by Sean O'Brien
By confiscation of the name itself:
No Mulligan here, ergo
Un-Mulligan: bear in mind also
That firstly others will decide who
May be called Anonymous, and secondly
It won’t be you, for yea the very imprint
Of the planking of this handsome bench
Upon the non-existent arse of nobody
Who never sat on this embankment
Shall herewith be effaced by governmental magic.
It’s Mulligan never: it’s Mulligan not: it’s no Mulligan here.
And if still a voice will almost surface
From the candid foolscap put away
In the suitcase for later, the lifetime of later,
Have suitcase will travel, will slowly unravel
And at last go mad that way, it is only
The ill-starred prodigious inaudible Mulligan,
Derelict, dead in the water, a drifter
Asking to be scuttled, set ablaze, struck off
At Lloyd’s and the Vatican, by National Insurance
And even for good brutal measure, God knows,
By the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.
Begun and re-begun, a paper cell of theological
Devising, where he must re-enter and re-enter
Under the gaze of the Black and Tan sergeant
Who is there to meet him always
When he looks up from the page and back
And finds it still unwritten and the sergeant
With his ‘teeth like washing-boards’,
Attentive at the spyhole of the cage.
Imagine me, the sergeant says, imagine me
You fucking taig. Imagine that.
Canto V
Beneath the East River, there lie in wait
Tunnels, ladders, hatches and the friend
Whose legs were amputated by a train.
You told me once you were deported,
But never how these elements combine.
So long now among the anecdotes, like you
I find the facts are neither here nor there –
The child in love with maps and lithographs
Finds everywhere a match for appetite:
But though it’s infinite beneath the lamp,
As memory the world sails out of sight –
And nor am I, if I can see the worklights,
Scaffolding knee-deep in water, the mise-en-abîme
Where girders sweat, and any second now
A disaster site or the scene of a crime you may
Only just have departed. Or dreamed, like me,
The second son you thought you’d never have,
To whom you lent the name you gave the first.
There is a darkness in your mind that means
You cannot read a novel for yourself
And dare not care for music. It’s as though
You came into the world with barely half a kit,
Or else are one who lost a life elsewhere
And cannot make it home [again]. I see you
Passing down the tunnel like a ghost
Who cannot find his level of damnation.
– Then nothing, and the friend is never named
And you can never quite be placed, although
You surface briefly in Southampton
Like a rumour spread by rumour,
As if you were a story, with a plot
Or even understanding to impart.
Lately I’ve been watching Ocean Terminal
And a page of Baudelaire appears
On a desk in a shipping office, magnified
By oceanic lenses, words themselves
Alone, transported from the world alone,
And now, among the long-dead reefs of paper
In this room that turns to nowhere, I can read
A version of that language still,
Inert with promise, as at last, for all
The lies and geography, we proved to be.
The child in love with maps and lithographs
Finds everywhere a match for appetite:
But though it’s infinite beneath the lamp,
As memory the world sails out of sight.
One morning we embark. The mind ablaze,
The heart blown up with rancour and disease,
We set out with the rhythm of the tide,
Infinitude adrift on finite seas.
Some do it to escape the hated State;
Some flee the horrors of indoors, and some –
Stargazers blinded by a woman’s stare –
Outrun the lure of Circean perfume,
And rather than be beasts consign themselves
To space and light and skies of molten brass,
Where biting cold and heat that roasts them black
Will slowly mask the imprint of her kiss.
But the authentic travellers are those
Who, light as balloons, take off and never give
Consideration to the claims of fate
And, never asking why, demand to live.
Such men’s desires map themselves in clouds.
They dream the way a squaddie dreams a gun,
Of unknown pleasures, protean and vast,
Out where the writ of language cannot run.
Canto VI
The river in her low-tide ruination,
Ramparts of mud with oozy slakes
To feed the trench. Something is done with,
Mulligan says, so make your peace
With the impedimenta, moon and bridge
And whatever is the past or not. You need
A sense of occasion to suit the low
Admonitory brass that follows Gustav Holst
On his perambulations through the night,
While Mulligan goes widdershins –
How it takes in the faintest curdled merriment –
Mechanicals with walk-ons, at the dancing, at the bar,
Embracing the far end of night when they can sense
The waters quicken in the river’s mouth
And actions having consequences: so.
They treat the river as themselves,
Unknowable and intimate, at hand yet out of reach.
Respect them in their ragged tableau vivant:
They build the city; they damn it, dream it, call it theirs
And walk the streets without a by-your-leave
And give it people. All you are is here,
Just out of reach, inaudible, the sound of frost
Among the cobblestones, as the darkness
Passes over the secret night-water,
A poster in a workshop underneath the railway
For a play, a dance, a palais of varieties.
– Now will that do you? Night and the city,
The music you have to imagine. My failure
Like my lousy teeth I leave to you
In perpetuity, if I could just pronounce it.
And oh important documents. Imagined futures
Obsolete avant la rêve. This poem
I stand accused of almost having written –
Left luggage at a station no one mentions nowadays.
And where the photographs and letters ought to be,
An emptiness that smells of brilliantine.
The living think there’s something owed to them:
It’s what they have in common with the dead.
A night bus slows on the bridge chicane.
The dozing riders stare out at themselves
Against the dark. The trench is filling silently.
They’ll come for me, the dead watch, out from trees
And lamp-posts, tireless, at walking pace.
You will not save me then, or understand
The nature of my torment, since my past
Does not exist. This is not solitude but something worse.
Better I were indigent and drowned
Beneath the bridge, my son, th
an you should find
My bare convictions wanting as the rest have done.
Your fate, like mine, is to imagine otherwise.
It is not solitude but something worse, to know
That men are only wolves and devils
And I am somehow of their party.
Look in the suitcase. Take up and flick through
A flat ephemeral pamphlet,
Wishful as a tooth beneath a pillow. Socialism
Proved too good for us. It asked too much.
The revolutionary’s Olivetti
Lies beneath its crust of fag-ash
Like a relic of Pompeii.
This is not solitude but something worse.
Carbon paper always looks
Pre-emptively incinerated, and held
One moment burns the hand.
I look over his shoulder as he types:
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down.
One story and one story only,
The mad priest / traveller / deserter
Gone to ground in the deserted village
To discover he was Satan all along. Two pages
On a good day. Finish it, my mother says,
Not looking up from where she marks
A thousand scripts while smoking, knitting,
Re-reading The Daughter of Time.
Other days a single sentence
Made, re-made, abandoned while the freezing fog
Descends and we are once more back
In the romantic cul-de-sac
Designed to suit a firing squad
And not to house a lightning-rod.
Thesis, antithesis, months of labour
In the History Room with fake stained-glass
And panelling, and heads of Silenus
Carved into the fireplace, and the smoke
From all those Player’s Plain
A blue heaven where the lightning brewed.
But poems, what poems? Never a one.
This is not solitude but something worse.
Expelled from every diary and archive
As from the barest anecdote, the exile
Left no place to lose or wish for lingers
As an absence, less than shadow, on the fringe
Of doctored photographs that prove
The exigencies of the day exceeded
The technology: so there he’s not, and yet
As blatant as the mastermind’s cheroot
Self-smoking in the ashtray when the panel
In the fireplace closes silently while an entire
Continent of tunnels floods with sand
To make from mere evasiveness a myth
That we will never hear about. Such vast
Machinery should serve the supernatural,
Should be the adamantine ampersand
That binds the merely human to the gods.
Says Ryan, but all you leave me are these streets
You might have walked, as if they’re evidence
Of how it was to try and fail at politics
And poetry and love and in the end
Become a dead man walking, followed
By the dead police who tracked you down
From false address to false address,
To destitution and beyond,
And when you turned to take them on, became
Mere London planes and lamp-posts once again,
Then crowded in the bathroom mirror,
Fingers to their lips, your gaolers once again.
There was nowhere to go, so there you went.
Again I was come back he went, you liked to say,
As if this too were secret
What mere economy could save you then,
Again I was come back he had went, you liked to say,
The glass in which I will not find you
Now or ever?
Canto VII
Remember this? No? Look again.
This is the only place you’ve ever been.
Drowned in the mirror of the dim afternoon,
In the irreparable betweentimes, bookies vanished
And the mind dried out with waiting, this is the life.
The patient failures glance up intermittently:
If nothing else, a drinker may catch his own eye
And return the slightest nod, as a conspirator
Might look back from the screen
Into this dappled sunken light-and-bitter bar
That never closes if your face is known, the place
The meantime goes to die. The slightest nod.
The barmaid looks up from her Photoplay. A death occurs.
When they run for the boats in The Red Berets
My half-imaginary cousin Patric Doonan meets his end
As Flash, a cheery cockney keen on skirt.
He turns to give covering fire. He falls
And Alan Ladd and Leo Genn and Harry Andrews
Live to jump another day and never mention Flash again.
He climbs from an unmarked grave to take his wage
And drink away the afternoons, perhaps to coincide
With Joxer on the lash, but finds himself at last
Uncredited in 1958 in Chelsea with a choice
Of bigamy or death and switches on the gas.
An underrated piece of realism, before its time
And thus too late. He is not spoken of.
Death is scarcely a rumour in here. Death is nobody’s business,
A different class of a thing in a different district,
Far scream of a siren, scream of a train,
A single line of monorhyme.
See, no one in here is a part of the main.
No one in here is in here at all excepting
Those the afternoon has made immortal.
Time pauses to consider and forgets
What it came for, and one of the sleepwalkers
Raises the piano lid to strike a sour note.
What d’you think you’re playing at? the barmaid snaps.
Who are you then? Hoagy Carmichael?
Now there’s Uncle Jack on the back of a lorry
Delivering a tonic to the troops. He was among the first
To enter Belsen and did not recover. His piano
Haunts successive rooms, his widow’s pre-fab
And his daughter’s house, for neither wants
To let it go. By night you hear how it rehearses
In the silence of discretion, like a pianola
With its paper tongue cut out. The aunts
Do not approve of history: one day you see
Their own grandparents’ trunk from Mafeking
And then you don’t. Oh it was full of worm.
You wouldn’t want to keep a thing like that –
It’s like that damn piano, always there
And in the way. Out of the grave their father
Rises to his work, and he is not what you were told,
A porter at the hospital, but rather an attendant
At the workhouse. Thus the poor corral the poor.
There is a power that invests us with the longing
To forbid. It is the grey attention in the air
Of rented passageways, door after door,
Next flight, half-landing, skylight, blue-black heaven
Where the moon makes clear
That it can promise nothing.
Dare say. Very likely. No nothing at present.
No place like home since home is nowhere.
Yet you rise from the grave of yourself
To this long afternoon in the four-ale hell
Which admits no before and no after
‘And where he must re-enter and re-enter,’
A private cinema of thirst and failure
With the same thing always showing,
Real as you and her yet quite untouchable.
The hand that you extend will pass
Into the mirror where the congress of accusers
With their teeth like washing-boards
Is assembled in the flooded cellar
So that you may reach the truth together
In the cause of épuration. Are you true?
A girl and a gun is the rule
And comrade you have neither. So as it were
Naked I / you entered the conference chamber.
That was a close one. A blast from the past
That raised a stench of gas and sewage
In the deserted street where you stand
Blinking in the chilly teatime sunset,
One of those creeks of London silence
By the water’s edge. Now let the dark assurance
Carry you away once more. Come home with me.
Come down the water-stairs and come aboard. The waters
Braid and shudder, braid and shiver, parting at the pillars of the bridge.
Canto VIII
Eighty years upstream from Hammersmith
On the edge of a nondescript field
That shades off into birch and hawthorn –
Never mind groves: this is barely a place –
There in the hummocks of winter-white grass
(I see what is not there or anywhere)
There lies a mouth forever opening
To discharge a stream of language wedded
To the slur and swallow of the water, in a tongue
As limpid as the speech of nightingales
And silent as the grave’s aphasia. Listen
And you almost hear it almost speak.
The fault is yours as much as any
Saturnine conjunction of the stars.
You leaned your back against that door
And fell straight down the cellar stairs
Into the pool of darkness standing there,
Illimitably patient in its cave.
And when you climbed back dripping to the light
You couldn’t spit it out, just what it was
That you imagined you were playing at.
Since when the daylight swells and wavers.
Dust-motes in a shaft of sunlight hang
Suspended like the chalk that never settles
In the glass you raise and raise until you choke,
That cannot quench your lack but deepens it
With every swallow. Drowned already.
Who are you to raise the dead, require
The truth of them or make lachrimae rerum
Run dry? Or like Procrustes fit them
To a history they could not know was taking place
There on the wireless, there on the bus,
There when a woman took time to powder her face
And arrive at a separate peace.
These people have a right to leave
The faintest outline on the air and die.
Turn a deaf corner and the buses blare