by Nick Laird
meant for this, meant to slide electrons of the universe
about their electronic grid, are us. If I try to see it, I see it
as a version of one of those gridded puzzles with a piece
missing, where you move a piece up and across and down,
and so on, to try to make a picture, but in this case
there is no picture to aim for, and the puzzle is at least 3D.
The puzzle itself is the picture, you are the gap, an instance
of peckishness or nausea or flames or lilies or bathwater.
Also quickened with touches of transporting grief and love.
I hold mine out now in front as a black single-breasted suit
I inspect to check that it is suitable for wearing to the funeral.
I am slapping dust from its shoulders. If we’re so suspicious
of meaning, Dragos, that’s because meaning has, historically,
had very hard edges. The point remains however: it is to be
the other, not to reiterate how I am not you, and never can be.
I know that already. But I get up in the morning and break
fast. I am still burning toast. I am taken with the possibilities
of radical formal shifts and tonal ambiguities. And I require
ceremony to practice ending properly. I know if you made me
dwell on it long enough I could feel bad about the death
of that clothes moth that just fluttered out from the suitbag.
Autocomplete
I expect the holy of holies must be
to watch machinery making machinery,
no? Begin with the others and do what they do,
and later you can branch off into the fresh
snow. Did you think the room smelt of not
having been smoked in? Or that her face
was the gate of a pool after closing? The wax seal
began as a personal stamp of authenticity
before it grew into a tool the administrators
used to represent you. Freehold of the soul
meant setting up the product line across all
the different platforms, and what I would like
to do is swim in you, it’s true, and I would add
that you are free to look me in the eyes when I do
so
The Vehicle and the Tenor
When it comes at me in the mirror with its meaning
ramping up until it passes and lowers in pitch, I’m on
the bit of the M1 where it bisects the Ring of Gullion
and I switch lanes, and let my right foot alleviate
its weight on the accelerator of the Focus,
and the ambulance is faster, and the shift in its report
an effect of the change in the wave’s frequency
and length on the observer, who is, in this case, me,
heading up to Newry hospice off the red-eye, and I
lag and have to have the window down for brisk air.
If the grief moves in towards me at high speed,
the wavelengths I observe are decreased as the frequency
increases. I don’t know what this means though
I can tell you how it feels: in the cryptic centre
of my head a voice recites a rhyme I read somewhere
or heard once or otherwise made up:
Let us go to the woods, one little pig cries.
But why would we do that? his brother replies.
To look for my mother, the little pig cries.
But why would we do that? his sister replies.
For to kiss her to death, the little pig whispers.
What is driving along this but a guided dream
since the road feeds itself in as the planed length
time feeds to the mind’s lathe to get it trimmed
correctly to size: heavy clouds; the waterlogged
fields; a rainbow arcing faintly out to the west
and I keep that with everything I keep to myself.
I am either in the midst of it or on my own or both
things are true at the same time. I kill the radio.
Were the universe to finish, music would endure
though I have no memories left for the moment before
so when I think of you I think of you sat slumping
on the edge of the mattress, zonked on Zopiclone,
small and bald as a wee scaldy fallen out the nest
and found there hours after you were meant
to have gone on to bed. At my coming in you barely
raise your head, your eyes are half-shut and you cannot
find the holes for the buttons on your nightie,
because you have it on you inside out.
I know every journey to a source is homecoming,
and I am bombing along the District of Songs,
along the Great Road of the Fews, towards you,
through a depression left by the caldera’s collapse.
This is the District of Poets, the district of the Dorsey:
Doirse meaning doors or gates, the solitary pass
to the old kingdom through the earthworks’ long
involvement, a pair of abrupt Iron Age banks
running parallel for a mile or so. An entrenchment.
An entrance. All manner and slant of analogy etcetera
but when, in the end, we had kissed you to death,
we sat and held your cold hands for a half hour more
and wiped with tissues all the black stuff bubbling up
from your lungs away from your lips, and wept
a good bit, and got up then and folded your clothes
and stacked your cards and binned the flowers,
and I sat out there in my rental car in the car park
as you kept on lying in here, past all metaphor,
left by yourself on the cleared stage like a real corpse.
ii
Parable of the Arrow
Imagine it is dusk and there are two men – friends, but not
particularly close – walking through the bamboo grove,
leading a litter of pigs back to the camp. Out of nowhere
the older man is struck in the chest by an arrow and falls.
The friend tells him he must pull the arrow out and clean
the wound.
The man replies he cannot let the arrow be removed
until he gets to know it better, until he grasps its proper
nature as a clawed or razor arrow. He must establish if the
shaft is a karavira sapling or flighted with the feather of
a heron, or a peacock, if it’s fastened with the tendon of a
ruru deer or a temple monkey –
The friend explains that at this time these are not his main
concerns.
The man insists he has a right to know his assailant’s age
and height, the colour of his eyes, what debt or threat
or great disaster should bring him to this pass, whether
his aggressor hails from such and such a caste, and if he
intends to sleep well or rise late and feel guilt or free.
The friend says keep still.
The man is adamant. He wants to know if the one who
tried to kill him is all kindness with his children, and his
children’s children, and their friends and so on, and how
far does his circle run, and does he recognise by now it
should have looped the earth?
The friend says bite down on this here belt.
The Good Son
Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry …
i
Your own neighbour at it to get you out.
I was stood in the bath with a bill-hook
as the glass shattered and they screamed threats,
that same auld slander and terrible muck.
The childer was all small then. Even the pol
ice,
they told us to leave. I mind we lay on the ground.
He was with them, laughing, done up like a priest,
and my daddy got his shotgun and opened
the bedroom window and clipped one of them.
We knew it was him alright by the limp.
All those years we lived in Newtownhamilton
and Whitecross sure I never lay down.
I would’ve come home from work and slept in
the chair but at first dark got up again.
ii
The time they got my sister’s man
she identified the boy: many’s the time he’d been
in her kitchen and had his dinner. He ran
bandsaws with her husband in the timber yard
and they shot Roy in the head and fired off
shots across him and him already dead.
He’d a great dog. D’you mind the dog he had?
Brung up from a pup he found in a hedge.
Pepper. Pepper was got out in the graveyard
trying to dig Roy up the night he was laid.
He shot at the dog too but missed and was lifted.
Ten years and he did one. In the courthouse
he said nothing till she looked him right in the face.
Alison, they made me do it. I was made.
iii
The time they were after Joe McCullough
he fought them in and out of his bungalow.
Blood everywhere. He would have been alright
only one of them went over and slit his throat.
Then they put a booby-trap bomb on him
and a sow pig knocked it and got blew to bits.
And Thomas McConnell. They were hid
on the roof of his tin shed waiting on him.
You know a fella came to our Hall about a year ago
wanting the youngest to go and do silage.
Gareth took the boy aside and said,
D’you know who that is? It was some goon
working for Dessie O’Hare’s crowd, and like a cod,
only for that, he would’ve gone.
Coppa Italia
If I prefer to drink in Irish pubs in non-Irish nations
it’s because misquotations are more revealing
and Tino and Patrick are stood at the bar.
It is Saturday and late in the desert of the real.
The table I like best is out on the cobbles,
a plastic red table with a plastic tablecloth
attached to it with metal clips. The laminate
is stamped with the trompe l’œil of the gaps
and fretwork of a real cast-iron table. Inside,
waiting for the pints to settle, a violence on
the small bright pitch. A man in blue and a man
in a red shirt float, collide, collapse and rise
as one thing turned on itself; are held apart
and shouted down and striding back beneath
the floods blue is distraught, a sacker of cities,
but when the camera pans to red he’s laughing,
supple and sleek and lit like a stamen at the very
centre of a long four-petalled shadow, waiting
for the ball to pollinate him, deep in their half.
User
The only Novacell was in the kitchen so I hesitated
before ambling down the hall and glancing in our Bean
to check that Yip was Uberliving©, ironing Ken’s blouses
and co-hosting a Meet-and-Greet for Bebop enthusiasts,
a form of Original Music she’d quite recently Addicted to.
I slipped in and flicked the MoodChute, whispered the visor’s
name onto the Eardrive and hollowed at his off-site.
Overall, demazing: semi-helpful; size, age, tribal appearance
not dissimilar to mine though he was just 28 percent
Blasian and had won Freestyle Bronze in 4-6-Summer
on the PetSafe moon of the Eternal Insurance System®.
I de-acked the stream and saw his temples were greying,
indicating wilting, and that he could do with a TreatWeek
in a JumpCoat© to vigorate the T’s. Underwhelmed when
memflicking to find it 10-80 since he’d stoked. As he coded
The Sunrise Raisinana PatchTM, allowing a fourteen mil
boost in the laterals to stave off the worst, I impressioned
taking a QuantiCation© with his extended, and why not try
the Salted Leaps on the Rio Seven islets, since I always liked
to jellifish. It was sufficient to just float there and feel
nothing, no language for it, be unformatted and free.
On Not Having Children
for AJ
The most difficult operation to stage is the retreat.
There’s a book of the Bible where God is not mentioned.
The water in your tumbler is older than the sun.
If the word ‘attention’ was not Chaucer’s invention
his use of it is the earliest we have extant in manuscript
and there are words that lack rhymes: silver; month;
depth; false. It makes them immune to doggerel
but also to the ballad form.
Watermelon Seed
If you extract the compact planet,
roughly sketched with jungle, wetlands,
I pick a knife with which to split it
and you put back the jams and ketchup.
The substantial rind is very chilly,
the flesh wet cotton candy cleanly
parted on the pressured edge to paired
slabs of seeded red, undersown by more
seeds that face eviction by your fork.
I like watching you at work: one dangles
from a tine, expelled and slickly black,
suspended by a tendril of thin pink pulp till
you flick it with your index finger
expertly at the sink. Plink.
La Méditerranée
In the midst of our lifelike life
I come to this fork in your hand –
stainless silver, of appreciable weight –
and I fully understand its pronginess,
the bent of want, an expressive head
and narrow neck spreading
like a delta out to three strict parallels.
You, the children, me.
At some point the waiter brought
your sea bass and the fork hovers over
its seared arrangement of chainmail,
its lips parted in surprise.
Against the stiff table linen
and sunlight on the knife
your skin is caramel and scuffed
a little whitely at the knuckles.
A few veins give the skin
its dark ridges and where each hair
plants itself there is a small dent
and crinkle in the flesh.
If the situation is not stable
nor sustainable,
what I want to mention is
if we did continue further in –
into an atom of the flesh
or the metallic fabric of the fork,
the micro-weft of the tablecloth,
it would be more or less the same
kind of utter emptiness –
as at the heart of any restaurant
there is this dead eye
of the sea bass on your plate,
its aureole lens, its lightless pupil
sunk flush as a thumb tack holding
the universe itself in place
and I stare at it, and it stares back.
Chronos
I swim to earn endorphins and eat my greens
because I need the fibre and the vitamins.
I shoot and kill eleven wolves
to barter with the skins.
I do my best to clean the bath,
then separate the bo
dies of the zombies
from their faces with a crowbar
or a chainsaw,
and make it to the water tower –
but out of the flames of the jack-knifed lorry
lurches the Overlord Zombie –
who will not ever stop –
and already is upon me
gorging himself on my delicate neck.
XY
When I slide it in the slot to press
the buttons in their order, wait,
I’m empire-building. Damn straight.
I’m Genghis Khan. Yes ma’am. I guess
I am embarrassing. I guess I’m done.
Maybe nothing beats the nothingness.
Maybe all I need is this depletion
and not French poems or drunk chess.
Maybe I take the antihistamine
and it doesn’t stop me operating.
Simple physics, Little Richard.
If my appetite intensifies my vigilance
I’d say that’s my lookout, and my business.
Then I’d say, here, take my card.
