It Says Here

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