by Sean O'Brien
Beneath the flattened thunder of the flyover
And glasses rattle on the shelves of bar-rooms
Sleeping off the night before. The tide of murk
Descends into itself again. The houseboats settle,
Jury-rigged at the pontoons forever,
As figures from Ravilious emerge on deck
To water the chrysanthemums displayed
In fire-buckets on the cabin roofs
As if this were the prospect of the future –
Demi-pastoral in cardigans with jazz,
While round the corner bombsites flower
With fireweed and Britain falls to Churchill
In a peaceable Dunkirk from sheer exhaustion,
Though the numbers do not lie. That year
The Oxford boat will sink; the re-staged race
Sees Cambridge winning: there on bikes and balconies
Along the Mall the crowding phantoms of festivity
Have not stopped cheering and can see no reason
Not to live this afternoon forever.
Where are Juno and Joxer in this picture?
Not quite gone, though time in their world shortens
Like the odds. November comes and those
Who built the Skylon tear it down again,
A Festival – a past – abolished with a bonfire
Raining ash into the river like a war
In miniature, lest we recall
What might have been had England kept the faith
So many had professed in one another.
The play is done, the sets are struck, the hall
Has always staged this empty silence. Overnight
The words of Fry and Duncan cease to be
Anachronistic and instead were never here.
So too the lodger with a single suitcase
Leaves the room as bare as ever and the landing
With its smell of soup and death
Immutably indifferent. Gone under the river
To build a new tunnel, gone over the hill, gone home
To no fixed address. Not known, except
That I know, though I’m desperate to forget,
The awful hopefulness of poverty
Averted by a day, an inch, a wash
And a decent shave, a district like the one escaped,
With evening bar-rooms in their palls of smoke
And jobs that might exist if x remembers.
I come looking for the exit. Not down here
Along these flooded corridors knee-deep
In Chronicles and Heralds. Not in this
Abandoned labyrinth where smoke and water fuse
And pinups leer and if ever cowards fled
Then it was all so unimaginably different and all
So long ago. That’s no excuse, says Ryan.
Canto IX
It is far away, sixty years later.
This dying city’s leaking steam
From every joint. The libraries are closed,
The discards burning in the mayoral hearth,
And out along the ragged edge
The book of January is white at dawn
Like the long field under hoarfrost
That divides this old estate
On which no library ever stood
And where the poor are exiled now.
To ignorance and rickets.
You cannat eat a poem, canny lad.
Past the full, the tall moon
Climbs aboard its long farewell,
And from the coldest depths
A dog might hear the peal of star-clouds
In the moment of extinction.
At this late stage we find
A promise in these distant facts
When scale must serve for sacrament.
And after all, this book of January
Remains unwritten, does it not?
Why should its pages not record
The works and days of hands like these
Before they perish from the earth?
Here come the early walkers now
To vanish down desire paths
Across the clear, new-published
Whiteness, with white voices raised
As if this field of tall, enormous cold
Was once upon a time a chamber
Where the poor could get a hearing
In a parliament of frost, with words
That might bear scrutiny,
And even now, without recourse,
Perhaps not even memory itself,
They keep a kind of faith
With rumours of a Silver Age
By shouting as they meet and part
And disappear. Ten minutes
See them on their way
From zero hours to graveyard shift.
If they would truly wish it still,
Beyond the habit of forgetfulness
There is another story to be told.
And yet. And yet the book of January
Is having none of it.
I am a text whose only page
Is white, it says. I am a book of breath,
That freezes for a moment and is gone.
I’ve spent my life accumulating books
I now discard for want of space –
Or maybe inclination, since that faith
Seems founded on the air in which it melts.
And yet it’s cold, and men once more
Become the wolves they always were.
Juno, Joxer, after ’47, after ’63,
You would think this is scarcely a winter at all,
But it bites, till the spirit considers itself
An illusion bred out of a settlement
None but the powerless believe in now.
There are people, if you can believe them,
Who think it is nostalgia saying so,
And that we have no history,
While by the logic of their frankness, they
Themselves are scarcely there: cold weather
Thins them down until you see straight through
To the graveyard they will build on next.
Juno and Joxer, tell me: what am I
Contracted to except the past, the solitudes
I cross in search of you? What am I but the tale
You did not think that you were telling?
Canto X
At the end of the garden runs a river
I will never reach. They walk there
In the silence of the intimate, and with the day
So vast and patient they have nothing on the clock.
I come indoors and light the fire
And look up at the flickering leer
On the face of Silenus carved over the mantel.
The old are sent here from the future
To ensure that we despair.
Better never to have been, but failing that
Stick to aesthetics, which in turn
Will stick to you like napalm. Thus Ryan.
Deep beneath the hearth a beam is smouldering,
Ignited by a memory that leaves the city
Mined with unexploded ordnance
Sunk among the bones in flooded graves.
Re-reading Captain January and Braddock by the fire
I am part, still, of the done war.
The old weight-bearing beam consumes itself
Austerely, by the splinter, in a steady, tended rage
Whose day will come and look like vindication
When the stack of storeys falls into itself
And through itself, and down again
And down, through the final dark river to nowhere,
For underneath this fury that will seek
Its own extinction in the wreck
Of all that stands and call it victory,
There is no bedrock to be found.
Imaginary England
Rises for a moment like a gas-flare
From a sewer and is gone.
Now leave me wi
th the house divided
To await its immolation, to bear witness here,
Complicit by the fact of being born
And drinking from the poisoned well.
Let books and earth and oily water burn,
Likewise the living and the dead,
But let me remember the possible days,
The river, where the garden ends
And those I lost are walking still.
Little Pig Finnegan
The alternative version
The farmer was talking
And Little Pig Finnegan
Heard what the farmer had said
That one’s tail is too straight
And there’s no time to wait
So he’s going for bacon instead tra la
He’s going for bacon instead
When your pig saw his ass
In a large looking-glass
The farmer had not been mistaken
Young Finnegan boked
At the thought he’d be smoked
And he felt all alone and forsaken
I’m going for bacon instead tra la
I’m going for bacon instead
But his big sister Bridget –
That’s Biddy for short –
Said you’ll be for breakfast
If ever you’re caught
So I’m putting these mints
In this bundle I’ve brought
Now run away Finnegan
Run run away
On your little pig legs
Or you’ll be the bacon
That goes with the eggs
The bacon that goes with the eggs tra la
The bacon that goes with the eggs
So Finnegan fled
With a price on his head
(Or in fact on his little straight tail)
Away far away
Till the breaking of day
When he came to a farm
A wee place of great charm
Where the farmer’s wife beckoned him in tra la
Where the farmer’s wife beckoned him in
She fed him and bathed him
And fed him again
Till the sleep rose up over his head
She put on a white coat
And she cut his wee throat
Till he thought holy fuck now I’m dead tra la
Till he thought holy fuck now I’m dead
Then she minced him for sausage instead tra la
She minced him for sausage instead
The Trespasser
I had forgotten the fidelity with which
You beat the bounds of the estate
You think is yours and yet is not.
Likewise your fury at the trespasser
Who comes and goes and does not care,
Whose merest wish unlocks a private gate.
You were not called; nor were you sent.
There is no one you represent.
Now tend your rage in private, please.
Switch out the lights. Hand in your keys.
You are not who, nor are you where
You may suppose. You’re not all there.
The Long Field
Late summer still, just barely. People are away
The long field’s mown. The aspens wait
For the wind to bring rain. And when it comes
Rain has itself for company this afternoon –
The roar, the hush, the sudden afterwards
When everything looks round as though
Awoken from exhausted wakefulness.
We are old now, you tell me. The lives we have led
Lead here, to this hour after the rain.
We have tried to be those on whom nothing is wasted
While knowing that all this is merely the case,
As the pronouns are, or those dim figures
Swimming up with neither names nor dates,
The decorative impulse gone to seed,
Delivering their gifts of obligation to recall
The place, the year, inconsequent and labyrinthine.
The sound of the Metro hangs in the wind.
Late afternoon, with its sensible emptiness.
Fresh clouds come gliding in from westwards
On columns of cross-hatch on cross-hatch.
When the rain begins again, the horses
Move in slowly underneath the trees as if
Not quite invited, left out by the travellers
To wait with a tin bath of leaves and black water.
Is it a sacred mystery, this mere contingency?
It places you beside me, reading at the window,
Breaking off to comment, deaf to the clock.
Why not? If I could I would live here forever,
Feeding my redundant papers to the flames.
But there’s the far-off clatter of the Metro
Veering suddenly much closer, like a carriage
On the Ghost Train hurtling into view –
While we are watching fifty years ago
With brandy-snap and inarticulate desires –
Then plunging back behind the double doors
Into the night where girls are screaming.
Somewhere in there is a hairpin bend
Where a skeleton station-master waits,
His fob-watch nesting in his finger-bones.
Where was I? Siding with the elements
That take no sides. Let’s close the window now
But oh forget me not, forget me not.
Let’s watch the rain emulsify and slide
Across the glass that holds our faces,
Carefully committing them to memory.
Cicadas
We watch the sea below. It seems to be our task
To keep in mind this blue mirage with no horizon,
Neither wine nor water though we’d drink it if we could
In search of somewhere else like this but not like this.
The olive trees condense dry shadow-pools
To stand on in the burning groves. And there is music
Of a sort, when the cicadas once more
Strike up the rehearsal. They are serial amnesiacs.
Imprisoned in the sun as we are in the cave,
They offer up the rusty execrations of the air
Against itself. They grind against its adamantine wall
And then are switched off like machines
Expelled from history they never know about.
And then they re-awake. They re-awake. They re-awake.
Your Kind of Town
This is the kind of drinking town
That does a lot of quiet service
Teaching people not to write.
Discuss the concept with a beer,
A fifth, the whole distillery.
The wives depart. They take your life
In suitcases in strangers’ cars.
There are decisions to be made:
Go fishing, shoot yourself, or hit the bars.
A hard school, but you’d miss the camaraderie
Of other solitary egotists
Who like to think they keep the faith
And die a little faster every day
And one day don’t show up. Let me get this.
Try as you may, you cannot stop. And now
Although your mind was somewhere else
It seems you went and wrote another book.
You live on Maker’s Mark and Listerine,
Avoid advice and wake up in the dark
Beside a scream that claims you for its own.
It’s always good to know you’re not alone.
Scene of
February. The leaves turn white
from weariness at being dead.
The fences slump on bailer twine.
Fire in an oildrum, purpose unknown.
More birches and more fog
than all the bears in Canada
know what to do with.
To say nothing of the yellow-brow
n
moquette squalor of indoors,
where nothing works
but repetition: vodka,
child neglect and smack.
The place has spent a lifetime, several,
waiting for its murder.
You could call it a project.
Someone passing through
must grasp its real
potential, and the current
residents, yeah, they want it –
dead, be dead, be done with this.
Give it a week. If they could
ever concentrate they might
be dramatists themselves.
No matter: here it comes.
Meet the Monster
‘Give me again / . . . the designer’s sketches’
I ought to have been grateful. I was not.
The far side of the table kept insisting
As though I’d failed to grasp the urgency,
The need, the oh-so-human theme.
So something was amiss with me,
Rejecting first encouragement, then sympathy.
Because I did not share the overwhelming sense
That to emote like fuck was proof
Of deeper feeling, I must be
A monster and a shadow, one who merely
Watches others do the living for me –
Or maybe worse, too well brought up
To say that when you talk like this
You bore me, while the thing itself,
The shadow-stuff, the shadow-salt
That scalds the eyes and flays the tongue,
The shadow-milk winched up
In rusty buckets from a well of bile
And waiting on the step at dawn
Like life, cannot be simply named to suit
Your mood of anxious affirmation
Or a calendar of wishing. Oh my dears, in short,
The shadow-land with its ten thousand pits
Is not the place to do your fishing.
Anger
Scarcely are we introduced and you’re in residence.
You say I know what’s good for me. The light in here’s
Too bright, so make it dingy, thirty watts, the Fifties,
With a smell of damp and cats and time gone bad. So can I feel
The imminence, a little bit? Just try and stop me. On the hour,
Somewhere upstairs, the argument that never ends is back,
Between the shouts of rage and the persistent quiet tone
That could provoke a murder, but not yet, because there is
A piece of this establishment that anger has not claimed
And has not found till now – a place to sit and listen, halfway
Up the stairs. You count the steps for me. That’s right. From there