by Sean O'Brien
To the snowy ditch, to the cliff at world’s end,
To the garden men of forty glimpse at dusk
When opening the icebox for the lonely sake of it,
Has never lost its hold, although it wasn’t meant for me.
This is their birthright, lodged like a minié ball
In a skull at Antietam, a grammar of train-whistles
Heard across the hills a hundred years
And more ago, and never headed here.
No place for me, though I am occupied by listening
To a music that can scarcely know itself
And yet meets all occasions: thus they gather at the river,
They return from foreign wars to ignorance and scorn,
They take their turns at parenthood, at burying their own
And at divorce, and – it is evening – come to stand
And watch a baseball diamond left to elegize
Stage four of its neglect, between two railroad yards
While fighting drunks steal bases from their skeletons.
What competence and what complacency:
How inextricable the habit that was there
Before the habits formed, that always knows
A pathway through the woods and past the fatal creek
To find the crazy widow’s shotgun shack awaiting
Immortality. The hidden way is marked at every turn,
Secure in all the righteousness that makes
Life look like religion and religion look like them.
These men who at fifty fall for sophomores,
These women who will put themselves to death
In the assault on greatness, cannot be denied
Their place among the saints. As well exclude the air itself
Or dam the smoking waters where they flow
Through burning forests and exhausted plains:
And why should anyone do that, they’d turn and ask,
Supposing they were listening. It is the right of all
To be a headlamp on a northbound train,
Or, lifting up their hearts unto the hills,
To sing of death as if it were a clause
Revoked in secret from the Constitution
And replaced with other words, like these.
Names
Ravenspur, Ravensrodd, Ravenser Odd,
Salt-heavy bells heard only by God.
Drink to the lost and the longshore drift:
When there is nothing the names will be left.
HAMMERSMITH
‘Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.’
Canto I
England is finished, not that it matters
When even the weather is done for,
When the Boat Race ends though it’s barely begun,
With a boy from Wisconsin who catches a crab.
For a moment the eye has him
Over and gone in the silver-black Thames,
In the deep shade of Harrods Depository –
Drowned Palinurus to sleep with the fishes
And raggedy scuttlers down on the slime-bed,
And several books later converse with John Snagge
In the slow fields of Hades by Hammersmith Bridge
Where Richard Widmark also met his end
At the climax of Night and the City, that love-song
To water and terror and death –
Oh, but the oarsman recovers, though the race is lost
By a shaming ten lengths, with ill-tempered
Un-boating appeals to the pitiless umpire,
An agent of Mercury, surely, by which time
I’m losing my faith in this annual fiction,
The same way as Aintree and Wembley
Can no longer tell me my name when I wander
From Hammersmith boozer to boozer and stand
In the jittery shade of the London planes
At the corner of King Street and Beadon Road
In 1960 or in 1945 or now, where I tell
Anybody who knows me and many who don’t:
I was more or less born here and woke to the sound
Of a wireless commentary, all England gathered
In its draughty living room to hear itself
Made language in the voice of Mordaunt Snagge.
All lies, as we neither affirm nor deny.
I was an old believer in that sound
Before the smell of valves and burning dust
Gave way to class, the major stench of things.
Do try to take more water with it, love.
It used to be all pubs round here
When my mother would walk out to dances,
The war lately over and the streets awash
With the Irish, among them her blue-eyed undoing.
– Thus Ryan, astray in the four-ale bars
Sees history invent itself
Between the blue smoke and the ceiling
And the pages of the sporting calendars,
Between one sentence and the next
When one door closes, then another
And the girl is gone in a cymbal-crash,
A nurse, a teacher, left no name
And the only game is a young man’s game,
The quickstep and the Palais glide
And the invitation to step outside.
And she’ll sit this one out if it’s all the same.
The world is beginning where it ended,
With the evening street and the London plane
Leprous and beautiful, meant for rain.
If you lose yourself in Parson’s Green
Then ask Our Lady to intervene
Blue is the heaven and dark is the sky
Lady be with us for now we die
Thus Ryan, in the trap of elegy.
Nor am I out of it, excepting insofar
As it became habitual
After such a promising beginning.
Off the Irish train at Euston,
Brilliantined, with mostly original teeth
And a past that I shall not go into again.
In the street there is a door
And past the door the stairs go up
And up into the dark, up
To a final room for rent that shows
A hundred rain-blue roofs and other rooms,
A park that hurries out of sight –
The wind at dusk applies the whip –
And the risen moon presiding from afar.
Oh loneliness, your name is Hammersmith.
The river fills again, the barges wake and shift
On skating blackness. Now would be the time
To find her coming to the dance
Among a crowd of other girls, the time to know
This room, the empty stairs, the empty street,
The high tide of the gale,
As an annunciation.
England is gone, with snoek and the ground-nut scheme,
With Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps
And the cold coming of immigrant ships,
To decline and fall, to a wind of change
To a world no longer rich and strange
Where Caliban and Ariel
Shivered at the sound of the sunset bell
At Lloyd’s and at Evensong’s white chill
And the citizen army cobbled its boots
For the money had long run away down the drain.
Do you love an apple, do you love a pear,
Do you love the boy with the curly brown hair
For it’s still I love him, I can’t deny him
I’ll be with him wherever he goes
Canto II
Once more you emerge in the autumn light
To find your parents’ London gone
From the streets where the gasping buses grind on
To no fixed abode, where is no stay,
Not known at this address,
Or never known, or went away,
Gone where the post
eventually goes,
With the midnight flit or the number
Forgotten for want of a pencil just then
On the dim top landing or under a streetlight
At closing. In this way their city is lost
With all the lives they might have led.
You want to go home. But you have to begin.
Here now at noon you must empty the Broadway
Of all but the dead, and set out
From the unquiet shade of the plane-trees
As if you must know where you’re going,
As if you might even belong.
The world for which the nation fought admits
No Blacks and no dogs and no Irish,
And yet you see a room somewhere,
And still in a cupboard over a sink
A bottled hint of brilliantine, as might
Be applied to an evening in prospect.
Then girls on the edge of the dancefloor
Settle their cardigans over their shoulders,
And close their handbags with a snap
To indicate several places to be
And not for the good of their health, dear me.
Now what will it be? Will we wait and see?
Then the band strikes up and away you go.
Am I haunting you now? Are you there?
Away they go under the railway arch
And into the hinterland, streets behind streets,
The dead go dancing on silent feet,
Over the wall into Ravenscourt Park,
Down frosty pathways and into the dark –
With a strange resemblance to happiness or
With a resolution to settle for less,
As the price of a kiss? Was it for this
That Ryan discovers himself on these streets,
Uncertain whether to laugh or cry?
The big-band silence, the make-do-and-mend
And the demob suits and the Palais Glide
And the Mick and his girl from the North Countree?
The dancers are gone. The bus rolls by.
Ryan recovers himself on the street
With a nightmare thirst and aching feet,
In need of something resembling repose
And a pint of black to re-enchant
A world that is always and only prose,
To offset the fear of what you might find,
Whatever it is that lies behind
The heartless song of the District Line
High over the secret far end of the street,
That says every verse-end that the here and now
Is neither here nor there, and that
If there is life it must happen elsewhere.
Look now, Ryan, in the A to Z,
For the nowhere to which your enquiries have led –
A pub that was fading, then boarded, then sold,
Too far from the river, too far from the shops,
An in-between place where the calendar stops,
A site for a starlet’s final berth
In a flat whose windows are touched with gold
When at teatime September is suddenly cold
On the dim, dusty fringes of Hammersmith.
Now you have come to the ends of the earth.
What is there now but the water’s edge?
The barges shift as the river awakes
And the painters at work on the green-gold bridge
Stare down as the black tide tightens its grip.
Why not let it take you away?
Here there is nowhere. Here is no stay.
The streetlights blink and the air-brakes sigh.
The barmaid knows what the problem is.
It’s your modus vivendi, she silently says.
If you lean out to look, it’s easy to slip.
You sit at the bar that is no longer there,
As the click of her high heels over the parquet
Resolves to a quickstep and out of the door
To a smouldering street at the end of the war.
Remember now, Ryan, you have an engagement.
So Ryan reads poems. Who gives a fuck?
Demented abuse from the not all there,
A bitter wee Jock with rodent-red hair –
See Apologia? Don’t even start –
Makes absolute sense of a dying art.
It is night now, and autumn, high tide.
So, Ryan, why at the slightest excuse
Must you look for a sign? You will fail
Like your father before you to speak
The true name of these waters. He left you
His life, in an all-too exemplary suitcase –
Poems and politics, no fixed address –
A suitcase brim-full of the waters of Lethe
And, for the ulcer, Belladonna, which way
Madness lay in wait for him, and yet
You will lower your face to the water,
And through it, and open your eyes.
Canto III
A lifetime upriver, out here on this spindly bridge
Across the sky-blue Cherwell
I watch the flat earth mirror heaven
In the February flood. Can it be that now
On the brink of old age I may begin?
The dreaming mind will lose no chance
To mobilize belief, so why not here
Among the sunken willows
And the houseboats moored to nowhere –
‘Our lives in infinite preparation’?
Did you ever
Take a notion, Ryan asks, to jump in the river and drown?
I think we’re drowned already.
Eighty years upriver
I think of her in a borrowed gown,
Sneaked in by a friend to hear Tolkien
Or Lewis – to feel that for an hour she knew
The place she was intended for until the war.
Then she walked on Port Meadow
And over this bridge and around, and she saw
When she gave back the gown that this
Must be afterwards, final, that life was denied
And would have to go on, since anyway
What can you do, as she’d say, but get on with it?
Therefore she teaches. Her home is the war.
At evening she walks by the river, rehearsing her lines
For the Players. She will be Juno
While you-know-who will be Joxer. A prophecy.
The pressure wave had killed them all
Where they sat at the table, quite unmarked
And with their evening meal before them
She tells you the story from time to time
Till sixty years are gone, and still the family
Are seated there, as though to contemplate
A kind of leisure life would not permit
And death itself cannot remember.
And although I cannot see their faces,
Now, as her memory goes, I must
Believe it for her: the pan of spuds
Still rippling from the blast, while she
Has lines to learn, and books to mark,
An eye to keep on you-know-who.
She walks by the river to get it by heart.
The water is her aide-memoire. I dare to think
It can remember her when she is gone,
Calm and preoccupied, nose in a book
Or turned aside to watch the garden grow,
Beside the water’s roman fleuve –
A making-sense that makes no sense
Except in passing, as the teams of oarsmen
On the calm of their creation glide
With the insane accomplishment of insects
Under the bridge and out of sight,
The wordless urgings of their coaches
Following, and the river’s reach extending
Down from Chiswick Mall to the blazing slums
Behind the docks, and back by dawn.
A making-sen
se that makes no sense
Except in passing. I watch as the waters
Part and rejoin at the Eyot. They are passing
Away from the world she knew and I am dreaming
To remember, where the dead sit patiently
As though a daughter’s late again
And yet expected, loved, provided for,
With the wireless dead where history ends
In the indefinite suspension
Of fixtures I supposed were England always.
Learn the script, she says, then mark the books.
Believe in chalk and talk and human kindness
Whatever the evidence says. Speak up.
There’s always work to do among the dead.
New gaps in the register week after week,
Times of which she’ll hardly speak,
Though you know she had only a pencil and chalk
With which to bring enlightenment
To forty East End boys who did not think
They needed saving but in time
Were all converted, giving her in turn
The faith in chalk and talk, stern sympathy
And in the virtue of persistence
In itself, there being no reward but that.
She walks by the river and learns her lines
To spar with you-know-who. A prophecy.
Canto IV
Left under the bed in a suitcase
Flat ephemeral pamphlets of an era
More remote than Troy or Carthage.
What shall we wish for, hope for, serve?
The means of production, comrade.
And having once secured it, get
The English out of England finally.
In case of fire, put on more coal.
But of course you were hoping for more,
The real thing all the fuss and smoke
And misery deserved to be about.
You go down the slick steps of the well
To emerge in the dark at low tide
Where the luminous pages of all his drowned books
Set out like stepping stones across the mud
In all directions and in none.
The ur-text is Mulligan, lost in transit,
The big one, yes that one, of which survives only
A rumour of your man’s nocturnal
Riparian bench-talk, lost between tides
On the fogbound / the starlit / the frozen /
The flooded embankment: rumoured aesthetics of Mulligan,
Small change of Mulligan, dead trousers alleged
Of said Mulligan, poet of no fixed abode
Or home team, one soi-disant ‘Mulligan’,
Apostrophizer of the moon, mud-mutterer
For whom says Mulligan the state intends
An utter absence from the lists