by Sean O'Brien
I get to exercise a choice and finally be overwhelmed
By my inheritance: so now the inexhaustible despair,
The whispers and the screams are mine. By day these lunatics
Are deadpan though dry-mouthed with rage. By night
They break new ground in the monotony of pain. But thank you
For advancing me this wisdom, which on second glance
Appears to be a debt that cannot be repaid, while I no longer
Occupy my body only, but a corner of this airless room
You’ve locked me in to celebrate the old religion too –
Its vinegar and loathing. Plenitude. So what’s wrong now? I ask.
It’s always you, you, you, you say. Why is that? Tell me. Tell me.
Metro Tunnel
Try not to get carried away when you enter
The foot-tunnel under the tracks. It’s flooded
And full of weird shite – novels and jogging pants,
Tricycles, popsicles, animal bones
And breathless utterances addressed to brick.
You can see what might arise – there’s murder, yes,
But also the attempt to make this ruined temple
Give up its secrets, any secret. So, unwary
And down here by accident, it could be
Agonizing to suppose this Untergang
Merely exemplifies thousands, with only
Minor local variations in the range of
Fetishes and discards on display: a plimsoll
And a ra-ra skirt are interchangeable; the cover
Of Dusty in Memphis in this dispensation belongs
Here beside Max Bygraves’ later work, as no one
But a headcase could deny. Remember
How at all times we must bear in mind
That this is not the preface but the end.
New evidence will not have come to light. It’s not
An opportunity for reconsideration.
Here among these sacred objects God is not
A detail or a faint aroma. He’s just not.
Wood
But I moot been in prison thurgh Saturne,
And eke thurgh Juno, jalous and eek wood
There are no markers in the woods, the woods themselves
So old, so long sold off into disuse that what appears
To be a woodpile is a drift of fallen birches turning
On the air’s slow tide, through which the tide’s slow air
Is playing on repeat. This is the wood of the mad
Where under Saturn Palamon would ride,
With its limited palette, grey, brown, grey, grey-white,
Furnished like a secondary hell, its watercourses
Thick with time and halting altogether as they reach
The old sluice at the boundary where all this ends.
The path curves back towards the core, the wood’s heart
Neither beating nor unbroken, when the air will pause,
Release itself across the dead white leaves
And having taken stock, be nowhere.
The Shirt of Nessus
He exits through the kitchen
Seeing no one, to the woods of boyhood
Where he means to blow his brains out.
This is in July. Among the trees
They have anticipated his intention.
He is relieved of his possessions
But will keep the Shirt of Nessus.
He writes letters to his wife,
And to his son in the inferno
That approaches from the east,
Then last his old professor, now retired
To a lake where he is watching
Barges dumping gold. The old man sends
His manservant and housekeeper
Away with thanks and blessings.
The prisoner sees this, sees all
The failures of the slow conspiracy.
Soon tanks will cross the Vistula.
He must write his other testament
On the insides of his eyelids,
Hoping that his eyes survive him
When his body is unearthed
Inside the prison yard by those
Who come a day, an hour too late,
But see smoke rising from the earth.
It may be so. And then
One autumn day he wakes inside
A state he cannot name, of knowing
Every scratch upon the iron door,
And all the names from which
The screams that rise all hours
From the sweat-soaked underworld
Have been detached. It smells,
He smells, of burning now.
The shirt of Nessus swarms
With self-consuming roses.
Yes, he writes, although his hands
Resemble candlewax that drips
To seal the page before his book
Is done, I think there is
Another place where we might live,
Beyond the lime-pits in the baking fields
Train after train is passing through
Ablaze and bound for nowhere.
And yet, he adds, black roses
Coiling from his eyes, to wait
Among the rags of time, and to lament,
Must be the only consolation.
The Golden Age
In the unselfconscious kingdom
Where vegetables vastly loved
Because that’s what they’re for –
It was the wish of the divine
That fig and cucumber entwine –
There was a gate, but nobody alas
Has found it since we found the means
To speak of gates, and love, and war.
That enviable greenness can’t survive
The mind’s eye where we treasure it
As evidence of how to live
Or might have lived, before.
The tempter comes to whisper
Measure it: to each his own,
To each her long submission
To the greater cause. My, how we’ve grown.
The Sea-Coast of Bohemia
From the distempered hallway you would hear
The alcoholic painter cursing overhead
That Clement Greenberg had him by the balls.
The girls all disappeared, except the proto-Goth
Who wouldn’t play but hung her stockings on a line
Out back – pour épater your man, he would confide.
With all that the jism steaming of an afternoon,
And green infected sputum raining down,
Dispensed by the musicians up beneath the roof
Awaiting news of what to borrow next,
Was there enough to constitute a scene?
The time the horse went back upstairs and stopped
And shat outside the painter’s door, it seemed
The building would collapse, as was foretold
The night that lavatory fell through the bathroom floor
With someone’s pregnant girlfriend sat there skinning up.
Was this the boue they sought to be nostalgic for?
Or maybe just another in-between, a place to smoke
And drink and fuck and sulk until the signal changed
And carried them still further down the drain,
To Goole and Crowle and Bawtry where in God’s name
Surely no one could be meant to live. All gone.
Except the painter who would die in bondage
To his art by courtesy of Buckfast, and the Goth
Who had a choice – découpage, or the fetish clubs
Down by the docks – and plumped for neither,
Waiting out the days before her broken mirror,
Wishing she was young and sinister again.
Blue Afternoons
i.m. Menno Wigman
Those were the afternoons. We let them go to waste.
To do so in a dim blue fog of Number 6 and Afgh
an Black
Seemed like a blow for freedom, so we struck it, smoked
And went on sitting there long after dark with three LPs
And a packet of skins with the cover torn off,
With aspirations and bronchitis, crablice and a chronic
Inability to put the empties on the step six feet away.
We worked with what there was to hand, so while the world
Lay all before us we could never find a use for it.
Then, later on, we died, three streets from where we sat,
The wrong side of the Hull with all the bridges burnt
And the survivors far too short of energy themselves
To stand and reminisce outside the crematorium
Or scatter us, though the scattering of ashes was an art
We’d all perfected privately, reclining long ago
On mangy sofas while the record jumped and no one could be
Arsed to deal with it. Those were the days. They really were.
Comedians
In memory of Mathew Sweeney
‘We were no good as murderers. We were clowns.’
James Simmons
It was our last engagement in Berlin.
Once more as if by magic we stepped out
Through the curtains of Nebel und Nacht
To do our stuff and parley with the guard
On the gate at the British Army hotel
At which by some appalling stroke
Of dark absurdity we had been booked.
We stood there in our long black coats
And homburgs, with matching black holdalls.
The squaddie unshouldered his weapon
And rang in to summon assistance. So,
Should we read him a poem? Or do one
Back into the darkness? We waited,
Since waiting was what we did best.
We had out-bored a hundred terminals,
Born to the trade, man and boy, man and boy,
And as with Mike and Bernie you might ask:
So which one is meant to be funny?
Either, neither, both. We’d died a death
In halls from Magdeburg to Spandau
But our timing was uncanny, coming on
Like this and in this of all places,
Just as they winched the iron down for good
And closed the palace of varieties. At last
A sergeant came, a regular humourless
UnFalstaffian man, who could not tell
Which side if any we were on. For an age
He examined the passports, one red, one green,
Of Estragon Goldberg and Vladimir McCann.
For all I know we may be waiting still.
And There You Were
The streets were full of fallen leaves, the clocks were going back.
I was early for something, half-reading the paper,
The bar behind Euston packed out with the young after work.
I admired their laconic assignations.
I was not young. Nor, certainly, could you have been,
But before it could even seem strange, there you were.
The woman, a blonde, was charmed and ceasing to be watchful.
You were mid-anecdote, mid-apothegm, mid-joke, midway
To somewhere, neither old nor young but like yourself.
So, glancing up from time to time, you admired
The barmaid who had pinned her black hair up,
Admired shyly and in awe the white nape of her neck –
Which I’d heard you several times declare
The most beautiful thing about women.
And if your companion noticed, as surely she must have,
She seemed not to mind, having instantly come to accept
That being generous to a fault you must be shared.
Then as the bar emptied, long after I ought to have left,
You stayed on, confirming a purpose –
This and not some other place would be your destination
For the moment. And of course you didn’t see me.
The tube-lines spread beneath your feet, the glasses
With a faint vibration went on sitting on their pools
Along the bar. That night the world was still in love with you
And had to claim you back again, since you were dead,
As I well knew, and your companion was there
For someone else, or never there at all,
But when you vanished and I made to leave
You lingered in the mirror for an eye-blink,
And again you didn’t see me, but pausing where you stood
Gazed out into the future to beguile it, and there seemed
No doubt the future would require
Your presence as a charm against the dark.
The Rendezvous
I missed our rendezvous, James Wright, of course I did.
I was asleep, if you can call it sleep,
In a roomette bunk with North Dakota howling past.
I missed the snow-swept freight-yards
Where the northern railroads meet in one great chord
At Fargo, which you feared and loathed,
A city nowadays known if at all
For Steve Buscemi’s booted leg
Protruding from the chipper into which
Peter Stormare has already fed the rest of him.
I won’t debate you is Buscemi’s final line. You said
You feared the War between the States
Made everyone secede from everyone:
Now multitudes within the multitude
Who have to live like things have learned to hate
All those with whom they share the gift of suffering.
And as I say, I missed the rendezvous,
But in the dream’s eye I could see you
Strike a match against the engine’s iron hide –
Show an affirming flame, as someone said,
And in that fearful blizzard.
But both of us were too far gone
And then the train swung southwards
Into Minnesota, and though it cried all night
It went unheard at William Duffy’s farm
Where snow was burying the horses
And their treasury of dung.
Charlene the stern attendant woke us
Thirty minutes out from Minneapolis St Paul,
Twin cities which you knew as Hell
Through all those winters lost in Dinkytown
Among the legendary drunks.
When they denied you tenure finally
You lived with three shirts and one shoe,
A borrowed suitcase stuffed with symphonies
And a glass that concealed an invisible hole.
You broke new ground in being so far indisposed
That even Berryman was fit to deputize.
Down there in Hell the black Ohio
Secretly consumed the Mississippi
Every freezing night, and you alone could see
The blessed company of miners and their angel-whores
Who gathered on the burning shore to sing
The hymn they learned in grade school
Which was all that they possessed.
At journey’s end I looked for you
At Union Depot, down the empty halls,
And in the bars and slaughter-yards
Above the river, and in the faces of the derelicts
Outside the library built by James J. Hill –
The very day they shut it down
And all the knowledge had to die. No luck,
And I am sorry I was late again
Though maybe what you had to share in sum
Was fear and solitude, which I have always known,
And anyway, as you were anxious to affirm,
The best is yet to come. Drink up.
Januarius
The two-faced god of gates and entrance-ways
Turns only one in your direction.
He has other tasks
Requiring his disdain. He’s never heard of you
And if there were a list your name would not be on it.
So you won’t be going out. And anyway, where to?
You turn aside to find the gnomon risen halfway
From its clock of icy brass, as though the sword
That ought to save the nation is stuck fast,
With no explanatory literature to hand
But what you scrape like hard frost from a windscreen,
While the globe the sundial represents as flat
Has turned from verb to noun, from wintering to winter,
And will turn no longer. This must be the end –
The fixed stars glitter and Orion on his frieze of night
Is polishing his blade, aloof, peremptory
In his immobile progress down the darkened corridor
From ‘nowhere into nowhere’, with his cloak of ice
Flung out behind him like a comet’s trail.
This can’t be happening. It’s not: but we were not designed
For stories with no deeds or conversation. Januarius,
Take pity. Tell us anything. A sad tale’s best for winter.
Note on Hammersmith
In recent years a great many people have begun to investigate their family histories with the help of specialist websites and convenient software. Among the reasons for this are understandable curiosity, the desire to establish some facts, and the need to test the veracity of stories handed down. Ancestors underwrite our existence (so we assume, or hope) in a way we cannot quite do for ourselves. This seems more important as we grow older, although we risk dispelling some of the more romantic and agreeable tales and impressions that have come down to us. A couple of members of my own family are at work on genealogical projects of this kind, finding their way back to the soldiers of the Crimean War, or to Methodist missionaries working in the Pacific. I’m interested in what they discover, and in their absorption in it, but not in undertaking such investigations myself. So in one way it might seem odd to be writing a poem such as Hammersmith, which appears to depend on family history in order to exist.
Robert Lowell asked, ‘Why not say what happened?’ Good question. But Hammersmith is to a significant degree a work of the imagination. It’s informed by things my parents told me about life in London in wartime and the early post-war years, and prompted by my memories, by walking about, by reading and film, but it makes no claims to documentary accuracy. It bears more resemblance to a dream than a factual record; its task is to evoke rather than substantiate. Even if I wanted to write a chronicle I would be unable to do so, because my information is limited. There is a great deal I wasn’t told or didn’t ask about, and much of it is a material not encompassed by libraries or archives, things known only to those who were there at the time, almost all of whom are dead now. For the purposes of the imagination, I find that reconstruction does not fit the bill.
