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It Says Here

Page 3

by Sean O'Brien


  By confiscation of the name itself:

  No Mulligan here, ergo

  Un-Mulligan: bear in mind also

  That firstly others will decide who

  May be called Anonymous, and secondly

  It won’t be you, for yea the very imprint

  Of the planking of this handsome bench

  Upon the non-existent arse of nobody

  Who never sat on this embankment

  Shall herewith be effaced by governmental magic.

  It’s Mulligan never: it’s Mulligan not: it’s no Mulligan here.

  And if still a voice will almost surface

  From the candid foolscap put away

  In the suitcase for later, the lifetime of later,

  Have suitcase will travel, will slowly unravel

  And at last go mad that way, it is only

  The ill-starred prodigious inaudible Mulligan,

  Derelict, dead in the water, a drifter

  Asking to be scuttled, set ablaze, struck off

  At Lloyd’s and the Vatican, by National Insurance

  And even for good brutal measure, God knows,

  By the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.

  Begun and re-begun, a paper cell of theological

  Devising, where he must re-enter and re-enter

  Under the gaze of the Black and Tan sergeant

  Who is there to meet him always

  When he looks up from the page and back

  And finds it still unwritten and the sergeant

  With his ‘teeth like washing-boards’,

  Attentive at the spyhole of the cage.

  Imagine me, the sergeant says, imagine me

  You fucking taig. Imagine that.

  Canto V

  Beneath the East River, there lie in wait

  Tunnels, ladders, hatches and the friend

  Whose legs were amputated by a train.

  You told me once you were deported,

  But never how these elements combine.

  So long now among the anecdotes, like you

  I find the facts are neither here nor there –

  The child in love with maps and lithographs

  Finds everywhere a match for appetite:

  But though it’s infinite beneath the lamp,

  As memory the world sails out of sight –

  And nor am I, if I can see the worklights,

  Scaffolding knee-deep in water, the mise-en-abîme

  Where girders sweat, and any second now

  A disaster site or the scene of a crime you may

  Only just have departed. Or dreamed, like me,

  The second son you thought you’d never have,

  To whom you lent the name you gave the first.

  There is a darkness in your mind that means

  You cannot read a novel for yourself

  And dare not care for music. It’s as though

  You came into the world with barely half a kit,

  Or else are one who lost a life elsewhere

  And cannot make it home [again]. I see you

  Passing down the tunnel like a ghost

  Who cannot find his level of damnation.

  – Then nothing, and the friend is never named

  And you can never quite be placed, although

  You surface briefly in Southampton

  Like a rumour spread by rumour,

  As if you were a story, with a plot

  Or even understanding to impart.

  Lately I’ve been watching Ocean Terminal

  And a page of Baudelaire appears

  On a desk in a shipping office, magnified

  By oceanic lenses, words themselves

  Alone, transported from the world alone,

  And now, among the long-dead reefs of paper

  In this room that turns to nowhere, I can read

  A version of that language still,

  Inert with promise, as at last, for all

  The lies and geography, we proved to be.

  The child in love with maps and lithographs

  Finds everywhere a match for appetite:

  But though it’s infinite beneath the lamp,

  As memory the world sails out of sight.

  One morning we embark. The mind ablaze,

  The heart blown up with rancour and disease,

  We set out with the rhythm of the tide,

  Infinitude adrift on finite seas.

  Some do it to escape the hated State;

  Some flee the horrors of indoors, and some –

  Stargazers blinded by a woman’s stare –

  Outrun the lure of Circean perfume,

  And rather than be beasts consign themselves

  To space and light and skies of molten brass,

  Where biting cold and heat that roasts them black

  Will slowly mask the imprint of her kiss.

  But the authentic travellers are those

  Who, light as balloons, take off and never give

  Consideration to the claims of fate

  And, never asking why, demand to live.

  Such men’s desires map themselves in clouds.

  They dream the way a squaddie dreams a gun,

  Of unknown pleasures, protean and vast,

  Out where the writ of language cannot run.

  Canto VI

  The river in her low-tide ruination,

  Ramparts of mud with oozy slakes

  To feed the trench. Something is done with,

  Mulligan says, so make your peace

  With the impedimenta, moon and bridge

  And whatever is the past or not. You need

  A sense of occasion to suit the low

  Admonitory brass that follows Gustav Holst

  On his perambulations through the night,

  While Mulligan goes widdershins –

  How it takes in the faintest curdled merriment –

  Mechanicals with walk-ons, at the dancing, at the bar,

  Embracing the far end of night when they can sense

  The waters quicken in the river’s mouth

  And actions having consequences: so.

  They treat the river as themselves,

  Unknowable and intimate, at hand yet out of reach.

  Respect them in their ragged tableau vivant:

  They build the city; they damn it, dream it, call it theirs

  And walk the streets without a by-your-leave

  And give it people. All you are is here,

  Just out of reach, inaudible, the sound of frost

  Among the cobblestones, as the darkness

  Passes over the secret night-water,

  A poster in a workshop underneath the railway

  For a play, a dance, a palais of varieties.

  – Now will that do you? Night and the city,

  The music you have to imagine. My failure

  Like my lousy teeth I leave to you

  In perpetuity, if I could just pronounce it.

  And oh important documents. Imagined futures

  Obsolete avant la rêve. This poem

  I stand accused of almost having written –

  Left luggage at a station no one mentions nowadays.

  And where the photographs and letters ought to be,

  An emptiness that smells of brilliantine.

  The living think there’s something owed to them:

  It’s what they have in common with the dead.

  A night bus slows on the bridge chicane.

  The dozing riders stare out at themselves

  Against the dark. The trench is filling silently.

  They’ll come for me, the dead watch, out from trees

  And lamp-posts, tireless, at walking pace.

  You will not save me then, or understand

  The nature of my torment, since my past

  Does not exist. This is not solitude but something worse.

  Better I were indigent and drowned

  Beneath the bridge, my son, th
an you should find

  My bare convictions wanting as the rest have done.

  Your fate, like mine, is to imagine otherwise.

  It is not solitude but something worse, to know

  That men are only wolves and devils

  And I am somehow of their party.

  Look in the suitcase. Take up and flick through

  A flat ephemeral pamphlet,

  Wishful as a tooth beneath a pillow. Socialism

  Proved too good for us. It asked too much.

  The revolutionary’s Olivetti

  Lies beneath its crust of fag-ash

  Like a relic of Pompeii.

  This is not solitude but something worse.

  Carbon paper always looks

  Pre-emptively incinerated, and held

  One moment burns the hand.

  I look over his shoulder as he types:

  Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down.

  One story and one story only,

  The mad priest / traveller / deserter

  Gone to ground in the deserted village

  To discover he was Satan all along. Two pages

  On a good day. Finish it, my mother says,

  Not looking up from where she marks

  A thousand scripts while smoking, knitting,

  Re-reading The Daughter of Time.

  Other days a single sentence

  Made, re-made, abandoned while the freezing fog

  Descends and we are once more back

  In the romantic cul-de-sac

  Designed to suit a firing squad

  And not to house a lightning-rod.

  Thesis, antithesis, months of labour

  In the History Room with fake stained-glass

  And panelling, and heads of Silenus

  Carved into the fireplace, and the smoke

  From all those Player’s Plain

  A blue heaven where the lightning brewed.

  But poems, what poems? Never a one.

  This is not solitude but something worse.

  Expelled from every diary and archive

  As from the barest anecdote, the exile

  Left no place to lose or wish for lingers

  As an absence, less than shadow, on the fringe

  Of doctored photographs that prove

  The exigencies of the day exceeded

  The technology: so there he’s not, and yet

  As blatant as the mastermind’s cheroot

  Self-smoking in the ashtray when the panel

  In the fireplace closes silently while an entire

  Continent of tunnels floods with sand

  To make from mere evasiveness a myth

  That we will never hear about. Such vast

  Machinery should serve the supernatural,

  Should be the adamantine ampersand

  That binds the merely human to the gods.

  Says Ryan, but all you leave me are these streets

  You might have walked, as if they’re evidence

  Of how it was to try and fail at politics

  And poetry and love and in the end

  Become a dead man walking, followed

  By the dead police who tracked you down

  From false address to false address,

  To destitution and beyond,

  And when you turned to take them on, became

  Mere London planes and lamp-posts once again,

  Then crowded in the bathroom mirror,

  Fingers to their lips, your gaolers once again.

  There was nowhere to go, so there you went.

  Again I was come back he went, you liked to say,

  As if this too were secret

  What mere economy could save you then,

  Again I was come back he had went, you liked to say,

  The glass in which I will not find you

  Now or ever?

  Canto VII

  Remember this? No? Look again.

  This is the only place you’ve ever been.

  Drowned in the mirror of the dim afternoon,

  In the irreparable betweentimes, bookies vanished

  And the mind dried out with waiting, this is the life.

  The patient failures glance up intermittently:

  If nothing else, a drinker may catch his own eye

  And return the slightest nod, as a conspirator

  Might look back from the screen

  Into this dappled sunken light-and-bitter bar

  That never closes if your face is known, the place

  The meantime goes to die. The slightest nod.

  The barmaid looks up from her Photoplay. A death occurs.

  When they run for the boats in The Red Berets

  My half-imaginary cousin Patric Doonan meets his end

  As Flash, a cheery cockney keen on skirt.

  He turns to give covering fire. He falls

  And Alan Ladd and Leo Genn and Harry Andrews

  Live to jump another day and never mention Flash again.

  He climbs from an unmarked grave to take his wage

  And drink away the afternoons, perhaps to coincide

  With Joxer on the lash, but finds himself at last

  Uncredited in 1958 in Chelsea with a choice

  Of bigamy or death and switches on the gas.

  An underrated piece of realism, before its time

  And thus too late. He is not spoken of.

  Death is scarcely a rumour in here. Death is nobody’s business,

  A different class of a thing in a different district,

  Far scream of a siren, scream of a train,

  A single line of monorhyme.

  See, no one in here is a part of the main.

  No one in here is in here at all excepting

  Those the afternoon has made immortal.

  Time pauses to consider and forgets

  What it came for, and one of the sleepwalkers

  Raises the piano lid to strike a sour note.

  What d’you think you’re playing at? the barmaid snaps.

  Who are you then? Hoagy Carmichael?

  Now there’s Uncle Jack on the back of a lorry

  Delivering a tonic to the troops. He was among the first

  To enter Belsen and did not recover. His piano

  Haunts successive rooms, his widow’s pre-fab

  And his daughter’s house, for neither wants

  To let it go. By night you hear how it rehearses

  In the silence of discretion, like a pianola

  With its paper tongue cut out. The aunts

  Do not approve of history: one day you see

  Their own grandparents’ trunk from Mafeking

  And then you don’t. Oh it was full of worm.

  You wouldn’t want to keep a thing like that –

  It’s like that damn piano, always there

  And in the way. Out of the grave their father

  Rises to his work, and he is not what you were told,

  A porter at the hospital, but rather an attendant

  At the workhouse. Thus the poor corral the poor.

  There is a power that invests us with the longing

  To forbid. It is the grey attention in the air

  Of rented passageways, door after door,

  Next flight, half-landing, skylight, blue-black heaven

  Where the moon makes clear

  That it can promise nothing.

  Dare say. Very likely. No nothing at present.

  No place like home since home is nowhere.

  Yet you rise from the grave of yourself

  To this long afternoon in the four-ale hell

  Which admits no before and no after

  ‘And where he must re-enter and re-enter,’

  A private cinema of thirst and failure

  With the same thing always showing,

  Real as you and her yet quite untouchable.

  The hand that you extend will pass

  Into the mirror where the congress of accusers


  With their teeth like washing-boards

  Is assembled in the flooded cellar

  So that you may reach the truth together

  In the cause of épuration. Are you true?

  A girl and a gun is the rule

  And comrade you have neither. So as it were

  Naked I / you entered the conference chamber.

  That was a close one. A blast from the past

  That raised a stench of gas and sewage

  In the deserted street where you stand

  Blinking in the chilly teatime sunset,

  One of those creeks of London silence

  By the water’s edge. Now let the dark assurance

  Carry you away once more. Come home with me.

  Come down the water-stairs and come aboard. The waters

  Braid and shudder, braid and shiver, parting at the pillars of the bridge.

  Canto VIII

  Eighty years upstream from Hammersmith

  On the edge of a nondescript field

  That shades off into birch and hawthorn –

  Never mind groves: this is barely a place –

  There in the hummocks of winter-white grass

  (I see what is not there or anywhere)

  There lies a mouth forever opening

  To discharge a stream of language wedded

  To the slur and swallow of the water, in a tongue

  As limpid as the speech of nightingales

  And silent as the grave’s aphasia. Listen

  And you almost hear it almost speak.

  The fault is yours as much as any

  Saturnine conjunction of the stars.

  You leaned your back against that door

  And fell straight down the cellar stairs

  Into the pool of darkness standing there,

  Illimitably patient in its cave.

  And when you climbed back dripping to the light

  You couldn’t spit it out, just what it was

  That you imagined you were playing at.

  Since when the daylight swells and wavers.

  Dust-motes in a shaft of sunlight hang

  Suspended like the chalk that never settles

  In the glass you raise and raise until you choke,

  That cannot quench your lack but deepens it

  With every swallow. Drowned already.

  Who are you to raise the dead, require

  The truth of them or make lachrimae rerum

  Run dry? Or like Procrustes fit them

  To a history they could not know was taking place

  There on the wireless, there on the bus,

  There when a woman took time to powder her face

  And arrive at a separate peace.

  These people have a right to leave

  The faintest outline on the air and die.

  Turn a deaf corner and the buses blare

 

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