CONTENT
You died in the back of a Cairo cab
thinking of a man wrapped in: bandages
and the twenty thousand tonnes of sandstone
it takes to point a pyramid at the sky.
Another time you died outside a Calais café
tasting a coral-pink macaroon in the February air.
On the drive to a Stockholm hotel you remember
dying on the steps of a university library,
a handsome dark-haired man bending to restore
your dropped books and each death was only
a part of that starry arsenal of memory from which
you had daily recrafted your idea of home
slipping off. The foundations
are not the thing, the contents
of the cupboards are not the thing, the draught
both entering and escaping is not
that thing. But there are bandages, there is indication
and there is cold air, and every carven moment
will shed the memories we have of it
like you, slipping from an old, comfortable bathrobe
into a death of body temperature and steam.
COMING TO PASS
two versions of a fragment (‘Reif Sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet…’) by Friedrich Hölderlin
I.
The way fruit, arriving
at its moment of ripeness, is glazed with fire,
cooked and checked by the earth’s close process. It’s law,
after all, how all things
come to pass, temptress
but unearthly. And as
the heavy stake of kindling, resting
on the shoulders, there is much to bear
in mind. But the trails
are evil. And everything
bridled will anyhow
wander off, like horses
into dusk; everything
shot-through with this longing
to go beyond bounds. But so much
stands to be lost. And loyalty
a must; which rules out prophecy
or nostalgia. Let us surrender, be rocked –
cradling ourselves against the moment –
like a boat, lapped by the waves.
II.
For a moment the project
will come perfectly to fruition,
each word glossed by its
plunge into the fire of the present, that flicker
from which everything is once again
made anew. It’s almost gospel
the way things arrive, slip askew,
and depart: as a snake,
dreaming of the cloths of heaven, its mounds
of laundry, its drying lines. And as
the weighted intellect is kindle
to any moment’s inspiration
or distraction, there is much to bear
in mind. And the previous versions
of the damn thing verge
on the diabolical. And everything
you think you’ve got bridled, every axiom
you’ve nailed, will wander off, like horses
into dusk, appearing
to dissolve into the dust of secondary
and tertiary meanings. And the constant
temptation to reach beyond what’s
suitable, beyond bounds, into the dense red
of yourself, your vague
and useless gloss. And so much,
so much stands to be lost! And loyalty
a must: this raking up of foreign soil –
the spoiled quarantine of adherence
to original – is no good. No good. All of which
rules out the possibility of prophecy,
or nostalgia. Let us rock between the two,
like a little skin-keeled coracle on a sea of confusion,
lapped by the various camberings
of serial and distinct waves, one
after the other, made up
of the exact same water.
NETHERLANDS
Ann’s Story
I was any three-year-old: a dream of curiosity. If you see
an open door you go through:
that’s what doors are. An inconstancy
of right and wrong – of action and its kinds of truth
had inhabited my vacation head
that holiday – the Netherlands, Nineteen-fifty-two.
And the bright suburban street’s nearest door was ajar, and my tread
still absence-soft enough to pass whichever off-guard parent,
and I was in. I remember a bed,
and solider even than its dark-wood frame the astonishment
at the eyes – on me! – of the woman half-amid the sheets,
small and dense: a surprise of curves. I’ve spent
such heavy hours since, retreading these curving streets
of the words I’ve hung on every memory I’ve had
of those wavering Netherlands, wholly incomplete
by now with passing through and through of that Dutch red,
half-hoping still to find a heart of flesh among the deep white
of empty sheets; and every memory a now-vacated, still-warm bed.
OF SOME SUBSTANCE, ONCE
and for all there is no other thing
in which the soul or any soul-like thing consists:
clear as lipstick is lips. Or the free will
of one hand, moving for another: a vanity. A sun,
spun around the Earths we weave of ourselves.
I do not say this. I watch you watching the moon.
And any moment I will take my chest and I will kiss you.
For the first time. And so to the materialist I say:
if you can’t ride two horses at once
you shouldn’t be in the circus.
AN OCEAN,
two versions of a fragment (‘Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce…’)
from ‘Mediterraneo’ by Eugenio Montale
I.
antiquer by far than the best furniture my father
was given to restore, to piece together from other woods,
to fix, and I’m hammered with the voice
that hauls itself from all your mouths, opening
into the moodswing gape of bells, greenish
and self-effacing, ringing into nothingness
and returning. I lived here once, at your shore, the sun
making a midday bakery of every point between these
three horizons, mosquitoes thickening the air. And so I
thicken back into presence, only now
lacking the target-part for the dressing-down
you have for me, the short shrift under your
breath. You showed me
how the petty unrest of my heart
was just a moment’s symptom of yours,
your cause; that down at the seafloor of my
life is that incomprehensible absolute:
to be the occurring shift of hugeness, its change and still
to be fixed in place. And so to slough off, like you
the rubble and filth of myself,
the dregs and starfish of your abyss.
II.
and ‘ocean’ is as good a term as any
for the startless thing
you are, and anyhow I’m stripped
of agency, reckless drunk
with a voice which springs from all your mouths –
the bells and pretty lines, the confessions and recollections I can’t
keep from getting in,
from soaking what good people have made dry.
I try to find a way the voices
can rise and dissolve into the stuff
they’re of. Like waves, but ideas have words
and words ideas and they get
everywhere, sand in sandwiches
at the beach. I think, helplessly, of the place
I used to live; I Sheffield and I thicken.<
br />
I make recollections like new bread and I absentee myself
from the proper rigours of responsibility. You showed me
the shallows of my heart, how its storming
was only a fractal part of the language
in which it stormed: that down at the seafloor of my life
is that incomprehensible absolute: to be
III.
what Morgan calls as various as vast,
yet fixed in place, – the stability I imagine
of constant renewal, of permanent momentum; the gyroscope
steadied by the movement
of its elements. Galassi
has voracious for vast, and fast
for various. And so to work, so
to slough off, like you, the rubble and filth
of myself, the seaweed and the starfish of your abyss.
SOME PECUNIARY OBSERVATIONS
Like a hopelessly bourgeois but charming market town
in the heartlands, in which
the moment the poetry festival ends
the In Bloom horticultural extravaganza
grows inaugurate. Town criers in regal blues
roam the squares, ringing bells,
the pealings of which startle upwards
like the sudden flight of noisome, heraldic birds.
Oh heartlands, you garlanded warehouse
of cherished ideals and cosy ropes of conjecture;
you trader motoring to the market town
with a trunkful of chintz you know you’ll shift
at magnificently bemargined prices. Accordingly
and moreover, the pursed lips of the very beautiful;
the conclusive redundancy of simple pleasures
in the face of those yet simpler. The barter
of comfort for hope. Oh heartlands,
you total 24/7 engine of destruction.
THE WAY OF DOING THINGS TREES HAVE
I’m getting surer
it’s inescapable, this
way of doing things the leaves on trees have,
the dull madness of profusion, the tumble
of identicals, the huddle
of uniformed kids breaking out
into a wild but contained game
of chase or tag or kiss-chase at the slightest tug
of a breeze
so this insane design, this drunken Fibonacci –
as fast as we replace it
with brick and facility it reasserts itself
– the tumble, the frantic contact –
in the play of meaning over meaning,
so our signs – perfectly dichromatic
oblong boards reading Pandora’s or
Sam’s Auto Parts – start, at the first
drift of the mind, leafing
through the banks of their noirish associations, their
bluey steam of suggestion, and so
we’re back at that familiar same-thing-again-
and-again that leaves have of running
against each other and together, of being
identical looking, only not quite, (it being
no coincidence, the way
the spinal rippling of a river close-up
sets itself so firmly against the sill
of its shore, the way
the shiver of leaves is only a shiver
against one or other implacable sky)
which is
your mind repeating the functions
which just take nature’s shape, its bundle
of angles, and the green
and the green of unstopping
CARRYING
The pigeons carry their reputation for disease like a canker
hidden in the beak. They peck mechanically about my feet
in my Thames-side café: the bitterer the coffee the more here I feel
in the same drowse of survival they bespeak, filthy doven clods
of proof for evolution. They carry their reputation for disease
like a sixties schoolgirl her clothbound volume of Sartre,
mildewed and risky. The pigeons are iron furbelows
ruffling the café patio’s concrete flagging. How much really do I need
to confront myself with history? I could raise my eyes
to the thin, pigeon-crowded piers like dark tongues
furred with nerves for the determined endless tasting of the old
river. Lucy and I held hands again for the first time last night
since the final kiss of our long relationship; my father had tickets
to the game that became the Hillsborough Disaster.
My mum’s father stole his older brother’s passport
to escape Ireland for the Second World War. But that’s
all over now, truly; and my dad was called, last-minute,
to work. And my grandfather returned, though not again
to old Ireland; ferried that inaccurate, harped passport
to Dagenham, where at last he made my mother. Essex girls
have such a reputation and are surely proof
that none of this has any value whatsoever. Think of her –
outside the secondary modern in the shadow of Ford’s
relentless heavy plant – a new flagship of French existentialism.
It’s only that each thing carries another. The tongue,
so evolved, has five types of cell for tasting: my own
is deficient at savour and has nothing at all for the forces
which have brought over time these things to their being.
AVERAGE TEMPERATURE AT SURFACE LEVEL
A man is falling asleep in the plush comfort
of a hotel armchair, a lit cigarette trembling
barely between his fingers. Any moment the air will grow
hot to the touch with the discomfort of inaction. Later
the windowframes will take, the light-fittings themselves
drift in imperceptible degrees from a plastic white
to the vaguely patterned brown of inattention, the plush armchair
to fire in a room of fire.
Elsewhere a painter is at his concentration.
He measures out his attention like a liqueur,
ignoring the mild furore of the late sun, its fading glare
seeming to ruffle the sea it lights on. A sea, as usual,
he can barely ignore. His still life
both stills and saturates its oranges;
the sharp edges of the table fray
and give as they approach the costly blue
of the vase; the fruit bowl
ceases to contain that fruit
which falls below its lip and out of the hard line of sight.
The gaze abstracts as it objectifies; object
bleeds into type, the starvation-ration of quiddity,
the hardtack of category, like interlocking
fingers – the posture of an infinitely sympathetic refusal
cast off
across the copper-inlaid oak of a café coffee table,
perhaps in a piazza of Venice, maybe
years ago now, before that thennish city
was understood to be sinking – the gesture
descending to a scrimshaw, sunk into still-living bones.
In every Western ever made
there’s a cowboy, his face a cave of oranges
and greys in the campfire’s, yes, flickering light.
He’s an exacting mechanistic archetype of machismo, sure,
but is pictured as somehow one with nature, running his
calloused hand across the rope-burned collar of hide
decorating the neck of the lassoed steer, damaged
by the way we gather it to us.
In the evolving technology of chess piece manufacture the unrefined chits of maple and rosewood are known as blanks. We remove from them what’s unnecessary until the desired form is attained. The desired form is one that sign
ifies only within the system of rules of the game for which it’s intended. Remove a bow of wood here and here and the piece will move maybe three spaces instead of four. Pieces meant for finer sets receive their inlay. After, one of two varnishes will be applied.
Adjectives queue like interior designers
fingering the fabric samples for the refitting
of a burnt-out hotel room. The felt swatches of material claim their titles
only insofar as they defer to another scene, absent
and imagined. Like the flamboyant designers they specify
at the same time they subject themselves
to something larger. We have such a mania for outfitting.
Reach out; alter into an admittable shape; utilise.
Place the grey scent of an old twenty pence piece
into the slot below a seaside telescope. Turn to your mother
The chemical the human brain employs
in the access of a memory
(the fingers of a perfume
and a person and an ideal
description of a perfume interlocking
imperfectly, that
vase)
is also the chemical that reaches in to rearrange
the synaptic pattern – the stick mandala
of an unlit campfire – which
incarnates that memory; that
which once again unchars these sticks anew.
As new, still-wet permanent marker is the best plan
for erasing old permanent marker, being in a place
is the best way to undo that place. Try
as best you can
to hold on to what it is we face
now – that charlatan, that impostor.
It’s an artist’s impression of the world, a reconstruction
of the chase, after the fact,
the unsentenced con mid-getaway, face turned
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