The huddle of cottages against the wind at Hyannisport,
One sealed as it was, strewn with waste paper.
Whether
They die so suddenly everyone stops
And takes the measure of their own lives,
Or slowly in the spread body of an old man.
The dead are all the same.
(I saw Teddy once in a plastic bib:
He was siphoning the meat from a lobster claw.
His light eyes ransacked the ocean.)
The dead recede, beatified,
Like the older mother nursing a baby
Suddenly radiant, au quatorzième …
Even with that slewed tattoo,
A pale green mermaid powdery with hair …
Calls are cancelled on both sides,
Intimacy ossifies
And promises go unfulfilled.
‘It will be the making of her’,
My father said, behind the curtain.
I was 35, pressed to his words
Like the girl in yellow flannelette,
Poised behind the banisters.
Dull as any family business
Dying is what the dead pass on.
The blur of oxytocin after labour is called joy,
But it is only like the morphine someone dying dies enjoying,
And everyone else is vaguely embarrassed by:
By the way the person dying is enjoying it at last,
By the giggling spew of the bowel in the bed,
And the slightly peremptory wave of the hand, and finally
The long carnival of the final breath,
The body heaving what was inside into the open,
The yellow urine skittling to the floor,
The blood, the sangria rushing through the teeth,
And the maracas in the chest, the maracas, the castanets,
As we sit, little wimpled Puritans with our tissues at the sickbed,
Willing it all to end, an iron lung clamping down on the eccentric oars of the ribs,
Wishing them still, wishing for silence, wishing this life lost,
Wishing for it to be odourless, man’s loss of the last animal lust.
Yes, let it be odourless.
Just as at birth the placenta is binned and the alien green cord
Is mangled with scissors
By the husband who is holding his breath.
The rich have ponds and lime-green parakeets,
Their brownstone Gothic, their Manhattan views,
And, for company, those who choked in war
Or evening dress, stampeding from the theatre …
The unclaimed and those who died during birth
Lie somewhere rockier, with the disinterred,
And the parts of atheists no one could dissect,
Shovelled into an island with worse views, upriver.
This is the city’s archipelago, its dead –
They watch new buildings going up in spring,
And wait in autumn for the reassertion of air,
For the middle distance to reappear,
Like space in the medina when trading is over
And the crowd disperses indoors to prayer.
There are bright skiffs of steam in the air holes,
And swallows planning their homeward journey.
Forget the transplant your father waited for,
The middle-of-the-night phone call that never came.
Forget the parched brain fizzing with morphine,
The body turning away in the bed, bored.
Forget the negligence of nurses.
Start with a daughter looking for her father,
Waking in shuttered rooms, in vandalised suites.
Start with your father listening for his mother,
Waking in the Acton orphanage, in wet sheets.
Forget the children’s sandpit after rain.
Forget the pitch contour of rain …
It flaps like leather soles on last year’s slippers,
Muffles the sound of binmen lobbing rubbish.
Start anywhere, everything dissipates.
Wet brains batter the limousine at noon.
End as a girl again, even Isolde,
Stranded in front of the fallen curtain,
Starting to sing.
End with a happy birthday, last but one.
You started dying on the morning you were made
While your father soaped himself in the sink
And your mother worked a porcelain-handled knife
Into a Simnel cake, sucking a marzipan ball.
Crumbs flew like chaff behind the harvester.
The letters of the code flipped in their pairs,
AATCCGCT: the odd proliferated error.
Because this is what death is:
Grant me the patience.
Start with a woman watching a man
Catching his daughter. End with a photo.
End as a woman older than either,
Feeling her own child sag in her arms,
Seeing it all, now for the first time,
After the ending:
The sideboard with the touched-up teak veneer,
Your mother’s watchful shrug of hair,
And your own mouth slewed with laughter,
Feet tilted like a landing goose,
Falling, and your father’s slender hands
Stretched out in the wind,
Henna-stained, praying.
Northolt, the old front room,
The photo with its reddish colour cast.
The faded figure in the catacomb,
Scouring the ceiling.
Watch contre-jour, a shadow
In the shade of the capiz-shell lamp,
A mother and the child you were.
You have been among the living twice,
And loved both times.
You have fallen in the lurid air.
Acknowledgements
‘You, Very Young in New York’ and ‘Repeat until Time’ first appeared in Areté magazine. ‘The Sandpit after Rain’ is in memory of my father, John O’Sullivan (1950–2014).
My friends have been generous with their encouragement for many years. I am especially grateful to those who scrutinised early drafts of these poems: Clare Pollard, Lara Feigel, Yael Goldstein Love, Sarah Howe, Amelia Klein, Roddy Lumsden, Patrick Mackie and Namwali Serpell. For careful attention to the final form, I would like to thank Matthew Hollis and Lavinia Singer at Faber, and typesetter Hamish Ironside. I am also indebted to my colleagues at New College, Oxford, for granting me leave from teaching, and to the Leverhulme Trust for support in the form of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. My mother and husband made it possible for me to finish the book during maternity leave, and I thank them with love.
For quotations, I gratefully acknowledge: Joan Didion, Theodor Adorno, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Heraclitus, Philip Larkin, Hugh Kenner, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, E. M. Forster, Horace, Claude Monet, James B. Conant, Robert J. Oppenheimer, Suetonius, Petronius, T. S. Eliot, and the anonymous authors of the Li Ki and the Kalevala.
About the Author
Hannah Sullivan lives in London with her husband and two sons and is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2008 and taught in California for four years. Her study of modernist writing, The Work of Revision, was published in 2013 and awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy.
Copyright
First published in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Hannah Sullivan 2018
The right of Hannah Sullivan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright
material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33768–2
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