Feel Free

by Nick Laird

  The Cartoons

  When my head was on fire I googled fire

  and the first result described it as

  a rapid oxidation releasing heat and light

  and various reaction products

  like sleeplessness and these poems.

  I had had enough of going in and out

  of doorways. Being undecided

  was only like existing on two or more

  floors at the same time. Which is like

  reading. Or parenting. Or being alive,

  on the outside and the flipside, here

  where you are listening to me talk

  and to your continuous response,

  continuous as a river is, as my

  father when he drives, reifying

  things by saying them out loud.

  Some cows. The cheese factory.

  Declan Cosgrove’s house.

  You know who else is in some pain?

  Everyone, and all the time.

  I need to sit here very still in this

  room where I am allowed to be this

  still for a few minutes with the traffic

  lit by the periodic lift and tilt of sirens

  or my daughter coughing next door

  and then I need to sit on the sofa,

  and let the youngest take my face

  in his hot hands again and pull me in

  until we’re nose to nose and say over

  and over, ‘Daddy, listen to me.’

  Team Me

  I get very bored of having to respond

  to the circumstances of my own life.

  I’m tired of trailing my ego around.

  I remember the feeling from being a lawyer,

  sat there in front of some client thinking

  I just can’t represent this cunt much longer.

  Most nights we meet each other face to face –

  at civil dusk, in defeat, my little regent

  standing in Gristedes’s dairy aisle or the lower

  field where the red clay banks and falls away,

  and the stream that feeds the Ballinderry slows

  on shallow gravels. Wherever. On his own.

  Always with the narrow back set like a shield

  against me, his shadow like a bracket or a lever

  twice as long as him, and half as thin,

  keeping him forever perpendicular to earth.

  He turns. Bat-fangs. Bowl cut. Such pretty little

  ears that hold the crown, a ripped green cracker hat

  from Christmas 1983. O my petty liege.

  My bliss and dearest enmity. My nemesis.

  When he spots me now and slopes across,

  affecting a limp, because he’s depressed,

  what I say when he asks how it went on the whole

  is no really no really no you were amazing

  Incantation

  Because we time-travel into the future

  at a blistering sixty minutes an hour,

  I ask you to sit down and write me

  one beautiful sentence I might carry

  in my pocket on the journey when I go,

  and in the window of the train unfold

  O you were the best of all my days.

  Never knowing if the thing is broken

  or the door between us is still open,

  you would like me to sit down and write

  you one beautiful sentence you might

  carry in your wallet when you leave,

  and in the cab you take it out and read

  Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.

  Depending where one stands, each circle

  back is a possible fall, a fail, a spiral,

  and I would like you to take a few seconds

  to write me out one beautiful sentence

  to carry now across the night and ocean,

  and held up at the gate I sit down and open

  Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

  iii

  Cinna the Poet

  I was trying to write like an adult.

  I had children.

  I was at the end of something.

  As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,

  I saw that the Sirocco had deposited

  a scrim of dust on the sill overnight,

  and it was the dark red of powdered blood,

  and like any of the others of my kind would have done,

  I graffitied it.

  In the past I might have gone for a peace sign

  or a smiley face or an ejaculating penis,

  but today I scrawled my name in it

  and my vocation,

  and left my fingertip ferrous with desert.

  It felt like stroking suede against the nap,

  half illicit, the particulates milled by wind

  and sieved by the distance

  to the softness of ash or brick-dust.

  I had been adding and subtracting

  sounds from my epic on the winds

  that thread the known world,

  but something like a real poem surfaced

  then, in the dust,

  in my letters edged with tiny drifts.

  What I wanted in a small thing was some

  principle, some vividness

  that lived both in things small and things great.

  A desert is red and the dust is red

  because the stones that make it up were red.

  It is the iron staged within.

  They share the rationale of blood.

  The tone was off.

  They understand the colour of

  Lucinda was filling my demi-tasse

  and stopped to watch the man,

  a partisan, standing in the square outside the window.

  The red cap of all his tribe was too small for his head

  which wobbled like a tied balloon

  as he read the name I’d written on the sill.

  At the nearer counter Kestius, mad again,

  stopped reciting his ode to prostitutes

  and turned around to get a proper look.

  I had been thinking how the coffee

  pouring from the spout and stopping

  was not unlike

  the

  thick

  tail

  of

  a

  black

  rat

  flickering into a drain,

  and I wasn’t listening, and he said it again.

  My Death is standing outside the window

  carrying on his shoulder a leg of lamb

  rolled in darkened butcher paper

  and My Death is upset

  and pointing his cigarette at me.

  How they massed in the streets for their Caesar,

  that rapist, that racist, that fat

  narcissist

  who found the crowd responded best to flattery

  and three-word phrases

  framed as an imperative.

  I do not believe in the imagined realm of perfectness,

  where nothing ever changes, where everything simply is,

  and which, according to Plato and Judeo Christian philosophy,

  is the true realm of nature; the sense experience,

  the red dust, the coffee, the leg of lamb – merely illusory.

  We have no reason to believe in the perfect circle.

  We have no reason to believe justice exists.

  There is the endless play of absence and presence.

  Seasons. Tides. The moon.

  I stood up and knocked my notebooks off the table.

  Long ago I noted the impossibility of imagining

  a heaven that doesn’t bore us instantly

  to death, and I don’t believe the human body

  is really a luminous body of white light

  that moves towards the larger light

  when it dies.

  On the odd occasion I feel amazed to be alive

  though
not often, to be honest, and not recently.

  Last summer when the weather optioned its menace

  his priests summoned those born feet first,

  the albinos, the twins,

  those afflicted with harelips.

  I lived in a state of despair and rage, we all did.

  I could not remember the last time the political

  had come to bear on the personal

  to such a large extent, and I grew up

  in the civil war.

  I sat reading

  how the world’s tallest man had saved a dolphin

  or they’d designed a gun for women –

  to be shot by women, not to shoot them.

  Last week, after the purge,

  Kestius stopped me in the toilets to tell me

  how he’d sealed his major poems in earthen jars

  and buried them at nightfall by the lilac in his garden.

  The time is just too real, he said.

  We are approaching the source, he said.

  Don’t you detect its heat in the night air,

  in the vividness beneath the skin,

  how everything is frantic.

  Now their leader was dead

  and his supporters on fire and I stood,

  at a loss, on the edge of their anger –

  you have been there – watching the dark

  present dispose

  itself too easily and flow away from me.

  I could not pass

  and when the girl ran up and spat

  panic like a swarm of bees and I tried

  to escape and slipped

  on my papers and fell and hit my head

  on the stone steps.

  The flesh is not a vessel emptied out at death.

  I had the evidence of my own parents.

  Black stuff bubbles from the lungs to the lips.

  Why would anyone set aside deities born of this earth,

  that protect the place, to privilege metaphysical

  divinities

  who do not have that relationship?

  Sirocco. Mistral. Levante. Ostro.

  None of them functioned as names exactly,

  not without following the sighing in the eaves

  or a rounding in the branches.

  But I was unsure what to do with those

  sounds, and such information,

  unsure what to do with the inconstancy of things in general.

  Poetry had not been good for me.

  It hardened me where I should have been

  otherwise.

  What is it anyway to say that one thing

  is like another? I practise forms of accusation.

  I came to as they were dousing me in lamp oil.

  Kestius was howling like a dog and being held back.

  The girl was going through my bag.

  I watched My Death try and strike a match.

  The Folding

  i

  In the midst of this lifelike grief

  I am stood at the cutlery drawer,

  and keep on standing here as if

  I might remember what I came in for,

  but then I think of something else,

  and head upstairs only to forget

  what that was and find myself

  eyeing the unmade bed, the bookshelves,

  the snow still coming down outside

  and realise then, and lift a stack

  of printer paper and the safety scissors

  for the kids to make snowflakes

  I’ll tape to the kitchen windows,

  since that was what my mother did.

  ii

  I know in terms of cuts and folds

  a modest pattern’s adequate,

  that infinite complexity’s composed

  by simple rules, and the last was that

  you had to live it out, right to the end –

  even as your body starts to stop,

  as your face withdraws from itself

  and your eyes continue, trapped,

  braving a last turn about the place.

  O that dull, almost inaudible pat

  of obliterative fleck on the glass,

  and the clock, and the held breath

  as the kids concentrate on symmetries

  or the blades’ irresistible path.

  iii

  I am four and follow her until I spot

  the photo booth and slip inside

  to climb up on the spinny seat, and watch

  cartoons that do not start, and wait

  for forty years as they raze

  the aisles and checkouts, the car park,

  wait for her to draw back the dark

  and find me here, staring at the screen

  where what I learn of absence is the panic

  is substantial, the face is lit with tears

  and snot and everyone is crying

  as I fold myself into her skirt,

  unable to explain that I was here,

  behind the curtain, the whole time.

  iv

  Civil dusk. I scrape the plates.

  The falling’s softened to a waltz

  and the garden’s lit lavender white.

  I suit them up like astronauts

  and we step out through the airlock

  to a scene as soundproofed as a dream:

  its padded walls and ceiling are being

  shredded without end. A snowflake catches

  in her mother’s lashes when Katherine’s

  looking upwards through the branches

  at the sky, at the unfolding of bright

  wave on bright wave, coherent scrims

  of quick scantlings looking to alight, alive,

  and we hold out our hands until they are white.

  New York ElastiCity

  When the hand is red,

  some of the walkers pause

  & others continue,

  some of the vehicles pause

  & others continue,

  & I am no longer that

  clerk to the heir of etc.

  & something of this city’s

  brute capacity for gathering

  is like a shining in my head.

  The valleys of glass & reset

  stone have softer, smaller

  forces pushing through them

  with shopping bags like pollen

  sacs attached to their bodies.

  Happiness is only a state

  of utter absorption,

  so why not take an island,

  not large, & see the people

  of the world live together there?

  I notice first they put the brown

  people in brown shirts

  & made them stand behind

  the counter in Starbucks as

  the customers are played by whites

  & east Asian girls. Each

  consciousness enacts its own

  drama in the silence of

  a breathing mind till Ahmed,

  the barista, calls your name.

  On Mercer & Bleecker

  the jackhammers answer

  & a rising siren answers

  but what I’d like to listen to is rain,

  no? The plainness of its thinking,

  the fat splatter of the first ripe drops

  on the hot sidewalk, its hiss,

  its consistence, its soft-shoe shuffle –

  the grid clearing & darkening

  as the Atlantic rolls in.

  Getting Out the White Vote

  Because of the unfairness I resigned.

  I mean I re-signed for another stint in

  the inferno’s furnace, with a furlough

  on the Vegas strip. Hell, I deserved it.

  I dreamt the real war waged in corridors

  of server banks in hangars in New Jersey

  or Missouri never happened, or happened

  only in my dream. You hadn’t heard me.

  I couldn’t help mys
elf so I helped myself,

  and when I told you to replace it,

  I meant put it back to what it was.

  I never said that you could change it.

  The Good Son

  i

  They disappeared. / They were disappeared.

  Argentina pioneered the passive use of active verbs,

  though the Stalinist regime

  had a similar irregular inflection

  when a member of the nomenklatura

  ‘was stepped down’.

  Physical force is nominalising.

  You do not speak but you are spoken,

  and the force, if exercised without curb,

  is able to transmute the bodies into corpses.

  We are aware there are two forces –

  one that kills, and one that does not, not yet,

  for now is merely fiddling with the implement

  it might bring down this every instant.

  ii

  She sighs; she lives; she has a soul and yet

  she is a thing, a thing that has a soul. Mirror.

  Extraordinary – and how does the soul inhabit

  an extraordinary house, how much does it cost,

  instant by instant, to accommodate

  itself to such a place, this extraordinariness,

  such writhing being requisite, so much bending

  and folding and pleating and snipping and so on

  required of it constantly. Door. Stairs.

  She simplifies down to whatever you wish, even if

  the soul was not made who could live inside a thing. Front