Nobody

by Alice Oswald

  NOBODY

  A HYMN TO THE SEA

  Alice Oswald

  When Agamemnon went to Troy, he paid a poet to spy on his wife, but another man rowed the poet to a stony island and seduced her. Ten years later, Agamemnon came home and was murdered.

  Odysseus, setting out at the same time, was blown off course. It took him another ten years to get home, but his wife, unlike Agamemnon’s, had stayed faithful.

  This poem lives in the murkiness between those stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.

  ‘Also there was a poet there, whom Agamemnon, when he went to Troy, ordered strictly to guard his wife; but once Fate had forced her to be seduced, then Aegistheus took the poet to a desert island and left him there as a lump of food for the birds, so the lover willingly took her willing to his house…’

  (The Odyssey 3 267)

  As the mind flutters in a man who has travelled widely

  and his quick-winged eyes land everywhere

  I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind

  immediately

  as if passing its beam through cables

  flashes through all that water and lands

  less than a second later on the horizon

  and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-form

  floating on the sea-surface wondering what next

  These stories flutter about

  as fast as torchlight

  even out here where the water is painfully clear

  and to drown in it is to sense the movement of its colour

  as a cold mathematical power have you not heard

  even out here these stories

  how in her house of silverware and deep baths

  a woman began to dream she began to wake

  and the heart stirring inside her clothes felt bruised

  as if a hand was squeezing it

  She said my friend someone is watching us you will not

  win over you will not walk over me easily

  as over the shallows of a river but Fate

  that great failure of the will that great goddess

  putting on a tremulous voice and smiling

  and dressed in the white bathrobe of her lover

  said dearest I have already doomed that watcher

  I took him to an island the merest upthrust

  of a stony shoulder sticking from the sea

  and he paces there as dry as an ashtray

  making up poems about us patchwork unfinished

  while the sea-crows traipse to and fro regarding him sideways

  what does it matter what he sings

  there is all this water between us

  and it is blind a kind of blind blue eye

  it is alive it is dead it more or less ignores us

  look at all these ripples everywhere complete with their shadows

  I do not think a human for example

  drowning in this measureless mosaic or floating up again

  I do not think he will

  hear us

  These voices flit about quick-winged

  with women’s faces or land on a clifftop singing

  so that here and there you find fading contrails of song

  and a swimmer slooshing along breathing in and out

  with the purple sea circling his throat always

  thinks he can hear something which nevertheless escapes him

  Poor man she says poor man it’s obvious

  the sea in its dark psychosis dreams of your death

  but your upwardness your quick turnover like a wedge of polystyrene

  always keeps you afloat this place is formless and unstable

  it’s as long as winter nevertheless you must swim

  wind yourself in my veil and the sea which always senses your fear

  will fall as flat as a pressed flower you shouldn’t know this

  it is not me but close to me a kind of cloud or smoke-ring

  made of nothing and yet it will outlast everything

  because it is deep it is a dead field fenceless

  a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling

  which in its patience always wears away the hard things

  or is it only the hours on their rounds

  thinking of the tides by turns

  twelve white-collar workers

  who manage the schedules of water

  opening and shutting the mussel shells and adjusting

  from black to turquoise the swinging sea-lights

  so that the sun sinking through bladderwrack

  into interminable aquarium

  finds even far down there are white

  stones

  And suddenly in the violet dark

  a bronze fish-hook flickers into life and out again

  and when it rains and the sand has every ounce of me

  marked at low tide and immediately forgotten

  so that my footprints far into the future

  go on sunkenly walking underneath me

  when it rains it snows sometimes

  as if falling asleep the body began to float

  sideways

  There are so many birds and most of them mean nothing

  but once or twice a gannet

  from a nest of slovenly seaweed

  hops

  as far as those stones and stops

  as a woman would remembering her son

  but it is done madam nothing will close that wound

  unless your shaken mind moving your pointed head

  can stitch the water to the wind

  or is it only her ghost going round and round

  with a remnant of blue

  and never a clue where to place it

  or is it only that poet pacing to and fro

  dreaming up rumours about the first kiss

  buzzing on those lovers’ flypaper lips

  Small geometric figure

  lost inside colour

  he keeps wading out then back but it is

  bottomless dusk down there pale black

  nameless and numbness as when unfolding after sleeping

  and your own dead foot has forgotten you

  as if I waded inward

  thirty yards from the surface of myself

  but it’s not myself it’s just dark purple

  it’s not my feet it is the hours that move

  if only the birds had subtitles if only by staring

  I could draw some of those directions into my mind

  And sometimes over my retina

  as over an angled mirror an aeroplane

  sometimes between two clouds with wingtips

  teetering on the very pivot of vision a passenger

  throws down her shadow

  in which I catch the tiny movement of her eye-blinds

  lifting

  and in this cloud/uncloud I who can’t settle

  when I think of that crowd of colours on the sea

  then my mind starts sliding towards them

  borne on a wave of wind

  As far as a man can shout across water

  and his shout with blown-back wings

  loses its bearings and is never heard of again

  and another man can hear the crying waves

  but his answer

  dissolves in water like an oval of soap

  they say this woman being twisted by sleep

  began to hear things

  as if the sea itself leaned over her bed

  she could hear they say the exact note

  in which a diver twizzles like a mobile

  among triangular hanged fish

  and the sea wall and the weaken
ing cliffs

  as far as the hem of her clothes

  being eaten away

  How does it start the sea has endless beginnings

  About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms

  and peered around and dived again and surfaced

  and saw someone and dived again and surfaced

  and smelt all those longings of grass-flower smells

  and bird-flower sounds and the vaporous poems

  that hang in the chills above rivers

  With crooked elbows walking and small steps

  she hops to these hollow limestone caves

  where the seals breathing out the sea’s bad breath

  snuffle about all afternoon in sleeping bags

  what kind of a rumour is beginning even now

  under the waterlid she wonders there must be

  hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths

  sulking and full of silt on the seabed

  I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once

  with the oddest verdigris expression and maybe

  even now a stranger is setting out

  onto this disintegrating certainty this water

  whatever it is whatever anything is

  under these veils and veils of vision

  which the light cuts but it remains

  unbroken

  So we floated out of sight into the unmarked air

  and only our voices survived

  like thistle-seed flying this way and that

  a blue came over us a blue cloud

  whose brown shadow goose-fleshed the sea

  the ship after a little rush stopped moving

  the wind with a swivelling sound began to rise

  and here I am still divided in my decision

  whether to heave-to or keep going under half-sail

  but the water is in my thinking now

  I remember the mast-pole broken by a gust

  severed my two minds separate

  and my body flopped like a diver over the side

  then came the invisible then the visible rain

  then icy and razor-sharp then green then dawn

  who always wakes behind net curtains

  and her watercolour character changes shade quickly like new leaves

  she is excitable then shy then coppery pink

  and raking her fingers around finds bits of clothing and bones

  How strange she says among those better worlds underwater

  where the cold of swimming is no different from the clear of looking

  there are people still going about their work

  unfurling sails and loosening knots

  it’s as if they didn’t know they were drowned

  it’s as if I blinded by my own surface

  have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness

  have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness

  How does the dawn trawler call out to the night trawler

  when they pass each other on the black and white water

  There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye

  who speak Greek and these invisible

  ambassadors of vision never see themselves

  but fly at flat surfaces and back again

  with pigment caught in their shivering hair-like receptors

  and this is how the weather gets taken to and fro

  and the waves pass each other from one colour to the next

  and sometimes mist a kind of stupefied rain

  slumps over the water like a teenager

  and sometimes the sun returns whose gold death mask

  with its metallic stare seems to be

  blinking

  Two fishermen rowing across saw something jagged and disturbing

  the long-drawn-out Now of a teenager

  pale green and full of unripe hope

  he had dressed himself in wings this is exciting

  I like the angle of attack when these graded feathers

  glued in their waxy grooves begin to swim the air

  winding his giddiness up and up

  carrying his steadfast sceptical stare

  right to the summit of sight he noticed suddenly

  his fate had been found out and flapping his arms

  flushed

  and almost glad to give up

  he began to

  fall

  What a relief to hear his flesh

  with hair and clothes flaring backwards like a last-minute flower

  hit the sea and finally understand itself

  his human-salt already at ease in the ocean-salt

  and the white silt-like substance of exhaustion

  blending with the water

  if only

  if only my eyes could sink under the surface

  and join those mackerel shoals in their matching suits

  whose shivering inner selves all inter-mirrored

  all in agreement with water

  wear the same

  wings

  But this is the sea

  still with its back to me

  in its flesh of a thousand faces all facing away

  and who can decipher this

  voice among voices

  listen

  This is one kind of water when it hangs over him

  a man is a nobody underneath a big wave

  his loneliness expands his hair floats out like seaweed

  and when he surfaces his head full of green water

  sitting alone on his raft in the middle of death

  then it is wide it is a wide field of horrible upheavals

  there are fish in it there are shearwaters searching

  and sometimes in these gulfs a goddess

  who used to be human now she is yellow-eyed

  sometimes she shrieks heavy-winged with laughterless laughter

  and lands on his raft shaking the underworld off

  poor man she says poor man it’s obvious

  you can sniff it everywhere the shabby weirdness

  of the sea-god leaning intimately over

  and turning his shadows against you

  poor morsel of cork you bob about

  throwaway in all this what is it grief grief grief

  but this grief is so old its matter has lost its mind

  blinks blinks and sees nothing

  howls howls and hears nothing

  And yet again water still in acute discomfort

  always yearning and hallucinating and dedicated to the wind

  and yet again the wind not fully awake

  or was it laughter blew me along I lost track of

  the underneath of things everything became my mirror

  once I stood up to look over the side

  I sat down again terrified it was myself I saw

  thronged and pitch-green

  spilling over the lip of the earth

  the same soft dust-sheets over my hands as the clouds

  the same thick curtain across the horizon as

  sheer boredom and a deep

  sea-breath

  In which a spirit leaning languorously from a porthole

  poured stillness over the sea like a jug of milk

  and there were bones everywhere and feathered people

  stood singing on the stones on rickety thin legs

  with tilted chins and pressed flat wings

  If you should see they said if you could spare

  a moment to make out if you have any heart

  to hear us mourn in short syllables

  now that the stillness is pale blue

  and apparitions of islands like pre-world humans

  are waiting to evolve but always before they can grow detail

  the air aborts them and the clouds

  bafflingly quiet as if the fact of floating

  had taken some weight off their minds

  the clouds pause like holy men

  very close and far-off in their white shr
ouds of office

  If you should see a pair of blinking eyes

  blue and red with weeping no sooner seen than gone

  you should know they are kingfishers

  man and wife in these amazing clothes

  who lay their eggs on fish-bones

  and for nine days when they nest the wind drops

  and the hooded waves remembering their story

  stammer to a hush they used to be humans

  whose flesh stalks always true to the light

  were on the point of flowering but the sea

  which has no faith no patience

  just kleptomaniac and fickle currents

  drowned him

  It was horrible when the rising sun

  wrinkled her skin as it worked its way in

  and the widow at the window saw at once

  her bloated husband’s head oh pray for the crowded

  ragged dead in the crypts of the sea

  where the boneless octopus

  only exists by endlessly altering

  pray for the hollowed out souls

  in the skins of the living whose lifted clothes

  became

  birds