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It Says Here

Page 2

by Sean O'Brien


  To the snowy ditch, to the cliff at world’s end,

  To the garden men of forty glimpse at dusk

  When opening the icebox for the lonely sake of it,

  Has never lost its hold, although it wasn’t meant for me.

  This is their birthright, lodged like a minié ball

  In a skull at Antietam, a grammar of train-whistles

  Heard across the hills a hundred years

  And more ago, and never headed here.

  No place for me, though I am occupied by listening

  To a music that can scarcely know itself

  And yet meets all occasions: thus they gather at the river,

  They return from foreign wars to ignorance and scorn,

  They take their turns at parenthood, at burying their own

  And at divorce, and – it is evening – come to stand

  And watch a baseball diamond left to elegize

  Stage four of its neglect, between two railroad yards

  While fighting drunks steal bases from their skeletons.

  What competence and what complacency:

  How inextricable the habit that was there

  Before the habits formed, that always knows

  A pathway through the woods and past the fatal creek

  To find the crazy widow’s shotgun shack awaiting

  Immortality. The hidden way is marked at every turn,

  Secure in all the righteousness that makes

  Life look like religion and religion look like them.

  These men who at fifty fall for sophomores,

  These women who will put themselves to death

  In the assault on greatness, cannot be denied

  Their place among the saints. As well exclude the air itself

  Or dam the smoking waters where they flow

  Through burning forests and exhausted plains:

  And why should anyone do that, they’d turn and ask,

  Supposing they were listening. It is the right of all

  To be a headlamp on a northbound train,

  Or, lifting up their hearts unto the hills,

  To sing of death as if it were a clause

  Revoked in secret from the Constitution

  And replaced with other words, like these.

  Names

  Ravenspur, Ravensrodd, Ravenser Odd,

  Salt-heavy bells heard only by God.

  Drink to the lost and the longshore drift:

  When there is nothing the names will be left.

  HAMMERSMITH

  ‘Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.’

  Canto I

  England is finished, not that it matters

  When even the weather is done for,

  When the Boat Race ends though it’s barely begun,

  With a boy from Wisconsin who catches a crab.

  For a moment the eye has him

  Over and gone in the silver-black Thames,

  In the deep shade of Harrods Depository –

  Drowned Palinurus to sleep with the fishes

  And raggedy scuttlers down on the slime-bed,

  And several books later converse with John Snagge

  In the slow fields of Hades by Hammersmith Bridge

  Where Richard Widmark also met his end

  At the climax of Night and the City, that love-song

  To water and terror and death –

  Oh, but the oarsman recovers, though the race is lost

  By a shaming ten lengths, with ill-tempered

  Un-boating appeals to the pitiless umpire,

  An agent of Mercury, surely, by which time

  I’m losing my faith in this annual fiction,

  The same way as Aintree and Wembley

  Can no longer tell me my name when I wander

  From Hammersmith boozer to boozer and stand

  In the jittery shade of the London planes

  At the corner of King Street and Beadon Road

  In 1960 or in 1945 or now, where I tell

  Anybody who knows me and many who don’t:

  I was more or less born here and woke to the sound

  Of a wireless commentary, all England gathered

  In its draughty living room to hear itself

  Made language in the voice of Mordaunt Snagge.

  All lies, as we neither affirm nor deny.

  I was an old believer in that sound

  Before the smell of valves and burning dust

  Gave way to class, the major stench of things.

  Do try to take more water with it, love.

  It used to be all pubs round here

  When my mother would walk out to dances,

  The war lately over and the streets awash

  With the Irish, among them her blue-eyed undoing.

  – Thus Ryan, astray in the four-ale bars

  Sees history invent itself

  Between the blue smoke and the ceiling

  And the pages of the sporting calendars,

  Between one sentence and the next

  When one door closes, then another

  And the girl is gone in a cymbal-crash,

  A nurse, a teacher, left no name

  And the only game is a young man’s game,

  The quickstep and the Palais glide

  And the invitation to step outside.

  And she’ll sit this one out if it’s all the same.

  The world is beginning where it ended,

  With the evening street and the London plane

  Leprous and beautiful, meant for rain.

  If you lose yourself in Parson’s Green

  Then ask Our Lady to intervene

  Blue is the heaven and dark is the sky

  Lady be with us for now we die

  Thus Ryan, in the trap of elegy.

  Nor am I out of it, excepting insofar

  As it became habitual

  After such a promising beginning.

  Off the Irish train at Euston,

  Brilliantined, with mostly original teeth

  And a past that I shall not go into again.

  In the street there is a door

  And past the door the stairs go up

  And up into the dark, up

  To a final room for rent that shows

  A hundred rain-blue roofs and other rooms,

  A park that hurries out of sight –

  The wind at dusk applies the whip –

  And the risen moon presiding from afar.

  Oh loneliness, your name is Hammersmith.

  The river fills again, the barges wake and shift

  On skating blackness. Now would be the time

  To find her coming to the dance

  Among a crowd of other girls, the time to know

  This room, the empty stairs, the empty street,

  The high tide of the gale,

  As an annunciation.

  England is gone, with snoek and the ground-nut scheme,

  With Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps

  And the cold coming of immigrant ships,

  To decline and fall, to a wind of change

  To a world no longer rich and strange

  Where Caliban and Ariel

  Shivered at the sound of the sunset bell

  At Lloyd’s and at Evensong’s white chill

  And the citizen army cobbled its boots

  For the money had long run away down the drain.

  Do you love an apple, do you love a pear,

  Do you love the boy with the curly brown hair

  For it’s still I love him, I can’t deny him

  I’ll be with him wherever he goes

  Canto II

  Once more you emerge in the autumn light

  To find your parents’ London gone

  From the streets where the gasping buses grind on

  To no fixed abode, where is no stay,

  Not known at this address,

  Or never known, or went away,

  Gone where the post
eventually goes,

  With the midnight flit or the number

  Forgotten for want of a pencil just then

  On the dim top landing or under a streetlight

  At closing. In this way their city is lost

  With all the lives they might have led.

  You want to go home. But you have to begin.

  Here now at noon you must empty the Broadway

  Of all but the dead, and set out

  From the unquiet shade of the plane-trees

  As if you must know where you’re going,

  As if you might even belong.

  The world for which the nation fought admits

  No Blacks and no dogs and no Irish,

  And yet you see a room somewhere,

  And still in a cupboard over a sink

  A bottled hint of brilliantine, as might

  Be applied to an evening in prospect.

  Then girls on the edge of the dancefloor

  Settle their cardigans over their shoulders,

  And close their handbags with a snap

  To indicate several places to be

  And not for the good of their health, dear me.

  Now what will it be? Will we wait and see?

  Then the band strikes up and away you go.

  Am I haunting you now? Are you there?

  Away they go under the railway arch

  And into the hinterland, streets behind streets,

  The dead go dancing on silent feet,

  Over the wall into Ravenscourt Park,

  Down frosty pathways and into the dark –

  With a strange resemblance to happiness or

  With a resolution to settle for less,

  As the price of a kiss? Was it for this

  That Ryan discovers himself on these streets,

  Uncertain whether to laugh or cry?

  The big-band silence, the make-do-and-mend

  And the demob suits and the Palais Glide

  And the Mick and his girl from the North Countree?

  The dancers are gone. The bus rolls by.

  Ryan recovers himself on the street

  With a nightmare thirst and aching feet,

  In need of something resembling repose

  And a pint of black to re-enchant

  A world that is always and only prose,

  To offset the fear of what you might find,

  Whatever it is that lies behind

  The heartless song of the District Line

  High over the secret far end of the street,

  That says every verse-end that the here and now

  Is neither here nor there, and that

  If there is life it must happen elsewhere.

  Look now, Ryan, in the A to Z,

  For the nowhere to which your enquiries have led –

  A pub that was fading, then boarded, then sold,

  Too far from the river, too far from the shops,

  An in-between place where the calendar stops,

  A site for a starlet’s final berth

  In a flat whose windows are touched with gold

  When at teatime September is suddenly cold

  On the dim, dusty fringes of Hammersmith.

  Now you have come to the ends of the earth.

  What is there now but the water’s edge?

  The barges shift as the river awakes

  And the painters at work on the green-gold bridge

  Stare down as the black tide tightens its grip.

  Why not let it take you away?

  Here there is nowhere. Here is no stay.

  The streetlights blink and the air-brakes sigh.

  The barmaid knows what the problem is.

  It’s your modus vivendi, she silently says.

  If you lean out to look, it’s easy to slip.

  You sit at the bar that is no longer there,

  As the click of her high heels over the parquet

  Resolves to a quickstep and out of the door

  To a smouldering street at the end of the war.

  Remember now, Ryan, you have an engagement.

  So Ryan reads poems. Who gives a fuck?

  Demented abuse from the not all there,

  A bitter wee Jock with rodent-red hair –

  See Apologia? Don’t even start –

  Makes absolute sense of a dying art.

  It is night now, and autumn, high tide.

  So, Ryan, why at the slightest excuse

  Must you look for a sign? You will fail

  Like your father before you to speak

  The true name of these waters. He left you

  His life, in an all-too exemplary suitcase –

  Poems and politics, no fixed address –

  A suitcase brim-full of the waters of Lethe

  And, for the ulcer, Belladonna, which way

  Madness lay in wait for him, and yet

  You will lower your face to the water,

  And through it, and open your eyes.

  Canto III

  A lifetime upriver, out here on this spindly bridge

  Across the sky-blue Cherwell

  I watch the flat earth mirror heaven

  In the February flood. Can it be that now

  On the brink of old age I may begin?

  The dreaming mind will lose no chance

  To mobilize belief, so why not here

  Among the sunken willows

  And the houseboats moored to nowhere –

  ‘Our lives in infinite preparation’?

  Did you ever

  Take a notion, Ryan asks, to jump in the river and drown?

  I think we’re drowned already.

  Eighty years upriver

  I think of her in a borrowed gown,

  Sneaked in by a friend to hear Tolkien

  Or Lewis – to feel that for an hour she knew

  The place she was intended for until the war.

  Then she walked on Port Meadow

  And over this bridge and around, and she saw

  When she gave back the gown that this

  Must be afterwards, final, that life was denied

  And would have to go on, since anyway

  What can you do, as she’d say, but get on with it?

  Therefore she teaches. Her home is the war.

  At evening she walks by the river, rehearsing her lines

  For the Players. She will be Juno

  While you-know-who will be Joxer. A prophecy.

  The pressure wave had killed them all

  Where they sat at the table, quite unmarked

  And with their evening meal before them

  She tells you the story from time to time

  Till sixty years are gone, and still the family

  Are seated there, as though to contemplate

  A kind of leisure life would not permit

  And death itself cannot remember.

  And although I cannot see their faces,

  Now, as her memory goes, I must

  Believe it for her: the pan of spuds

  Still rippling from the blast, while she

  Has lines to learn, and books to mark,

  An eye to keep on you-know-who.

  She walks by the river to get it by heart.

  The water is her aide-memoire. I dare to think

  It can remember her when she is gone,

  Calm and preoccupied, nose in a book

  Or turned aside to watch the garden grow,

  Beside the water’s roman fleuve –

  A making-sense that makes no sense

  Except in passing, as the teams of oarsmen

  On the calm of their creation glide

  With the insane accomplishment of insects

  Under the bridge and out of sight,

  The wordless urgings of their coaches

  Following, and the river’s reach extending

  Down from Chiswick Mall to the blazing slums

  Behind the docks, and back by dawn.

  A making-sen
se that makes no sense

  Except in passing. I watch as the waters

  Part and rejoin at the Eyot. They are passing

  Away from the world she knew and I am dreaming

  To remember, where the dead sit patiently

  As though a daughter’s late again

  And yet expected, loved, provided for,

  With the wireless dead where history ends

  In the indefinite suspension

  Of fixtures I supposed were England always.

  Learn the script, she says, then mark the books.

  Believe in chalk and talk and human kindness

  Whatever the evidence says. Speak up.

  There’s always work to do among the dead.

  New gaps in the register week after week,

  Times of which she’ll hardly speak,

  Though you know she had only a pencil and chalk

  With which to bring enlightenment

  To forty East End boys who did not think

  They needed saving but in time

  Were all converted, giving her in turn

  The faith in chalk and talk, stern sympathy

  And in the virtue of persistence

  In itself, there being no reward but that.

  She walks by the river and learns her lines

  To spar with you-know-who. A prophecy.

  Canto IV

  Left under the bed in a suitcase

  Flat ephemeral pamphlets of an era

  More remote than Troy or Carthage.

  What shall we wish for, hope for, serve?

  The means of production, comrade.

  And having once secured it, get

  The English out of England finally.

  In case of fire, put on more coal.

  But of course you were hoping for more,

  The real thing all the fuss and smoke

  And misery deserved to be about.

  You go down the slick steps of the well

  To emerge in the dark at low tide

  Where the luminous pages of all his drowned books

  Set out like stepping stones across the mud

  In all directions and in none.

  The ur-text is Mulligan, lost in transit,

  The big one, yes that one, of which survives only

  A rumour of your man’s nocturnal

  Riparian bench-talk, lost between tides

  On the fogbound / the starlit / the frozen /

  The flooded embankment: rumoured aesthetics of Mulligan,

  Small change of Mulligan, dead trousers alleged

  Of said Mulligan, poet of no fixed abode

  Or home team, one soi-disant ‘Mulligan’,

  Apostrophizer of the moon, mud-mutterer

  For whom says Mulligan the state intends

  An utter absence from the lists

 

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