by Steven Price
and if we woke
we would remember
none of this.
Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
Which once more unwaked from drags down all
she is: grey-shawled, cold, in a dark parlour
she waits, her small white hands salt-stung still.
The night oysters in tight around her. Colder
black winds shoal hard her latched gate;
its nothing all week wakes her. She shuts
her eyes. Tells herself he’s moored-up late
or gutting yet the catch, the slurred fish slit
and flaring in the drainpans’ phosphor tin,
plicked scales quick on slickers greased with gore—
men are late for any reason. Now wind
bangs up the back porch like a boy soaked bare.
She does not think of last week. Its downpour.
The drenched men gaffing that body to shore.
Omens in the Year of the Ox
The lake slits its belly; a pale blade slips in.
All oared elbow,
black back-kick and purl, all sputtered gasp of froth-
sprayed shine blown out,
she, slack, cuts through pitch, wrists dragging a deeper cold.
Old stars swim out over.
Treading the dead waters, she goes out. Grey hair adrift,
flected and lucent
there where each slow reach, gasp, roll, reach of her
churns and churns what
sleeps in her wake. When she wades out the shallows
drain off her fingers
in slow molten ingots; her ankles bloom in the tarred silt
and she’s shivering—
a thing flowing fathoms under had finned up past her
there in the black,
a thing vast, stirred, deep, ancient and cold, utterly
unconcerned with her
had slurred along her flesh in a long silvering flash,
a living current,
then plunged back down to the dark and was lost.
The Persian General
Herodotus tells us that when the tyrant Arximedes learned that Polygoras, whose verses were admired even among the Persians, stood among his captives, he summoned him to dine. In the firelight he unbound the Greek’s hands and offered wine, fresh bread, oysters in mountain ice. He laid a jewelled finger on the poet’s wrist. “I would like you to sing of my victories,” he said, “I would like you to march with me.” The Greek refused. Arximedes cajoled, pleaded, threatened, charmed. But when he realized his captive could not be persuaded, the tyrant released him and sent him stumbling off towards the Greek lines. He would not extinguish such a light from the world, Herodotus writes admiringly, even though it burn against him. The following morning Arximedes cut out the tongues and noses from the remaining prisoners, then flayed each man alive. Three hundred twenty-six captive Greeks. Their blood filled a crevasse deep enough to bathe in.
One fragment of verse by Polygoras survives: “The green fields lie ploughed like her thighs, the night is cold, O my love, I am coming.” Those who do not see the war in such lines, Herodotus writes, have not known war.
Chorus
They rode cold gusts down in a blustered roaring
I’d withstood, all wind, with so much still to ask—
were they visitations or figments, intruders
or guests? Was it form they took in the swarm
or was form taken after? “We drift against,
O!, granite keels, and are so so cold,” cried one
against the thunder. I flinched. Icy rain
gattling the leaves, raking a bruised light
over the lawn. But had they come to others
as to me? Did they lack all lineament
when they left? “Lo! what we went through
was not what we thought!” howled another;
and: “Leaving is not how we think it to be!”
Each hollered down a din of such mock,
muckery, gust. Had they nothing to say? “Observe
the birds’ ferocious fart—” sniggered the first;
I threw up my hands and stormed away.
Dr Johnson’s Table Talk
Truly, Sir, if ever I met an arse-picking pickle-fingered mettle-felcher—
__________
Indeed you are correct, Sir:
he was birthed in a shite-barn’s shine-bowl.
__________
Not, Sir, upon my word: I should say not!
__________
That he is a shrivelled sock of skin, Sir, no man could doubt;
but so fast dribbled out—!
__________
Nay, Sir, not he; he would lose his arse if it were loose.
__________
Not hobbled, Sir; merely a three-legged dog piggered rearward.
Lacking a leg he hobbles the harder.
Which leg! Which leg, she asks!
__________
I beg pardon, Sir? How is that?
__________
A gapstop, Sir! A gutter-slinger, Sir! A gross-bellied blowsy bin, Sir,
whose panny giggers wide for any with a pound!
__________
Sir: never did such a doddering gog-brained codfish come
so completely through a man’s mud-shoaled pratts.
__________
His gaying instrument, Sir? I should say so!
__________
Ah, what is this? Roast duck? Pudding and pie?
Madam, a man would piss in his fist for a piece of this pie.
Plumb
What we went
through was not
what we thought.
That was then.
Then was not
what went on
but what stood
still. What stood?
Fall for one.
Fixed sway. Light.
Plunging straight
out of ourselves
what did not fade
fell true
in that slow
fall of our few
our unfathoming
days.
Odds Were
That swaggy haze of August heat
we limped through lugging bases, bats,
bitten leather mitts rubbed to a sheen
come dusk. Who we were. What we’d be.
High over shingled roofs vapour trails
drifted off into meaning. Faint screel
of the old dayliner, chinking downtrack.
It was taken back, all of it back.
A white white arbutus sun-stained
and shriven. What is and is again
is there, though it fades. Seen afar,
seems fire in its own dissolving fire.
We do not know if anything ends.
Soils leech, lakes rise, while in frail vials
men grow skin out of its own death.
But the loft of a ball on its right course,
a haft hefted in gripped fists, a bat
all riflecrack and gut-shivering hit
and the wood through no effort of its own
connecting. We just swung and ran.
Kid
. . . and morning bent our fender back, in,
chrome all warpled with unwashed light. Light
is what we come to, rundown in darkness.
Kid’s hair in the glass streaming a greasy shine.
I turned the motor over: clouds of bright
birds burst the trees. What was ours, what parked us
there, what the hour: like any weekend cued
in that second reel of our lives, bored, beered,
unbuckled and bent double as in a pew,
shivering and all agrin. We shifted into gear,
the clack of hollow cans cruppled in the back
gone stale. How we moved through a savage light
blinded, amoan and bad-headed. Eyes fucked.
Fists swollen. God
but that sun was bright.
The Boy Next Door
Because our ladder’s battered leg banged, lurched,
listed badly, his head would slur a blurred
arc across the glass, dip, then disappear
to a bucket perched below. Maybe safety
mattered more to my mother than to me;
for pouring warm from bed I’d peer out, pale
fists pressed to the sill until his hands slid back
in view, vinegared, red-fleshed. He’d clank
up the ladder’s steel slats, whorl soaped moons
into that glass, then scrape all crookedly off
with the long sinewy languor of a dream:
to my sleep-gogged eyes he seemed not to clean
the windows, but erase them. Always early
Saturdays, always at my waking,
the quiet rasp of wet cloth rubbing glass, then
the dull screel of dried rubber dragged across.
That boy next door a blur behind drenched hands—
and always the window again made whole.
As if I could step through. Stand there in his cold
uneasy air.
But nights under no moon
low moans waded the witchgrass in our yard.
I’d stare at the glass through terrified air, watch
his slow drift through lamplit rooms,
the cautious countable lights going out behind
his blown head. Loose, wild, breathing murder
in my bed, feeling a fierce elation clockwork
through my skull. That was blood, rising.
Chorus
A clatter as the desk creaked, filling;
rattle of a handle at my knee. I felt
a presence passing: its rasping ceased
near the door. “Do not turn; do not turn
toward us,” they coughed from awful throats,
crackling like nightbirds in the black.
What’s happened? I grasped the lamp to lift it.
They had altered. “Do not turn that on,”
one hissed. And this: “He thinks we’ve turned.”
I shivered. “What’s t-turn t-t-turning
in him turns him p-pale,” stuttered a second.
“You called us down and drew us here,”
the fiercest whispered, “you ordered us.”
I’d ordered nothing. “And without order
is there art?” A low grimacing leer,
the air ashimmer at its edges. “He fears
the order’s not his own.” “Or not his
to own.” “Or not his only.” I feared only
what I’d failed to feel in my skin, let alone
in any other’s. That I feared. “And?”
Already they were withdrawing. And.
And shouldn’t I be more in it? I asked.
“You’re in it regardless.” I felt
something, a heat at my cheek, like a lantern
just cooling in the burn, from which
I understood they would, in the rhyme, return.
Late Rehearsal: Requiem in D Minor
Shade
that shapes stage,
wrist that takes shape: what dark
strings stretch gut-tuned to mark
page
by flecked page
each stagelight’s seepage
to black? We are passage,
age,
sweet decline,
the sorrowful woods
shirr; we char when we should
shine.
Offstage fades
to wisp, white matchsticks
snapped in the strike; spark-flicked
frayed
seats catch, creak
where grey faces fold
close to scratch out each cold
sheet,
where horsehair
bows bend oarlike, slice
dripping a drenched silence.
Here.
Soft. A sound
of stunned pigeons aloft
in dark rafters: applause—
then
slow white hands,
faint, as if adrift
over black waters: Let lift,
it sings,
be light.
The Second Magi Returns to Parthia
Fallen ill my King and failing, I feared
we should not reach Judea: that strange flared
star seemed ever to falter, its cold light
near enshrouded night after icy night
in those bleached dunes. Lost, wind-rippled
in a grinding dark, our caravan ground on,
a weird eel unwinding windward in the lee;
and we rode what we hoped was west.
Any would founder. Frozen wadis, the bray
and crunch of camels lurching in the flail
and some nights the tracks six-toed, strange,
the cold tugging at our robes and how we
turned, always, to nobody there, just a creak
and shatter of iced reins
in half-flensed hands—
Like sand or rust
all corrodes; we last just long enough to outlast.
Forty nights, withering in darkness, it bore us
westward with it: we could not my King not
cross; each dusk the glittering sands spun
as we staggered out over eerie dunes,
rags on sticks under westering skies, red eyes
fixed on a plummeting sun.
Stations of the Geode
I
This world is hollow; go.
Break it. Under a barnacled dark
a hard light quartzes a queer fire:
break it. Go. The true geode
grows against itself, is maculate,
scarred, all mar and grunt of stone,
all glottal stop of rock.
II
Break it. Go. The true geode’s
guts glint fluke-fanged, fixed-fast, agleam
in an amethyst crust of unrock,
blooming like blown glass. Light
too can be entombed. Look: geodes
inlode with longing: what once was
stone is stone still yet grows.
III
Blooming like blown glass, light
illumines the outer object alone.
Gripped in warm hands, glows warm
what is utterly not us,
and beautiful: an egg furrowed,
infolded. How we long to go
in where there is no in
IV
that is not utterly us,
our bodies but striate and shear.
Let us be air-scour, wind-wawl,
an eye that won’t open;
let us some nights let grief drill deep
in us, that it come back black,
hollowed-out in wonder.
V
The eye that won’t open
sees nothing. Here the heart’s sump
thrumps its own slow erosions—
vein-whorpled, ventricled,
blood-bellowing all with light.
We are bone-caged and vugulate,
world. Break us
to make us bright.
At the Edge of the Visible
In strange cities sometimes it happens. A statue parts the pigeon-stained curtain of its body and peers out in hard sunlight, amazed. In Stuttgart the living statues followed us with their eyes, bronzed arms upraised in benediction. I had been reading Boswell with a knuckle marking the page. How Dr Johnson had refuted Berkeley’s argument against matter by kicking a stone over cobblestones. I refute it thus, he is supposed to have said. Sometimes the world’s beauty overwhelms, and still we doubt our place in it. In the late October sunlight you rested a gloved hand on a saint’s thigh and laughed. The statues could not help themselves, and looked away. Later, at the café in the park: an old man in a grey suit, folded over a chessboard, unmoving for hours. Do
n’t stare, you whispered, and kicked my shoe. So that I was, in that place, for that hour, irrefutable.
Transparencies
I
Then slurred shut the sliding
door. Sunbleached
deck, weeds seething gold:
here what feeds
in the rooms of the world
wants no truck
with grace. Won’t even
try. Too much light sears
the flesh; here
you lived eclipsed
by a cast back
glance. Your whole life
a rising from.
II
So morning stokes
its kiln. So you stake
this acre
of sky, this gulp
of flesh you gave
your days to. Nothing
is yours by right.
From white bells wasps
hove past pollened
with fury, all touch
and go. Wait. In the furnace
of itself it pitied
you: your peeled back
burned was the blessing
of its terrifying hand.
III
Handed a half-
glass you held out for the whole
of it all
day. In that cold water
a watery skin spun sky
in silvered fractals
of ice. Your skin spun