It Says Here

by Sean O'Brien

  I get to exercise a choice and finally be overwhelmed

  By my inheritance: so now the inexhaustible despair,

  The whispers and the screams are mine. By day these lunatics

  Are deadpan though dry-mouthed with rage. By night

  They break new ground in the monotony of pain. But thank you

  For advancing me this wisdom, which on second glance

  Appears to be a debt that cannot be repaid, while I no longer

  Occupy my body only, but a corner of this airless room

  You’ve locked me in to celebrate the old religion too –

  Its vinegar and loathing. Plenitude. So what’s wrong now? I ask.

  It’s always you, you, you, you say. Why is that? Tell me. Tell me.

  Metro Tunnel

  Try not to get carried away when you enter

  The foot-tunnel under the tracks. It’s flooded

  And full of weird shite – novels and jogging pants,

  Tricycles, popsicles, animal bones

  And breathless utterances addressed to brick.

  You can see what might arise – there’s murder, yes,

  But also the attempt to make this ruined temple

  Give up its secrets, any secret. So, unwary

  And down here by accident, it could be

  Agonizing to suppose this Untergang

  Merely exemplifies thousands, with only

  Minor local variations in the range of

  Fetishes and discards on display: a plimsoll

  And a ra-ra skirt are interchangeable; the cover

  Of Dusty in Memphis in this dispensation belongs

  Here beside Max Bygraves’ later work, as no one

  But a headcase could deny. Remember

  How at all times we must bear in mind

  That this is not the preface but the end.

  New evidence will not have come to light. It’s not

  An opportunity for reconsideration.

  Here among these sacred objects God is not

  A detail or a faint aroma. He’s just not.

  Wood

  But I moot been in prison thurgh Saturne,

  And eke thurgh Juno, jalous and eek wood

  There are no markers in the woods, the woods themselves

  So old, so long sold off into disuse that what appears

  To be a woodpile is a drift of fallen birches turning

  On the air’s slow tide, through which the tide’s slow air

  Is playing on repeat. This is the wood of the mad

  Where under Saturn Palamon would ride,

  With its limited palette, grey, brown, grey, grey-white,

  Furnished like a secondary hell, its watercourses

  Thick with time and halting altogether as they reach

  The old sluice at the boundary where all this ends.

  The path curves back towards the core, the wood’s heart

  Neither beating nor unbroken, when the air will pause,

  Release itself across the dead white leaves

  And having taken stock, be nowhere.

  The Shirt of Nessus

  He exits through the kitchen

  Seeing no one, to the woods of boyhood

  Where he means to blow his brains out.

  This is in July. Among the trees

  They have anticipated his intention.

  He is relieved of his possessions

  But will keep the Shirt of Nessus.

  He writes letters to his wife,

  And to his son in the inferno

  That approaches from the east,

  Then last his old professor, now retired

  To a lake where he is watching

  Barges dumping gold. The old man sends

  His manservant and housekeeper

  Away with thanks and blessings.

  The prisoner sees this, sees all

  The failures of the slow conspiracy.

  Soon tanks will cross the Vistula.

  He must write his other testament

  On the insides of his eyelids,

  Hoping that his eyes survive him

  When his body is unearthed

  Inside the prison yard by those

  Who come a day, an hour too late,

  But see smoke rising from the earth.

  It may be so. And then

  One autumn day he wakes inside

  A state he cannot name, of knowing

  Every scratch upon the iron door,

  And all the names from which

  The screams that rise all hours

  From the sweat-soaked underworld

  Have been detached. It smells,

  He smells, of burning now.

  The shirt of Nessus swarms

  With self-consuming roses.

  Yes, he writes, although his hands

  Resemble candlewax that drips

  To seal the page before his book

  Is done, I think there is

  Another place where we might live,

  Beyond the lime-pits in the baking fields

  Train after train is passing through

  Ablaze and bound for nowhere.

  And yet, he adds, black roses

  Coiling from his eyes, to wait

  Among the rags of time, and to lament,

  Must be the only consolation.

  The Golden Age

  In the unselfconscious kingdom

  Where vegetables vastly loved

  Because that’s what they’re for –

  It was the wish of the divine

  That fig and cucumber entwine –

  There was a gate, but nobody alas

  Has found it since we found the means

  To speak of gates, and love, and war.

  That enviable greenness can’t survive

  The mind’s eye where we treasure it

  As evidence of how to live

  Or might have lived, before.

  The tempter comes to whisper

  Measure it: to each his own,

  To each her long submission

  To the greater cause. My, how we’ve grown.

  The Sea-Coast of Bohemia

  From the distempered hallway you would hear

  The alcoholic painter cursing overhead

  That Clement Greenberg had him by the balls.

  The girls all disappeared, except the proto-Goth

  Who wouldn’t play but hung her stockings on a line

  Out back – pour épater your man, he would confide.

  With all that the jism steaming of an afternoon,

  And green infected sputum raining down,

  Dispensed by the musicians up beneath the roof

  Awaiting news of what to borrow next,

  Was there enough to constitute a scene?

  The time the horse went back upstairs and stopped

  And shat outside the painter’s door, it seemed

  The building would collapse, as was foretold

  The night that lavatory fell through the bathroom floor

  With someone’s pregnant girlfriend sat there skinning up.

  Was this the boue they sought to be nostalgic for?

  Or maybe just another in-between, a place to smoke

  And drink and fuck and sulk until the signal changed

  And carried them still further down the drain,

  To Goole and Crowle and Bawtry where in God’s name

  Surely no one could be meant to live. All gone.

  Except the painter who would die in bondage

  To his art by courtesy of Buckfast, and the Goth

  Who had a choice – découpage, or the fetish clubs

  Down by the docks – and plumped for neither,

  Waiting out the days before her broken mirror,

  Wishing she was young and sinister again.

  Blue Afternoons

  i.m. Menno Wigman

  Those were the afternoons. We let them go to waste.

  To do so in a dim blue fog of Number 6 and Afgh
an Black

  Seemed like a blow for freedom, so we struck it, smoked

  And went on sitting there long after dark with three LPs

  And a packet of skins with the cover torn off,

  With aspirations and bronchitis, crablice and a chronic

  Inability to put the empties on the step six feet away.

  We worked with what there was to hand, so while the world

  Lay all before us we could never find a use for it.

  Then, later on, we died, three streets from where we sat,

  The wrong side of the Hull with all the bridges burnt

  And the survivors far too short of energy themselves

  To stand and reminisce outside the crematorium

  Or scatter us, though the scattering of ashes was an art

  We’d all perfected privately, reclining long ago

  On mangy sofas while the record jumped and no one could be

  Arsed to deal with it. Those were the days. They really were.

  Comedians

  In memory of Mathew Sweeney

  ‘We were no good as murderers. We were clowns.’

  James Simmons

  It was our last engagement in Berlin.

  Once more as if by magic we stepped out

  Through the curtains of Nebel und Nacht

  To do our stuff and parley with the guard

  On the gate at the British Army hotel

  At which by some appalling stroke

  Of dark absurdity we had been booked.

  We stood there in our long black coats

  And homburgs, with matching black holdalls.

  The squaddie unshouldered his weapon

  And rang in to summon assistance. So,

  Should we read him a poem? Or do one

  Back into the darkness? We waited,

  Since waiting was what we did best.

  We had out-bored a hundred terminals,

  Born to the trade, man and boy, man and boy,

  And as with Mike and Bernie you might ask:

  So which one is meant to be funny?

  Either, neither, both. We’d died a death

  In halls from Magdeburg to Spandau

  But our timing was uncanny, coming on

  Like this and in this of all places,

  Just as they winched the iron down for good

  And closed the palace of varieties. At last

  A sergeant came, a regular humourless

  UnFalstaffian man, who could not tell

  Which side if any we were on. For an age

  He examined the passports, one red, one green,

  Of Estragon Goldberg and Vladimir McCann.

  For all I know we may be waiting still.

  And There You Were

  The streets were full of fallen leaves, the clocks were going back.

  I was early for something, half-reading the paper,

  The bar behind Euston packed out with the young after work.

  I admired their laconic assignations.

  I was not young. Nor, certainly, could you have been,

  But before it could even seem strange, there you were.

  The woman, a blonde, was charmed and ceasing to be watchful.

  You were mid-anecdote, mid-apothegm, mid-joke, midway

  To somewhere, neither old nor young but like yourself.

  So, glancing up from time to time, you admired

  The barmaid who had pinned her black hair up,

  Admired shyly and in awe the white nape of her neck –

  Which I’d heard you several times declare

  The most beautiful thing about women.

  And if your companion noticed, as surely she must have,

  She seemed not to mind, having instantly come to accept

  That being generous to a fault you must be shared.

  Then as the bar emptied, long after I ought to have left,

  You stayed on, confirming a purpose –

  This and not some other place would be your destination

  For the moment. And of course you didn’t see me.

  The tube-lines spread beneath your feet, the glasses

  With a faint vibration went on sitting on their pools

  Along the bar. That night the world was still in love with you

  And had to claim you back again, since you were dead,

  As I well knew, and your companion was there

  For someone else, or never there at all,

  But when you vanished and I made to leave

  You lingered in the mirror for an eye-blink,

  And again you didn’t see me, but pausing where you stood

  Gazed out into the future to beguile it, and there seemed

  No doubt the future would require

  Your presence as a charm against the dark.

  The Rendezvous

  I missed our rendezvous, James Wright, of course I did.

  I was asleep, if you can call it sleep,

  In a roomette bunk with North Dakota howling past.

  I missed the snow-swept freight-yards

  Where the northern railroads meet in one great chord

  At Fargo, which you feared and loathed,

  A city nowadays known if at all

  For Steve Buscemi’s booted leg

  Protruding from the chipper into which

  Peter Stormare has already fed the rest of him.

  I won’t debate you is Buscemi’s final line. You said

  You feared the War between the States

  Made everyone secede from everyone:

  Now multitudes within the multitude

  Who have to live like things have learned to hate

  All those with whom they share the gift of suffering.

  And as I say, I missed the rendezvous,

  But in the dream’s eye I could see you

  Strike a match against the engine’s iron hide –

  Show an affirming flame, as someone said,

  And in that fearful blizzard.

  But both of us were too far gone

  And then the train swung southwards

  Into Minnesota, and though it cried all night

  It went unheard at William Duffy’s farm

  Where snow was burying the horses

  And their treasury of dung.

  Charlene the stern attendant woke us

  Thirty minutes out from Minneapolis St Paul,

  Twin cities which you knew as Hell

  Through all those winters lost in Dinkytown

  Among the legendary drunks.

  When they denied you tenure finally

  You lived with three shirts and one shoe,

  A borrowed suitcase stuffed with symphonies

  And a glass that concealed an invisible hole.

  You broke new ground in being so far indisposed

  That even Berryman was fit to deputize.

  Down there in Hell the black Ohio

  Secretly consumed the Mississippi

  Every freezing night, and you alone could see

  The blessed company of miners and their angel-whores

  Who gathered on the burning shore to sing

  The hymn they learned in grade school

  Which was all that they possessed.

  At journey’s end I looked for you

  At Union Depot, down the empty halls,

  And in the bars and slaughter-yards

  Above the river, and in the faces of the derelicts

  Outside the library built by James J. Hill –

  The very day they shut it down

  And all the knowledge had to die. No luck,

  And I am sorry I was late again

  Though maybe what you had to share in sum

  Was fear and solitude, which I have always known,

  And anyway, as you were anxious to affirm,

  The best is yet to come. Drink up.

  Januarius

  The two-faced god of gates and entrance-ways

  Turns only one in your direction.
He has other tasks

  Requiring his disdain. He’s never heard of you

  And if there were a list your name would not be on it.

  So you won’t be going out. And anyway, where to?

  You turn aside to find the gnomon risen halfway

  From its clock of icy brass, as though the sword

  That ought to save the nation is stuck fast,

  With no explanatory literature to hand

  But what you scrape like hard frost from a windscreen,

  While the globe the sundial represents as flat

  Has turned from verb to noun, from wintering to winter,

  And will turn no longer. This must be the end –

  The fixed stars glitter and Orion on his frieze of night

  Is polishing his blade, aloof, peremptory

  In his immobile progress down the darkened corridor

  From ‘nowhere into nowhere’, with his cloak of ice

  Flung out behind him like a comet’s trail.

  This can’t be happening. It’s not: but we were not designed

  For stories with no deeds or conversation. Januarius,

  Take pity. Tell us anything. A sad tale’s best for winter.

  Note on Hammersmith

  In recent years a great many people have begun to investigate their family histories with the help of specialist websites and convenient software. Among the reasons for this are understandable curiosity, the desire to establish some facts, and the need to test the veracity of stories handed down. Ancestors underwrite our existence (so we assume, or hope) in a way we cannot quite do for ourselves. This seems more important as we grow older, although we risk dispelling some of the more romantic and agreeable tales and impressions that have come down to us. A couple of members of my own family are at work on genealogical projects of this kind, finding their way back to the soldiers of the Crimean War, or to Methodist missionaries working in the Pacific. I’m interested in what they discover, and in their absorption in it, but not in undertaking such investigations myself. So in one way it might seem odd to be writing a poem such as Hammersmith, which appears to depend on family history in order to exist.

  Robert Lowell asked, ‘Why not say what happened?’ Good question. But Hammersmith is to a significant degree a work of the imagination. It’s informed by things my parents told me about life in London in wartime and the early post-war years, and prompted by my memories, by walking about, by reading and film, but it makes no claims to documentary accuracy. It bears more resemblance to a dream than a factual record; its task is to evoke rather than substantiate. Even if I wanted to write a chronicle I would be unable to do so, because my information is limited. There is a great deal I wasn’t told or didn’t ask about, and much of it is a material not encompassed by libraries or archives, things known only to those who were there at the time, almost all of whom are dead now. For the purposes of the imagination, I find that reconstruction does not fit the bill.