by Nick Laird
The Cartoons
When my head was on fire I googled fire
and the first result described it as
a rapid oxidation releasing heat and light
and various reaction products
like sleeplessness and these poems.
I had had enough of going in and out
of doorways. Being undecided
was only like existing on two or more
floors at the same time. Which is like
reading. Or parenting. Or being alive,
on the outside and the flipside, here
where you are listening to me talk
and to your continuous response,
continuous as a river is, as my
father when he drives, reifying
things by saying them out loud.
Some cows. The cheese factory.
Declan Cosgrove’s house.
You know who else is in some pain?
Everyone, and all the time.
I need to sit here very still in this
room where I am allowed to be this
still for a few minutes with the traffic
lit by the periodic lift and tilt of sirens
or my daughter coughing next door
and then I need to sit on the sofa,
and let the youngest take my face
in his hot hands again and pull me in
until we’re nose to nose and say over
and over, ‘Daddy, listen to me.’
Team Me
I get very bored of having to respond
to the circumstances of my own life.
I’m tired of trailing my ego around.
I remember the feeling from being a lawyer,
sat there in front of some client thinking
I just can’t represent this cunt much longer.
Most nights we meet each other face to face –
at civil dusk, in defeat, my little regent
standing in Gristedes’s dairy aisle or the lower
field where the red clay banks and falls away,
and the stream that feeds the Ballinderry slows
on shallow gravels. Wherever. On his own.
Always with the narrow back set like a shield
against me, his shadow like a bracket or a lever
twice as long as him, and half as thin,
keeping him forever perpendicular to earth.
He turns. Bat-fangs. Bowl cut. Such pretty little
ears that hold the crown, a ripped green cracker hat
from Christmas 1983. O my petty liege.
My bliss and dearest enmity. My nemesis.
When he spots me now and slopes across,
affecting a limp, because he’s depressed,
what I say when he asks how it went on the whole
is no really no really no you were amazing
Incantation
Because we time-travel into the future
at a blistering sixty minutes an hour,
I ask you to sit down and write me
one beautiful sentence I might carry
in my pocket on the journey when I go,
and in the window of the train unfold
O you were the best of all my days.
Never knowing if the thing is broken
or the door between us is still open,
you would like me to sit down and write
you one beautiful sentence you might
carry in your wallet when you leave,
and in the cab you take it out and read
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.
Depending where one stands, each circle
back is a possible fall, a fail, a spiral,
and I would like you to take a few seconds
to write me out one beautiful sentence
to carry now across the night and ocean,
and held up at the gate I sit down and open
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
iii
Cinna the Poet
I was trying to write like an adult.
I had children.
I was at the end of something.
As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,
I saw that the Sirocco had deposited
a scrim of dust on the sill overnight,
and it was the dark red of powdered blood,
and like any of the others of my kind would have done,
I graffitied it.
In the past I might have gone for a peace sign
or a smiley face or an ejaculating penis,
but today I scrawled my name in it
and my vocation,
and left my fingertip ferrous with desert.
It felt like stroking suede against the nap,
half illicit, the particulates milled by wind
and sieved by the distance
to the softness of ash or brick-dust.
I had been adding and subtracting
sounds from my epic on the winds
that thread the known world,
but something like a real poem surfaced
then, in the dust,
in my letters edged with tiny drifts.
What I wanted in a small thing was some
principle, some vividness
that lived both in things small and things great.
A desert is red and the dust is red
because the stones that make it up were red.
It is the iron staged within.
They share the rationale of blood.
The tone was off.
They understand the colour of
Lucinda was filling my demi-tasse
and stopped to watch the man,
a partisan, standing in the square outside the window.
The red cap of all his tribe was too small for his head
which wobbled like a tied balloon
as he read the name I’d written on the sill.
At the nearer counter Kestius, mad again,
stopped reciting his ode to prostitutes
and turned around to get a proper look.
I had been thinking how the coffee
pouring from the spout and stopping
was not unlike
the
thick
tail
of
a
black
rat
flickering into a drain,
and I wasn’t listening, and he said it again.
My Death is standing outside the window
carrying on his shoulder a leg of lamb
rolled in darkened butcher paper
and My Death is upset
and pointing his cigarette at me.
How they massed in the streets for their Caesar,
that rapist, that racist, that fat
narcissist
who found the crowd responded best to flattery
and three-word phrases
framed as an imperative.
I do not believe in the imagined realm of perfectness,
where nothing ever changes, where everything simply is,
and which, according to Plato and Judeo Christian philosophy,
is the true realm of nature; the sense experience,
the red dust, the coffee, the leg of lamb – merely illusory.
We have no reason to believe in the perfect circle.
We have no reason to believe justice exists.
There is the endless play of absence and presence.
Seasons. Tides. The moon.
I stood up and knocked my notebooks off the table.
Long ago I noted the impossibility of imagining
a heaven that doesn’t bore us instantly
to death, and I don’t believe the human body
is really a luminous body of white light
that moves towards the larger light
when it dies.
On the odd occasion I feel amazed to be alive
though
not often, to be honest, and not recently.
Last summer when the weather optioned its menace
his priests summoned those born feet first,
the albinos, the twins,
those afflicted with harelips.
I lived in a state of despair and rage, we all did.
I could not remember the last time the political
had come to bear on the personal
to such a large extent, and I grew up
in the civil war.
I sat reading
how the world’s tallest man had saved a dolphin
or they’d designed a gun for women –
to be shot by women, not to shoot them.
Last week, after the purge,
Kestius stopped me in the toilets to tell me
how he’d sealed his major poems in earthen jars
and buried them at nightfall by the lilac in his garden.
The time is just too real, he said.
We are approaching the source, he said.
Don’t you detect its heat in the night air,
in the vividness beneath the skin,
how everything is frantic.
Now their leader was dead
and his supporters on fire and I stood,
at a loss, on the edge of their anger –
you have been there – watching the dark
present dispose
itself too easily and flow away from me.
I could not pass
and when the girl ran up and spat
panic like a swarm of bees and I tried
to escape and slipped
on my papers and fell and hit my head
on the stone steps.
The flesh is not a vessel emptied out at death.
I had the evidence of my own parents.
Black stuff bubbles from the lungs to the lips.
Why would anyone set aside deities born of this earth,
that protect the place, to privilege metaphysical
divinities
who do not have that relationship?
Sirocco. Mistral. Levante. Ostro.
None of them functioned as names exactly,
not without following the sighing in the eaves
or a rounding in the branches.
But I was unsure what to do with those
sounds, and such information,
unsure what to do with the inconstancy of things in general.
Poetry had not been good for me.
It hardened me where I should have been
otherwise.
What is it anyway to say that one thing
is like another? I practise forms of accusation.
I came to as they were dousing me in lamp oil.
Kestius was howling like a dog and being held back.
The girl was going through my bag.
I watched My Death try and strike a match.
The Folding
i
In the midst of this lifelike grief
I am stood at the cutlery drawer,
and keep on standing here as if
I might remember what I came in for,
but then I think of something else,
and head upstairs only to forget
what that was and find myself
eyeing the unmade bed, the bookshelves,
the snow still coming down outside
and realise then, and lift a stack
of printer paper and the safety scissors
for the kids to make snowflakes
I’ll tape to the kitchen windows,
since that was what my mother did.
ii
I know in terms of cuts and folds
a modest pattern’s adequate,
that infinite complexity’s composed
by simple rules, and the last was that
you had to live it out, right to the end –
even as your body starts to stop,
as your face withdraws from itself
and your eyes continue, trapped,
braving a last turn about the place.
O that dull, almost inaudible pat
of obliterative fleck on the glass,
and the clock, and the held breath
as the kids concentrate on symmetries
or the blades’ irresistible path.
iii
I am four and follow her until I spot
the photo booth and slip inside
to climb up on the spinny seat, and watch
cartoons that do not start, and wait
for forty years as they raze
the aisles and checkouts, the car park,
wait for her to draw back the dark
and find me here, staring at the screen
where what I learn of absence is the panic
is substantial, the face is lit with tears
and snot and everyone is crying
as I fold myself into her skirt,
unable to explain that I was here,
behind the curtain, the whole time.
iv
Civil dusk. I scrape the plates.
The falling’s softened to a waltz
and the garden’s lit lavender white.
I suit them up like astronauts
and we step out through the airlock
to a scene as soundproofed as a dream:
its padded walls and ceiling are being
shredded without end. A snowflake catches
in her mother’s lashes when Katherine’s
looking upwards through the branches
at the sky, at the unfolding of bright
wave on bright wave, coherent scrims
of quick scantlings looking to alight, alive,
and we hold out our hands until they are white.
New York ElastiCity
When the hand is red,
some of the walkers pause
& others continue,
some of the vehicles pause
& others continue,
& I am no longer that
clerk to the heir of etc.
& something of this city’s
brute capacity for gathering
is like a shining in my head.
The valleys of glass & reset
stone have softer, smaller
forces pushing through them
with shopping bags like pollen
sacs attached to their bodies.
Happiness is only a state
of utter absorption,
so why not take an island,
not large, & see the people
of the world live together there?
I notice first they put the brown
people in brown shirts
& made them stand behind
the counter in Starbucks as
the customers are played by whites
& east Asian girls. Each
consciousness enacts its own
drama in the silence of
a breathing mind till Ahmed,
the barista, calls your name.
On Mercer & Bleecker
the jackhammers answer
& a rising siren answers
but what I’d like to listen to is rain,
no? The plainness of its thinking,
the fat splatter of the first ripe drops
on the hot sidewalk, its hiss,
its consistence, its soft-shoe shuffle –
the grid clearing & darkening
as the Atlantic rolls in.
Getting Out the White Vote
Because of the unfairness I resigned.
I mean I re-signed for another stint in
the inferno’s furnace, with a furlough
on the Vegas strip. Hell, I deserved it.
I dreamt the real war waged in corridors
of server banks in hangars in New Jersey
or Missouri never happened, or happened
only in my dream. You hadn’t heard me.
I couldn’t help mys
elf so I helped myself,
and when I told you to replace it,
I meant put it back to what it was.
I never said that you could change it.
The Good Son
i
They disappeared. / They were disappeared.
Argentina pioneered the passive use of active verbs,
though the Stalinist regime
had a similar irregular inflection
when a member of the nomenklatura
‘was stepped down’.
Physical force is nominalising.
You do not speak but you are spoken,
and the force, if exercised without curb,
is able to transmute the bodies into corpses.
We are aware there are two forces –
one that kills, and one that does not, not yet,
for now is merely fiddling with the implement
it might bring down this every instant.
ii
She sighs; she lives; she has a soul and yet
she is a thing, a thing that has a soul. Mirror.
Extraordinary – and how does the soul inhabit
an extraordinary house, how much does it cost,
instant by instant, to accommodate
itself to such a place, this extraordinariness,
such writhing being requisite, so much bending
and folding and pleating and snipping and so on
required of it constantly. Door. Stairs.
She simplifies down to whatever you wish, even if
the soul was not made who could live inside a thing. Front
