried like insurance
