Blaris Moor

by Medbh McGuckian

  to my own available vocabulary

  being spoken through, damozen, lap summer

  skirt, rendered blue in the face

  by the sonnet form, that liberates

  the thousand river names from their anchorage.

  I bescribble and I blacken paper

  with my smooth domesticated tissue

  of images desiring to please a shadow,

  to saddle with meanings the traumas of war

  by an occasion of wordshed.

  Language deserts the self

  like the fragility of the outer meaning

  playing on the joy in Joyce.

  A pillow of old words with old

  credentials, never certain that their

  passports are quite in order,

  nothing with which to express,

  nothing from which, no power,

  no desire, with the obligation

  to find semantic succour, and no

  audience—that’s part of one’s death.

  A Novel About Patrick

  Second or third house on the left coming up,

  second floor, window twenty-one, I believe.

  Window looking for a window, the window

  at your back, sitting on the window-sill,

  watching the opposite pavement thick from strain.

  As you read, try the word on, kingly plunderer,

  to be found stolen in a century. You should stop

  using these minimum dreams as fuel,

  I so enthustiastically underscore lines of yours,

  I haven’t been to the pawnshop in two months.

  And right you are, never is, never was,

  you just listen, listen—you hit the nail

  on the head, you were as good as here, and burst

  in you will, as if the presence of a faultless angel:

  how two-in-one you are to me,

  my soul is not that virgin. So he went on promising,

  (page torn) and this over and over, she was crying,

  she was undressed by a man with your ring on his hand.

  At the city limits she watched eighteen trains go by,

  her eyes cannot be paired up, sodden doorways of flame.

  I am weary of cranial partitions and fabulously busy

  like giving birth for the twelfth time and,

  as fate would have it, I have so far been unable

  to take my place at that window:

  you force yourself through solid crowds

  on pilgrimages buying in closed shops, your pocket

  swelling with what was left over from the selling

  of a medal, pocket lined with smashed eggs

  and sunflower seeds. Please don’t think I have designs

  on the days of the week, like verbs with holes in them.

  The past is ripped off like a shutter in a storm,

  a car cries out like a cuckoo, or coughs

  like an old man opening desk drawers. Once

  the sirens sound I hold on to the edge of my Remington

  from early in the morning, gun salvos broke

  into our house at any time of the evening.

  I was that angel of modesty that heated your flat

  with my Greek scent, I would scrupulously

  scrape my feet and clean my clothes with a brush

  moistened in disinfectant. I opened

  the storm windows to air I had ceased breathing

  long ago, when I made that gesture of denial

  against your hands, with the waiter standing

  observing my mouth. New waves of the old feeling.

  When the train came to a halt near the porcelain factory

  they said there was a storm on the lake, they said there

  was no storm. In a photograph I study with the eyes

  of two families, the city rises outside

  the windows of the Hotel Octobre,

  my book smiles at me anew, from the window.

  Reading Before Stalin

  Friend means action—could you? Hold out?

  In the northern capital we were not expected to know

  what millennium it was outside Pegasus Stall

  in that inconceivable London.

  My lips cling together at the top of my voice

  like fingers in mittens. As appetizers, cold slices

  of marinated mushrooms, then mushroom soup,

  and finally the main course, boiled mushrooms

  with mushroom fillings.

  My party books are dished out as dessert in little

  cardboard squares, lilac ice-cream, cloud milk,

  wine on the palm, cloud bread and rye-bread book.

  The bronze of a sermon through the laziness

  of the angels is melted down to a flywheel

  with hammers, screws and bolts on a red

  marble coffin. I can’t get my hand

  into my sleeve, what with the wooden spoon

  in my buttonhole, the bluebird on my cheek,

  the words across the sky displaying the day’s motto,

  a lyrical digression giving orders to the Army

  of the Arts from the Commissar of Enlightenment.

  Verses Unpublished in the Poet’s Lifetime

  Works and Days

  Although the blessing of horses

  to Saint Florus and Saint Laurus

  promised something, a stretch, from the road,

  the calico balloon met the sky like John the Baptist—

  above one’s head hung not the spring.

  Our Days

  The tulips became shorter and more abrupt,

  the hill had grown taller and drawn in;

  books that snaked across the floor vapoured

  with the terseness of parable,

  engines pounded hotly.

  About That

  Knives and forks on the terrace took on

  a green hue, gatherings à quatre

  made their nests high over the gangway

  into a voyage on the round nape of the wave

  just a station up the line.

  Seasonal Mood Picture

  Down by Brest Station the redolent express

  departed into golden marshland and hillside

  nurtured in silver—journeys became possible

  to diamond forests, the river too

  learned what it was to be renamed.

  Sketches for a Fantasy

  To put it more gently, I shall work my way

  through to him, I shall break myself

  for the last time, bewilderedly retracing

  my steps and indried thoughts

  like a hundred blinding photographs.

  Poem of a Kinsman

  I understood him as an outline, a contour,

  a cast-off skin whose bandages would slacken,

  whose youth was marked

  by the dawning town that too often

  became different, or nothing.

  Sympathy for the Twilight

  His alter ego, You Will Remain,

  hid behind the claret-coloured walls of the cool

  and clean museum. Farewell to loving

  anything, I carried him away with me

  from the boulevard into my life.

  Muse of Cinema

  It was the middle sister who was the main

  object of his interest—that was how

  he operated—charred pears at the Café Grec,

  her five-petalled gaze an ornate lock,

  and little in the way of extra snow.

  The Black Goblet

  He finally seduces her, and in that instant falls

  genuinely in love with her. Then

  his mistress Camilla turns up

  like a blood-spotted card.

  (She lives next to the theatre.)

  Dream of a First Love’s Marriage

  He privately dedicated his sultry, summery

  collection to Natasha, but she did not keep

  his letters, and aft
er his death her letters

  to him were handed back to her.

  (She has herself since died.)

  Revenge Against Music

  He came from the depths of lyrical space,

  alias the summer on the one hand,

  to this mustering point, this profusion of lilac lustre,

  this home in the autumn borne along

  on its own words as though upon a raft.

  Your Death

  And the town that is now performing itself,

  since she had replaced the whole blackened town,

  stone by stone, surrounded by fir saplings,

  whoever you are, this town is your own invention,

  and what, the duty of something unthinkable, went on there.

  Synagogue Wedding

  A tank cleared up the street like a forest cutting

  once and for all, the drawing room over three winters

  merged into one, was allowed to freeze up,

  with venomous courtesy the first government decrees

  made them remove their hats.

  Red Cornfield

  Everything disposed one to work, polite

  social occasions were so few. The skittish

  mannerisms of his backbone flute were unpolished,

  like oars at rest. Still to him a schoolgirl,

  she intended signing on as a nurse.

  Rain-Spangled Poem

  And she was as good as her word.

  They paid her in gold to pass through this atmosphere

  of fierce, abstracted, chaotic frost,

  of dirty sea and narrow beach by the rail

  halt on the winter mail route.

  To the Demon’s Memory

  But still mountains unlived by anyone.

  Noise of a revving motorcycle flooded

  the key buildings. October would be withdrawn

  into even deeper depths, its frozen

  motionless energy a puzzle to the two of them.

  The Courtyard

  I’ve appointed your meeting with me in a novel,

  my brother in the fifth season of the year,

  something more than a thousand pages long.

  Having breathed its falsehoods for over ten years

  I shall not manage this spring.

  Lyre of Lyres

  Yesterday I began struggling through

  the dense shrubbery of your book, your sweeping,

  winged script, the aristocratic burr

  of your French speech. But nor did I pour away

  the ink with which I wrote of famine.

  October’s Man of the Moment

  Your book sounds its mating call, turns its ten

  windmills in a huge wave of love. Splinters

  of its lines fly apart and become caught

  in ordinary drops—your voice is more mine

  than yours, more aspen than birch.

  Unextinguished Moon

  I stopped reading on the second page

  where my family crystallized like stored water,

  biographically glittering, deprived of Europe. Unshaken

  by the changes down the street, all the elements

  of the confusion are in him true.

  Samson the Housecat

  He is not the only one who can provide

  a key to the age in his converse with the country,

  its trading and careerisms, like a great mass

  of time imagined all at once,

  with faith in the reader.

  White Guardist Poetess

  Simply as sharing the light of your après-ski

  attention, to the soul in my soul, that rejoices

  for the song that is over my song, comrade

  genius, weary equestrienne, I snapped—Good!—

  the book to on the third page.

  Attempt at a Room

  I had not counted on my letter’s having not two

  but four destinations, tight-lipped when pressed,

  writing the poem about England for the newspapers.

  I’ve not a soul to swipe an anthem from.

  He always sounded bits of paleness in her universe,

  his firmer mouth wandered, though hers was the heavier breath.

  Some shred of heart the last vestiges of her mind

  would not let go—I am as he is, since he is right.

  His gait ringing on the steps, his bestowed weight—

  despite his unerring ear all has been taken in advance,

  he breathes on me the bitter cold of a possessor,

  of whose possessions I am knowingly a part.

  My warmth has already lain on the panes of his eternity,

  there is always a sort of draught between you and me.

  While speaking to a friend she hasn’t seen for years,

  oh, are the towels hung up to dry? What is ours

  remains ours, I called it happiness, let it be misery

  or the same aloneness. I had anticipated the entire

  echo, would there ever be one to help us to fullness

  again? Did I read you correctly, or just the movement

  of your lips, should it be done with the eyes or with the breath?

  Double jealousy—single is enough—our both referring

  to the sea, the beginning, the northern city, dreary

  and prosaic. You might have seemed to be made of an alloy,

  on the assumption that you and I were translucent.

  Remember, under coverlets of cowardice,

  the birds on the ceiling and by the glimmer of memory,

  the blizzards on the other side of the river?

  Look at the map, the date, the town, out of the well

  of wells the bed, back, table, elbow, always stove,

  broom, money, none, not to sweep, any more—

  the deed and the poem are on my side.

  Though much, everything even, remains in the notebook.

  Incomplete angel, either can speak for both,

  we sit when we should stand, somewhat flushed,

  in a secondhand bookshop.

  And the blizzard of print increases in ferocity,

  the long years are running out,

  the gravely ill metaphors must eat their fill

  before the hearse carries them to the churchyard.

  Her Dislove of Love

  Women there are whose perfume

  is ruinous and fine—they’re thirty.

  After the snarled tangle and cave-in

  of the war my hands so seldom want to.

  I took you to see your younger sister

  beyond the suburb’s brow: just anyone

  who feels at home in the hours.

  Journey of sacred slowness

  to what you mean, my little word.

  The woods are mine, pre-sounds

  and post-sounds, where I can be

  alone with your large photograph.

  Last night I stepped out to take down laundry

  and took all of the wind, all of the north, in my arms.

  The Heart Ghost

  A dream stood over me

  attracted by the lamplight

  out of sight: a shredded face

  that came back from the dead

  of its own accord

  to comfort the living.

  Only its head was visible,

  the shelves of brow and chin

  as if preserved in redness like

  a Prussian town now in Poland.

  Days in Red Poland

  Winter, without journey: I watch too much weather.

  The slum clearance has turned old lush gardens to blood,

  making noise like a bank in a blizzard

  of constant views and surfaces.

  From the unhealthy Jewish town within this image

  of undamaged city I throw a can of pineapple juice

  at a streetlight’s unipolar world—a nested act,

  with dragging slipper walk.

  And move tha
t sound aside like the earliest known word,

  keeping guard over my ear all the time (my system just

  has on and off) for cup-muted sounds that tend

  to stop half way,

  but looking for untasted words, though whispers

  have their own key, and seeing everything as if it were

  scenery. If I try to drink the paving waves

  in the lavender-coloured mirrors,

  or hold up the wall in my head with a third

  hand, the dream ebbs out of me. I tie my Palestinian

  scarf, stained teal-blue, ash and parchment

  like that small 45 the Englishman wears.

  So Warsaw’s Come to Wait on Us Now

  The war kept brewing. On and on.

  We were rotting away. Who would

  have thought it would last so long?

  I wanted to escape to the Old Town.

  I felt as if I were in some strange

  German city crippled by the stones

  under my feet.

  I kept going in circles doing nothing.

  I had so much to say, I preferred

  not to be snared by words.

  From early in the morning we heard

  artillery and machine guns:

  without that ‘music’ we were sad.

  We received a spoonful of good jam.

  At night we gathered snow.

  The mass started at seven instead of midnight

  because of the curfew.

  I wanted to appear very devout

  by walking the six kilometres to church.

  Living in the country was the best

  medicine, being put up at a new farmhouse

  every twenty-four hours.

  Zofia had a fall coat,

  her place was a crooked shack sunk

  into the earth as if for gnomes.

  She perched on the packed dirt floor

  like a hen, sealing herself with her shawl.