by Steven Price
May you wake weeping to your life
each morning:
may what is hidden keep ever hidden.
___________
May everything be permitted you.
May nothing be forbidden.
___________
May your sons devour their daughters,
your daughters dash their sons to the floor;
may each foetus feed in you like cancer.
___________
May your prayers be answered.
The Tyrant’s Physician
Since you ask: like a viscous blue jellyfish, its tendrils adrift. That is how his wife’s eye swims in that vase. Come; fetch me the colder basin. This heat could boil apart the bones of a lamb. His headaches? Oh, he is luminous with pain. They will not be cured by tea leaves or figs. He is dying, wattling into a husk. He can no longer bear the red sun in the morning corridors, and he does not dream at all. Do you imagine it is guilt? He said to me: I have learned that the suffering of others does not exist. He said: At night in the faint frescoes I begin to see. Oh, such things he sees! I cannot begin to tell you. Yesterday he stood at the window and told me: You would like to be useful, yes? In the courtyard, that blonde child polishing the stones. Bring her to me.
Medea
She cradled her ale like an infant’s head,
dragged it close. Glass all aglar and rasping
in her palms – thumbfogged, pubthick –
rolling slow on its heel where she gripped it
grinding wet half-moons dark in the bar’s grain.
“Did you think something would go through me?”
she asked, thick-lidded eyes hooded in that haze;
“and what then? a bolt? an arrow?” She clicked
the brown heft of her glass hard down.
Our waitress loomed, threading her tray
asway in the smoke and roar; then swift
as a god-from-the-machine deposited another.
“So let it come,” she said, “by my hand
or his. O he’ll suffer for what he’s done.
I swear it on the throats of our children.”
Drilling her hard knuckle through the cork;
that scarred oak table etched with what
old love initialed there, long since stubbed
out, scrubbed, scoured, stogied-out
until no longer any’s name. “My name, this,
Medea, will never mean sweetness or milk.
I gave birth and was gutted. A mother knows
what that means.” I said nothing. A slap
of doors behind the bar, rattle of dishes clattering
off the drainpan beyond. She was crying now.
“Love should leave the world the way it came.”
She did not need to say what way that was.
__________
Innocence is incorruptible. They drift.
Let it live everlasting. And dream.
Dead is not dead, what does not perish:
a candle clutched in her fists like a blade
as she watches their little chests fall.
This is not the world she made. O her
delicate sons, more than mere reflection,
each lies blurred like a curl of smoke
in sheets where she’d made them in love.
Love, she spits, crushing out the flame.
They will be sheltered even from love.
__________
We braked. Geared south in a slur of dust,
gattled stones spattering the pitted wells
where tread-rubber rode hot in the grooved hull.
And pulled slow off. A station gone to rust:
twin scabby pumps squatting desolate, bleary
in the day’s heat-hover. She’d thought return
might mean a turn to rights, lessons learned.
But banked by black cliffs, bleached eyries eerie
with no wing or cry, that shut gas bar seemed
no end to what we’d sought, or once had thought to be.
*
Still a stunned bell banged out as we pulled in.
We had gone as far as this. For what. No word.
And slumped now rustburnt as a man emerged
griming his hands in a rag. That look we gave him
strange as he cocked the gauge, lugged the gun,
punched the trigger to full. Bent at our hood,
his rag just smearing the grease and roadslime round
when with a sudden ache in that splintering sun
we saw it. A well of darkness, whorling up in him:
how what overspills our lives is not if but when.
*
His weird visage shivered watery, blurred
behind a slap of ropy cloth: blearing the glass
to bad effect, spiralling a foul grey wash
of soap deeper in. The day darkened under.
Then came the savaging, the voice of the god.
“Did she think something would go through her?”
it groaned at me. “She is no vessel. Nothing’s in her
that was not ever in her. She will know blood,
her own blood, shed. All births bring the same:
gore, fear, screams; small limbs wrenched in pain—
*
she will bear it.” Then he was back, shining a mirror,
scrubbing out glass that the road ahead come clear.
__________
Three dreams she dreamed back to back.
First: twin boulders of bread, broken apart,
which she ripped in warm fistfuls of crust.
Her wrists agleam in a heartblinding shine.
Love, spare us the bitter and hesitant life:
that dream sheathed its secret in her
ribs like a knife. In the second dream
two crackling sails, torn in a wind, flailed
where a white moon waned into gloom.
Shadow unmakes what the shining once made:
everything is vanishing, though it take
an age to disappear. The third dream
was no dream and from it she would not wake.
__________
Then did Medea lead down to the shed.
Haltingly, legs alurch, leaden in thick woolen
skirts. As if looped in a sharp steel line
that led inward. A bulb’s red filament
flared, glowed to slow life: light, asway
in the rippled tin walls, sliding off tools
tacked up toothed and cold like instruments
of cruelty. I stood at the edge in darkness.
She slung a snubbed hammer by its claw, stared
dully back at the shack where both boys slept.
That greasy smell of her hair, grimed, sour
like bad milk; in her eyes, a cadaverous heart.
“Medea,” I said. “You can still stand aside.
Nothing’s written that can’t be changed.”
Turning, her scalp bashed the bulb: shadows
spun, swirled, skitted back. “You only want it so,”
she scowled. “My mistakes were cast
at every turning. I chose always him.”
And then in half-anger at herself, or me:
“You’ll get this wrong; you’ll tell it wrong.”
Back in the dark shack a phone was ringing
but pitched strange, too shrill, shrieking
like a saw shivering into bone. “It’s the second
night,” I told her. “He might still return.”
Lifting a hatchet, hefting its haft, setting it
back. She did set it back. The phone shrieked
and shrieked. She stumbled out, I assumed,
to answer it, as I stood in that sinister shed;
the shrieking seemed to go on a long time;
then it stopped and the air went dead.
Ghosts
According to reports, during the closing days of the Second World War, resident
s of the Austrian village of Kosse were rounded up, marched into a nearby copse of birches, and shot through the base of the skull. The soldiers responsible, billeted in the houses of the murdered, almost immediately began to complain of certain unusual events. Silverware, furniture, dishes would move in the night; shoelaces and socks would vanish; small pieces of food would be found sorted along the mantels of fireplaces, in front of heating vents, under bookshelves. Footsteps, slamming doors, soft weeping, thumps in the walls: such disturbances continued until 1964, when one of the houses was gutted for renovations. Workmen, tearing open a brick wall in the attic, discovered a small grey man living in the wall. In hiding since 1940, he had over the years excavated a complex passage of tunnels through the walls and floors. When they carried him out he lay on the stretcher shrivelled and hairless and frightened. It seems he had not realized the war had ended. Since that time, thirty-seven other survivors have been discovered. Unhappily, however, the hauntings continue.
Gardener’s Curses
May black waters stunt your children,
your taps run brackish and impure.
__________
May your stalks rot to sticks;
may the roots endure.
__________
May your labours be laid
in clay, sand, rock, bog;
may all your fruit be wormfall,
your orchards sown with salt.
__________
May you sleep long and late;
may you wake with fingers
smooth as cream.
__________
And may the weather that shines
be outshone ever
by the weather you dream.
__________
May you be blessed with many neighbours;
may their harvests run high.
__________
And may a white sun burn burn burn
in an ever cloudless sky.
Three Blues
I. SWEET MISS MOLLY GRINN
Sure sir he left me an he left me nothin—
just a tub of jelly,
a big ol belly,
an I aint seen my man now two nights runnin.
Aw that old razor aint nothin to see.
Steeled hisself up, set his ol self down—
like a old white bandage
when the bad’s at you;
I said I aint seen my man two nights runnin.
Aw that old razor aint nothin to see.
Said last I seen’s black back of his head; said
aint leave nothin, said
no dough no bread;
just a ol tarnish ring said he give me if he dead.
No that old razor aint nothin to see.
Well good’s to the girl got to know what’s what—
but if he aint own up,
he aint own up,
an man better make sure he know how it cut.
Aw that old razor aint nothin to see.
II. VAGRANCY BLUES
Got to lurk,
shine an shirk,
aint nothin so sweet as steady work.
Got to thank the man.
Got sun, sand,
coalblack tan,
an ever man workin just as hard as he can.
Got to thank the man.
Got bed, board,
ten to a ward,
shiny new collar for each of us, lord—
Got to thank the man.
Got time, time,
askin no dime,
punchin that dirt on God’s county line.
Got to thank the man.
Ever day,
night an day,
watchin the good man give us our pay—
O right proper one a these days
we goin to thank that man,
I say we goin to thank that man.
III. DARK TRAIN SONG
This train it leavin Boston, sixty-seven soul alive.
This train it leavin Boston, sixty-seven soul alive.
But when it get to Oakham, just sixty-six soul arrive.
See this train it dark in tunnels, grey man got a wife.
This train it dark in tunnels, grey man got a wife.
But her train aint goin to Oakham; grey man bring a knife.
Goin cut her in her belly, goin cut her in her throat.
Goin cut her in her belly, goin slit her sweet black throat.
Till those iron rusted rails run all bloody underfoot.
O aint no evil in the valley, aint no evil in the town.
No aint no evil in the valley, aint no evil in the town.
But ride them old blue rails boy it ever can be found.
The Inferno
Speculation suggests it might be, must be, hell. A vast cavern unearthed deep under Baffin Island. Experts are puzzled by both its location and its depth. Last week two exploratory crews were dispatched. We are told the first drillers passed trembling into a huge and silent blackness, while a wind reeking of sulphur crackled in the tunnels around the second, wailing like the cries of the dead. It seems the caverns funnel ever deeper, descending through chasms and sheer drops. The first crew photographed windcarved mineral spires, twisted like shrivelled oaks. When they shone their lamps on the walls, the slick burned luminous and blue. Great silver cathedrals of limestone arched far into the depths. At their innermost point, the second crew discovered a stone well; its depth has not yet been determined. Under a bench near its edge they found a pair of rotted wood sandals, and a small leather psalter printed in Genoa.
All who have returned agree the beauty of those caverns rivals Rome.
Curses of the Blind
May you see the world as it is
in its darkness;
may night be your day.
__________
May you never look away.
__________
May you learn the hour of your death
early;
may its wind on your face be foul.
__________
May you fall, and fall, and fall, and fall.
__________
May all your seeing be foreseeing;
and may you mistake
becoming for being.
__________
May the road to your gate
be thicketed
and steep.
__________
And O may you never sleep.
__________
May your halls shirr with whispers,
the creaking of frightened feet—
may your wife’s weeping outlast
even sky, even grass.
__________
May all the ills you wished on others
come to pass.
Omens at the Edge
That was ebb tide in the breaches,
gulls shrieking
in the spin. We waded in:
chilled mud windgilled, sifting
under us with wash,
the black barnacled rocks slick
as the slate waters fell back
and the world receded to sand.
Call it kind’s clarity
of purpose. Call it the going
out. Not to wade too far
past treefall, landfall, light,
lest our darker selves
rise roiling in the white
breakers combing inward,
and know us as we were: here
where no one’s ever one
person, and a curtain
rent in the wide shimmer
and the shorn light
of the long ago already was
creaking to its rusty close.
We entered that distance;
we entered our diminishing.
The Excursion
Once onshore we shuddered to see it: like panic pouring over the dead
shale, the shellfused
rockpools, it oozed
its hooded head
under a barnacled block
in a smooth crush
&n
bsp; of coils, was flushed
black-muscled back
through the cold flail
of its beak, a soft vent
murking a current;
then gulped a bell
of ink against the glassed
surface and fell
still. Each slow gasp welled
up strange to us
where we crouched. Smaller than
we’d thought it, it
slewed, limbs knotted
like knuckled hands
wrung white, a sight
we saw and shrank from—
who had not come
for this. The sea light
wimpled like banged steel
in the beyond.
We rose. Reeled stunned
in a reeking squall
of sandflies, saltburnt decay;
then, like appalled
reflections of half-recalled
lives, turned away.
“What was it?” asked
one; “a fish?” “Not
a fish,” we replied; “not
that.” And thought: ghost.
That soft horror pulsed
on in its rockpool
like an ember
of darkness; we left it
there. And, slow, trudged
down the rock-ledge
our low craft lifted
in the shadow of, lifted
and fell from. The light
was failing. Our guide
hunched astern, hooded,
knuckling white oars.
He lifted his face.
It seemed we did
not know this place;