Feel Free

by Nick Laird

  meant for this, meant to slide electrons of the universe

  about their electronic grid, are us. If I try to see it, I see it

  as a version of one of those gridded puzzles with a piece

  missing, where you move a piece up and across and down,

  and so on, to try to make a picture, but in this case

  there is no picture to aim for, and the puzzle is at least 3D.

  The puzzle itself is the picture, you are the gap, an instance

  of peckishness or nausea or flames or lilies or bathwater.

  Also quickened with touches of transporting grief and love.

  I hold mine out now in front as a black single-breasted suit

  I inspect to check that it is suitable for wearing to the funeral.

  I am slapping dust from its shoulders. If we’re so suspicious

  of meaning, Dragos, that’s because meaning has, historically,

  had very hard edges. The point remains however: it is to be

  the other, not to reiterate how I am not you, and never can be.

  I know that already. But I get up in the morning and break

  fast. I am still burning toast. I am taken with the possibilities

  of radical formal shifts and tonal ambiguities. And I require

  ceremony to practice ending properly. I know if you made me

  dwell on it long enough I could feel bad about the death

  of that clothes moth that just fluttered out from the suitbag.

  Autocomplete

  I expect the holy of holies must be

  to watch machinery making machinery,

  no? Begin with the others and do what they do,

  and later you can branch off into the fresh

  snow. Did you think the room smelt of not

  having been smoked in? Or that her face

  was the gate of a pool after closing? The wax seal

  began as a personal stamp of authenticity

  before it grew into a tool the administrators

  used to represent you. Freehold of the soul

  meant setting up the product line across all

  the different platforms, and what I would like

  to do is swim in you, it’s true, and I would add

  that you are free to look me in the eyes when I do

  so

  The Vehicle and the Tenor

  When it comes at me in the mirror with its meaning

  ramping up until it passes and lowers in pitch, I’m on

  the bit of the M1 where it bisects the Ring of Gullion

  and I switch lanes, and let my right foot alleviate

  its weight on the accelerator of the Focus,

  and the ambulance is faster, and the shift in its report

  an effect of the change in the wave’s frequency

  and length on the observer, who is, in this case, me,

  heading up to Newry hospice off the red-eye, and I

  lag and have to have the window down for brisk air.

  If the grief moves in towards me at high speed,

  the wavelengths I observe are decreased as the frequency

  increases. I don’t know what this means though

  I can tell you how it feels: in the cryptic centre

  of my head a voice recites a rhyme I read somewhere

  or heard once or otherwise made up:

  Let us go to the woods, one little pig cries.

  But why would we do that? his brother replies.

  To look for my mother, the little pig cries.

  But why would we do that? his sister replies.

  For to kiss her to death, the little pig whispers.

  What is driving along this but a guided dream

  since the road feeds itself in as the planed length

  time feeds to the mind’s lathe to get it trimmed

  correctly to size: heavy clouds; the waterlogged

  fields; a rainbow arcing faintly out to the west

  and I keep that with everything I keep to myself.

  I am either in the midst of it or on my own or both

  things are true at the same time. I kill the radio.

  Were the universe to finish, music would endure

  though I have no memories left for the moment before

  so when I think of you I think of you sat slumping

  on the edge of the mattress, zonked on Zopiclone,

  small and bald as a wee scaldy fallen out the nest

  and found there hours after you were meant

  to have gone on to bed. At my coming in you barely

  raise your head, your eyes are half-shut and you cannot

  find the holes for the buttons on your nightie,

  because you have it on you inside out.

  I know every journey to a source is homecoming,

  and I am bombing along the District of Songs,

  along the Great Road of the Fews, towards you,

  through a depression left by the caldera’s collapse.

  This is the District of Poets, the district of the Dorsey:

  Doirse meaning doors or gates, the solitary pass

  to the old kingdom through the earthworks’ long

  involvement, a pair of abrupt Iron Age banks

  running parallel for a mile or so. An entrenchment.

  An entrance. All manner and slant of analogy etcetera

  but when, in the end, we had kissed you to death,

  we sat and held your cold hands for a half hour more

  and wiped with tissues all the black stuff bubbling up

  from your lungs away from your lips, and wept

  a good bit, and got up then and folded your clothes

  and stacked your cards and binned the flowers,

  and I sat out there in my rental car in the car park

  as you kept on lying in here, past all metaphor,

  left by yourself on the cleared stage like a real corpse.

  ii

  Parable of the Arrow

  Imagine it is dusk and there are two men – friends, but not

  particularly close – walking through the bamboo grove,

  leading a litter of pigs back to the camp. Out of nowhere

  the older man is struck in the chest by an arrow and falls.

  The friend tells him he must pull the arrow out and clean

  the wound.

  The man replies he cannot let the arrow be removed

  until he gets to know it better, until he grasps its proper

  nature as a clawed or razor arrow. He must establish if the

  shaft is a karavira sapling or flighted with the feather of

  a heron, or a peacock, if it’s fastened with the tendon of a

  ruru deer or a temple monkey –

  The friend explains that at this time these are not his main

  concerns.

  The man insists he has a right to know his assailant’s age

  and height, the colour of his eyes, what debt or threat

  or great disaster should bring him to this pass, whether

  his aggressor hails from such and such a caste, and if he

  intends to sleep well or rise late and feel guilt or free.

  The friend says keep still.

  The man is adamant. He wants to know if the one who

  tried to kill him is all kindness with his children, and his

  children’s children, and their friends and so on, and how

  far does his circle run, and does he recognise by now it

  should have looped the earth?

  The friend says bite down on this here belt.

  The Good Son

  Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry …

  i

  Your own neighbour at it to get you out.

  I was stood in the bath with a bill-hook

  as the glass shattered and they screamed threats,

  that same auld slander and terrible muck.

  The childer was all small then. Even the pol
ice,

  they told us to leave. I mind we lay on the ground.

  He was with them, laughing, done up like a priest,

  and my daddy got his shotgun and opened

  the bedroom window and clipped one of them.

  We knew it was him alright by the limp.

  All those years we lived in Newtownhamilton

  and Whitecross sure I never lay down.

  I would’ve come home from work and slept in

  the chair but at first dark got up again.

  ii

  The time they got my sister’s man

  she identified the boy: many’s the time he’d been

  in her kitchen and had his dinner. He ran

  bandsaws with her husband in the timber yard

  and they shot Roy in the head and fired off

  shots across him and him already dead.

  He’d a great dog. D’you mind the dog he had?

  Brung up from a pup he found in a hedge.

  Pepper. Pepper was got out in the graveyard

  trying to dig Roy up the night he was laid.

  He shot at the dog too but missed and was lifted.

  Ten years and he did one. In the courthouse

  he said nothing till she looked him right in the face.

  Alison, they made me do it. I was made.

  iii

  The time they were after Joe McCullough

  he fought them in and out of his bungalow.

  Blood everywhere. He would have been alright

  only one of them went over and slit his throat.

  Then they put a booby-trap bomb on him

  and a sow pig knocked it and got blew to bits.

  And Thomas McConnell. They were hid

  on the roof of his tin shed waiting on him.

  You know a fella came to our Hall about a year ago

  wanting the youngest to go and do silage.

  Gareth took the boy aside and said,

  D’you know who that is? It was some goon

  working for Dessie O’Hare’s crowd, and like a cod,

  only for that, he would’ve gone.

  Coppa Italia

  If I prefer to drink in Irish pubs in non-Irish nations

  it’s because misquotations are more revealing

  and Tino and Patrick are stood at the bar.

  It is Saturday and late in the desert of the real.

  The table I like best is out on the cobbles,

  a plastic red table with a plastic tablecloth

  attached to it with metal clips. The laminate

  is stamped with the trompe l’œil of the gaps

  and fretwork of a real cast-iron table. Inside,

  waiting for the pints to settle, a violence on

  the small bright pitch. A man in blue and a man

  in a red shirt float, collide, collapse and rise

  as one thing turned on itself; are held apart

  and shouted down and striding back beneath

  the floods blue is distraught, a sacker of cities,

  but when the camera pans to red he’s laughing,

  supple and sleek and lit like a stamen at the very

  centre of a long four-petalled shadow, waiting

  for the ball to pollinate him, deep in their half.

  User

  The only Novacell was in the kitchen so I hesitated

  before ambling down the hall and glancing in our Bean

  to check that Yip was Uberliving©, ironing Ken’s blouses

  and co-hosting a Meet-and-Greet for Bebop enthusiasts,

  a form of Original Music she’d quite recently Addicted to.

  I slipped in and flicked the MoodChute, whispered the visor’s

  name onto the Eardrive and hollowed at his off-site.

  Overall, demazing: semi-helpful; size, age, tribal appearance

  not dissimilar to mine though he was just 28 percent

  Blasian and had won Freestyle Bronze in 4-6-Summer

  on the PetSafe moon of the Eternal Insurance System®.

  I de-acked the stream and saw his temples were greying,

  indicating wilting, and that he could do with a TreatWeek

  in a JumpCoat© to vigorate the T’s. Underwhelmed when

  memflicking to find it 10-80 since he’d stoked. As he coded

  The Sunrise Raisinana PatchTM, allowing a fourteen mil

  boost in the laterals to stave off the worst, I impressioned

  taking a QuantiCation© with his extended, and why not try

  the Salted Leaps on the Rio Seven islets, since I always liked

  to jellifish. It was sufficient to just float there and feel

  nothing, no language for it, be unformatted and free.

  On Not Having Children

  for AJ

  The most difficult operation to stage is the retreat.

  There’s a book of the Bible where God is not mentioned.

  The water in your tumbler is older than the sun.

  If the word ‘attention’ was not Chaucer’s invention

  his use of it is the earliest we have extant in manuscript

  and there are words that lack rhymes: silver; month;

  depth; false. It makes them immune to doggerel

  but also to the ballad form.

  Watermelon Seed

  If you extract the compact planet,

  roughly sketched with jungle, wetlands,

  I pick a knife with which to split it

  and you put back the jams and ketchup.

  The substantial rind is very chilly,

  the flesh wet cotton candy cleanly

  parted on the pressured edge to paired

  slabs of seeded red, undersown by more

  seeds that face eviction by your fork.

  I like watching you at work: one dangles

  from a tine, expelled and slickly black,

  suspended by a tendril of thin pink pulp till

  you flick it with your index finger

  expertly at the sink. Plink.

  La Méditerranée

  In the midst of our lifelike life

  I come to this fork in your hand –

  stainless silver, of appreciable weight –

  and I fully understand its pronginess,

  the bent of want, an expressive head

  and narrow neck spreading

  like a delta out to three strict parallels.

  You, the children, me.

  At some point the waiter brought

  your sea bass and the fork hovers over

  its seared arrangement of chainmail,

  its lips parted in surprise.

  Against the stiff table linen

  and sunlight on the knife

  your skin is caramel and scuffed

  a little whitely at the knuckles.

  A few veins give the skin

  its dark ridges and where each hair

  plants itself there is a small dent

  and crinkle in the flesh.

  If the situation is not stable

  nor sustainable,

  what I want to mention is

  if we did continue further in –

  into an atom of the flesh

  or the metallic fabric of the fork,

  the micro-weft of the tablecloth,

  it would be more or less the same

  kind of utter emptiness –

  as at the heart of any restaurant

  there is this dead eye

  of the sea bass on your plate,

  its aureole lens, its lightless pupil

  sunk flush as a thumb tack holding

  the universe itself in place

  and I stare at it, and it stares back.

  Chronos

  I swim to earn endorphins and eat my greens

  because I need the fibre and the vitamins.

  I shoot and kill eleven wolves

  to barter with the skins.

  I do my best to clean the bath,

  then separate the bo
dies of the zombies

  from their faces with a crowbar

  or a chainsaw,

  and make it to the water tower –

  but out of the flames of the jack-knifed lorry

  lurches the Overlord Zombie –

  who will not ever stop –

  and already is upon me

  gorging himself on my delicate neck.

  XY

  When I slide it in the slot to press

  the buttons in their order, wait,

  I’m empire-building. Damn straight.

  I’m Genghis Khan. Yes ma’am. I guess

  I am embarrassing. I guess I’m done.

  Maybe nothing beats the nothingness.

  Maybe all I need is this depletion

  and not French poems or drunk chess.

  Maybe I take the antihistamine

  and it doesn’t stop me operating.

  Simple physics, Little Richard.

  If my appetite intensifies my vigilance

  I’d say that’s my lookout, and my business.

  Then I’d say, here, take my card.