The awareness of a mortal state. When cliché reassumes its rare power and forces on you a truth that you can handle only in set phrases, communicate nothing. It is spitting into the sea.
XV
A female ghost of repeated weeping inhabits such nineteenth-century terraces as these. A coil of tears can unspring throughout the day in each untenanted room. Heat got into her useless bones, made her sorry of her limbs, melted her down Arethusa-like into mere flow of summer and never-again. The ghost rises earlier and earlier, doing less and less, an imagined embarrassment to the unseeing company who otherwise enjoy however little life there might be in her appallingly lengthened day.
There is silent crying, crying with murmurs, crying and snivelling, crying with involuntary whimpering, crying with jerking motions. Is there something sexual in the ghost’s relief? Bodiless, she finds the nearest consolation: abandonment to spasms. Those who live in these houses share her spasms of the mind, shut down except to peer over the verge of a sorrow down which again and again to tumble.
The sky bright through ice-blue curtains, pattern name dot.com waterfall. The blasted birds sounding like fury. One city bombed. Another city threatened by a hurricane. The ghost is not getting through. The lights flicker at all hours in the windows across the street. I have not tried to make contact.
No lifting but what one can make out of this grief.
XVI
I would be taught to write by a writer. I would be taught to write by a writer who likes students who chase after his liking. The writer would not like me; not as a student. I would produce work for regular assessment. Writing does not take place in the locus of disappointment. Words do not lie low in silence, forming and re-forming, being taken out and letting in the sunnish blue. Being taught by a writer, I would be among other writers. Sharing a stall makes writers better. The young don tells me about a young don’s sonnets that are beautifully controlled. The young don looks ill with admiration of a messy poem, before asking whether all the allusions had been meant. The young don could not translate ‘lyrical castrates’ back into the original language, and who ever dreamt up such a judgmental phrase? The young don giggles, looking helpful and undisturbed but for his attitude of fear before a true thing-that-is-not-to-be-encouraged. To have a task, and a method, and the need to know the non-writing world, is to make a claim on the property of aloneness. It was in the search for educators that the habits of holding back were learnt. I walk about two rooms in spills of exaltation, making no cents.
The trees in the park have been clipped artfully. They look wild. It is as if they just happen to have swept aside or dropped one of their own branches, avoided an angle or tilted their top to open another and another vista: plum foliage, spikes from harsher climates and thousand-year-plus traditions of scratching non-representative trees on rock or painting a leaf, with exactitude, on silk. The ground moves beneath the feet if the neck tips back. Bursts of yellow-green capture and contribute to the heightening of light. A man from another city, walking here, collided with a female student. Their eyes met. He knew she was The One. From her spiritual, creative look, he thought that she must be a student of English. Now the man was on a quest. Each weekend, he travelled from his home to this city, hunting his Beatrice. In the English Faculty buildings, he sought a photo board. He identified the college nearest the park. Impressed by his persistent entering of University buildings without permission, the college gave him access to their email lists. For was this not true love in the early twenty-first century? Fortunate the man not to have fallen in love with a bank clerk or estate agent! For who would have tolerated his quest had he tried to pursue it through such offices? The eagle claws of Barclays would have torn him. He would have been disdained by the dispensers of letting contracts. Fortunate the man not to be a goth, a punk, a Rastafarian, a black-toothed, straw-hatted, mountain-eyed guitarist leading a donkey, or anything other than pink-skinned and with a reasonable array of teeth! And fortunate the man to be a man! For who knows what his Beatrice did want, in her presumed state of wanting without knowing she wanted, but that surely she wanted a man?
This day begins late enough. The speaking voice wakes up so claggy. Read aloud a verse by someone else, to re-tune it? I could think only of Dante’s stony poems, pietrose. I wanted to draw on their clunky power. Yet I did not desire to start the day with that scatter of yellow hair and ardour trapped in consonantal rocks – the movement being a little too slow, the impetuosity being that of a beast’s snarl even as the metal-trapped leg trails behind. I desired again the marvellous impulse of the Inferno. All of a sudden this appeared to me as purely intellectual in its emotion. When the light, sinful beasts come leaping down towards the poet, they course as smoothly as the terza rima. They may be bad creatures within the poem, but they are written with, and move with, the ease and brilliance of a mind that has slipped its traces. The poet of the Commedia does not begin by putting on a yoke of religion or false habit of sublimation. The poetry itself is a freeing of the mind from obsession with a love-object, in that it can play to the uttermost in every intellectual system available to it. There is true emotion in the full engagement of the mind’s powers.
So I have read nothing aloud. And this morning I have not been silent, nor read before anything else a good text, nor written one real thing here! I am sending this to you now, and hope that you will rewrite it; I love how you make the time.
Measures of Expatriation — VII
Syllable of Dolour
For the whole space that’s in the tyrant’s grasp,
And the rich East to boot.
– Shakespeare, Macbeth IV. iii.
my pretty ones see i’m small if you will
only go away in Tempo Peril slalom heedless colourfast
nor ask just look back like i’m shy hell
ice inwardly sutures Psyche crying mountain boy crying wolf
flow as flesh reversing into youth head picked kicked
glued old calabash laughter on the inside only where
it hurts perspective please believe this the lake sunk
towns drowned fairs hypothermia naps cobalt whisht non temere
Pobrecillo Tam
‘Only I do not like the fashion of your garments. You will say they are Persian attire, but let them be changed.’
– Shakespeare, King Lear III. vi.
raise yr gme said my friend lucky
in love since going online
to learn moves that lead from geek
to playa. go to the big
baldwin city; life’s laid out like
yr sister’s tea set that time
she spilled the milk & didn’t
cry for a real melting knife.
chamoised my head & was going,
radiant as a hermit’s cave
in cappadocia; fled Him
& my other dogs & wall-
papered my sister’s braced smile
in carious photographs.
well caramel you can cross,
pass, shoot for the stars, scrape sky
for a living but don’t hang
yr washing from the window –
the old man doesn’t like it;
& see that tree? it translates
spring will bring again bread stone
scorpion to hand; always
afternoon if once you stand
in His light. i prayed for lift-off
& became a little horse
shadowed by an always car;
i prayed for inside, needed
shadow like a crown on my head,
lived off foods composed of sub-
stitutions. Lady of sit-
uations, i pray for lift-
off, tailoring my head & bust
to rise above this city
of unkadare nature,
pushkin types, fatalistic
pedestrians who’re at the start
of my game, who’re my true loves,
if only their hearts were Ga
briel,
& not being borgesed to death
staying off the drive-by streets,
mummified in the seven
sealed orifices firstnamed home.
Sycorax Whoops
‘I’ th’ commonwealth I would, by contraries, Execute all things […]’
– Shakespeare, The Tempest II. i.
Mother! plague of angels in the house – thinkin stranglin,
oh shit, applied bakin soda remedies instead, witherin
final refrigerator angels cloggin language
like they’d free us from knowin it’s true further
Father Zeus airdrops party favours, fractures syntax,
gettin the glitter out of war where we’re struck stuck livin,
sex existin, plane to sea. Mother, our cities! cold
called on Aphrodite, AIDS worker, to blonde bond us
again with triage ties of love. Maa! Thinkin writin.
Turned over a new leaf to indict science silence
siloed whiteness witness; was a portal, no paper;
near as narnia, fell in; this darling darkling plain!
It’s rainin in Ilium. There’s somethin classic
about this situation which eye must not, nor heart,
articulate, though bearin it, we do, and have sung
songs whose vibration slips the mascara from those gods,
though a man lookin down on us dogs us with kind thoughts
he kind of attributes to us as tributes to him.
Mother! plunge your tongue where ever with brokenness we’re deafen’d defend fed. Take apart our part. Launch in sighted
darkness our pack of languages, fluid as hounds,
all ready: bathed: riteful: already intending chase:
Un Furl
Any love
meant as equal
is momentary
momentarily unequal is equal
if love
reckons time
knows not equals
Energy pie
cuts recurrent
numbers, finishes
sweet-and-sorry plates
Crumbs, dolcezza
defend the knife
nobody likes
for no body
likes it
Not ‘I,
you or me,
Thou and I’ –
This is
it, is
it and it
its itness
it’s itness
Who decides
whose in-charge
electrifies what passing
belle of limits?
Recoup value
for re-cooped
available valuables?
Sacrifice this good,
Who decides?
Good, good
doesnae transfur;
disney compute:
faithful rewrites
‘until death’
pandemic formula
various loveprosy
miss difference
in recognition
miss recognizable
in differentiate, shun
love’s capitalists
worry: six
cats equivalent
one convent;
one man,
half a boat,
five wives
and two ghosts
unbalanced
if add
six-tenths person,
remembered and dismembered
trees, three
over two jobs,
sundry passports,
samurai, and pedestrianism?
A way of working
word for word
breath in breath
skin on skin
dream to dream
transfurrable skills
say let’s
play with you
Stalker
for K. M. Grant
He waits. Without knowing me,
he waits. The tips of branches,
edible and winey, bring
spring by suggestion to him
who in autumn dawn, eager,
with wet knees, disregards me,
being drawn by me. He waits
and in me he waits. I branch,
the form is branching, it bounds
like sight from dark to bright, back
again. The form is from me:
it is him, poem, stag, first sight
and most known. In him I wait:
(when he falls) needs must (hot heap),
nothing left over (treelike
no longer) nor forlorn: we’re
totalled.
Acknowledgements
Leila Capildeo and family; Katie Grant and household; Madre Marina Barbero (i.m.); Tracy Assing; Nadine Brooker; the Byragie Marajh family, and in honour of the memory and legacy of Pandit Kaysho; Pat Byrne; Madeleine Campbell; Theo Celot; Joan Dayal; Elspeth Duncan; Ian Duhig; Anthony Esposito; Giles Goodland; Revd Dr Peter Groves; Laura Guthrie; Lucy Hannah; Jeremy Hardingham; Katy Hastie; Susannah Herbert; Idara Hippolyte and family; Eve Lacey; Nicholas Laughlin; Maisie Lawrence; John Robert Lee; Vladimir Lucien; Agata Maslowska; Michael Mendis; Rod Mengham; Iain Morrison; Inge Milfull; Kei Miller; Metu Miller; Drew Milne; Ron Paste; Shivanee Ramlochan; Giselle Rampaul; Tanya Singh; Attillah Springer; Tanya Syed; Molly Vogel; Courtenay Williams; John Whale; Café Writers, Norwich; Commonwealth Writers, Commonwealth Foundation; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; The Oratory of St Alphege, Southwark; Michael Schmidt, generous emperor.
IN PRINT
Cambridge Literary Review; The Missing Slate; PN Review; Poetry & Audience; Prac Crit; Wasafir; Cybermohalla Hub (Sarai-CSDS and Sternberg Press, 2012); Disappearing Houses (Vahni Capildeo and Andre Bagoo, Alice Yard, 2011); Furies: A Poetry Anthology of Women Warriors (forbookssake, 2014); New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015); The Arts of Peace (Two Rivers Press, 2014); Gathered Here Today: Celebrating Geraldine Monk at 60 (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2012).
ONLINE
a glimpse of; Blackbox Manifold; Almost Island; Clinic; Gangway; Molly Bloom; Poetry and Pictures at the Museum; Shoes Or No Shoes?; Tender; Visual Verse.
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.
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Measures of Expatriation Page 11