New Poetries VII

by Michael Schmidt

  is a Pinteresting Gentile.

  And inside every Gentile

  is a unique ignorance

  of the Midrash

  that the Torah was given to everyone.

  *

  I have studied the yud-shaped pool of blood

  like an exhausted hunter sniffing out the air for some lentils.

  I have adorned myself with Bilaam’s staff infection, and the lines on my face

  record the litany of psalms I have struggled

  to compose

  lisping, tongue-numb from the frost of imagined taiga.

  But never could I hear

  the night-ram bleating out

  Zohar, Zohar.

  *

  I’ve heard Bialik forbade himself from writing as a kind of sign-prophecy.

  A desperate gesture towards the emptiness of his devotional rebellion.

  The way Hosea names his daughter ‘Ee-Ruchama’, meaning there is no mercy,

  to demonstrate that God, too, will have no mercy on his children.

  The poet’s silence is an almond-shaped abandonment.

  Holiness, an incorrect password

  to a door that has no lock, no gatekeeper.

  *

  To be a Jew is to pervert metaphysics

  so that what matters is not ideas

  about the thing or the thing itself

  but the voice, departing into blessing.

  A piece of fruit, embezzled from paradise

  by speech alone. By speech, alone.

  Déjà Vu

  Tell me the absence of helicopters, there

  In winter blue, above the bridge, isn’t

  Significant – that the upside-down sign

  Advertising a world at No Additional Fees

  Isn’t meant to draw us into it.

  And poems, tell me the years don’t spread,

  Vainly forming a notion

  Of self-worth and haggling over the boundary

  Between voice and desire. Tell me this need

  To hibernate is language’s way of teasing

  Forth from refusal. Tell me this staff, this rock

  This comma, projected into bread and blessing

  Doesn’t tell us everything we need to know to morph

  To ward to throw unknowable music: Fire, child of snow

  And snow, child of gaze. Whose? Yes. That’s the point,

  O chaos. So may the target of our senses and the backlog

  Of our failures be constitutive of our lives that we may live

  Beyond allure. Let those orange suede boots traipsing across

  Your poem not dissolve your knowledge that you manifested

  From a rat’s periphery. She wants to be a co-author with you,

  As if you were the same as you. As if the you deciding which

  Words deserve to arrive – here – were not an effect of the words

  They only seem to chaperone. Tell me a truth that doesn’t

  Reference Heidegger, a love whose knowledge exceeds all scope.

  Pirkei Avot

  My father used to say:

  Reader and writer are like two fugitives

  Examining the shade of an egg.

  But my mother would always counter, an olive.

  Now, my children taunt me:

  For what did they examine?

  A place to rest? A secret measure?

  The ward in which they question me

  Becomes a palace I can almost see.

  I strain towards the meagre light

  In search of something to say.

  Look! The light is the size of an egg!

  No, they reply. An olive!

  The Binding of Isaac

  Twenty minutes away, a young Muslim is dying of bone cancer

  In an Israeli hospital. His sister refuses to donate her marrow

  And the young man cries out in darkness, ‘Allah, Merciful One, I know

  You are punishing me for all those naked women I visited.’

  And under his rage is the sadness of tank-ploughed olive groves.

  We read about it in our seminar and debate the pros and cons

  Of hugging him. We refer to human touch as an intervention.

  ‘Who are you to love me?’ we hear our fantasies shout back at us.

  And so it was that Abraham, having heard the angel’s voice

  And felt her tears, untied his only son, saying, ‘God has provided

  The offering for us.’ But Ishmael insisted Avraham had heard wrong

  And said, ‘My place is here, on the altar.’ And Abraham said, ‘Isaac, Isaac.’

  And Ishmael said, ‘Hineini.’

  RACHEL MANN

  Must priests write religious poetry? It’s a question I’ve wrestled with repeatedly in relation to my own writing. I am fascinated by the question’s imperative: does the ‘must’ here mean ‘necessary’ or ‘inevitable’? Or even ‘doomed’? Is it necessary or inevitable for a priest-poet to be tied to the interrogation of the Divine? Certainly the origins of many of my poems lie in a recognition that I write in what Les Murray has called ‘the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith’. The genesis of my poems in this selection lie, in large measure, in acknowledgement of the ever-failing grip the Word has on a culture once saturated by it. I hope, however, I am not simply responding to a twenty-first-century version of Arnold’s ‘Sea of Faith’. Faith is all very well, but the Word is more interesting.

  Perhaps the slipperiness of the Word has an analogue in the seeming frictionless quality of words themselves. One doesn’t need to be a doomy Victorian or a playful post-modern to recognise the refrain that words are inadequate to speak the world. At their most basic, these poems are interested in what might be made with words when some degree of formal and rhythmic friction is applied to them.

  David Jones reminds us that one of the implications of the Latin root for ‘religious’, religio, is ‘ligament’ or connective tissue. Ligament is a binding which supports an organ; similarly, the religious may be read as a binding or a securing which makes a certain kind of freedom possible. As Jones suggests, ‘cut the ligament and there is atrophy’.

  The religious binding tissue in my poems is not so much my faith, still less ‘God’, but my Anglican formation in the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. Those texts provide the bindings for my language-wrangling. I hope, then, that my poems are not simply playful riffs on archaic phrases and gestures, but represent an attempt at what Evan Boland calls ‘a forceful engagement between a life and a language.’

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whilst imprisoned by the Nazi Regime, wrote ‘There are things more important than self-knowledge.’ Christian Wiman has gone so far as to suggest that ‘an artist who believes this is an artist of faith, even if faith contains no god’.* If these poems say something, anything, they do so by their relative disinterest in ‘self-knowledge’ and their commitment to interrogating the connective tissue between words and the traditions which have shaped them.

  * Christian Wiman, ‘God’s Truth in Life’, Poetry Review 98 (2008).

  A Kingdom of Love

  I return from the garden of remembrance,

  I wash the dead from my hands,

  I sing the versicles for Evensong, O Lord,

  My larynx trembles with mucus and awe.

  Collect for Purity

  I try to form prayer’s capital word

  On my tongue. O sweet imagination

  Give it shape enough! Love!

  Love should taste of something,

  The sea, I think, brined and unsteady,

  Of scale and deep and all we crawled out from.

  Of first day, the Spirit’s debut,

  The frantic dove torn apart,

  Her feathers ash on Eden.

  Yet of that of which we cannot speak

  We must pass over in silence –

  Selah!

  The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us

  With groanings
/>   Which cannot be uttered.

  Fides Quaerens

  Am I required to believe

  In the uncorruption of saints,

  The Mother’s timeless womb?

  There is limit, even if limit

  Is never drawn. (I cannot

  Give an instance of every rule.)

  I don’t know what ‘believe in’ means

  In the vast majority of cases,

  Which is to say I think it enough

  To acknowledge the glamour of words –

  Relic, body, bone – I think

  Mystery is laid in syllables, syntax,

  Miracle a kind of grammar,

  Milk to train the tongue.

  The Ordinal

  I’ve lived for the feelings of others,

  That’s a listening of sorts,

  What have I learned? That self

  Is bitumen, black as tar,

  Oh, how slowly we flow, oh

  How slowly we flow, we crack with age.

  I’ve lived for the feelings of others,

  A philosophy of sorts. I’ve heard

  Self give up its final word,

  Coughs and whispers in

  Hospitals and nursing homes.

  Oh, how slowly we flow, oh.

  The Book of Genesis

  Before holy or righteous, before the Law,

  Before sound was distilled into bet, aleph, niqqud

  (So many crossings-out), before all that: Song.

  Oh, to taste fricatives – damp from lip and palate –

  Dental trills, the Spirit chewed by teeth,

  Ejected from lungs, an offering!

  Oh, to know before, before, before the Book: Decision.

  Should the Apple be plucked or crushed?

  And, love, what place love?

  Compline

  Why should I not have lovers too?

  Which is to say, when no one else

  Comes near, God will have to do.

  Prayer is the body’s work, is,

  I was taught to steeple my fingers

  As a child, form a spire, Like this!

  Prayer ascends, it is naked, shiver.

  O God, avert thine eyes! Thine eyes

  Are multitude, thy tongue is bitter.

  The Apocalypse of John

  I.

  We gather at church door

  For a body, and perhaps

  This is creak of Last Day,

  Ten of us, eyes downcast,

  Behold! A universe in pavement cracks;

  I hold a Word in my hands – Eleison –

  I whisper, In God, nothing is ever truly lost,

  But already a Seal

  Is broken and I am sick

  Of rain and storm, and pale horse,

  And pale horse comes to my door

  And perhaps this is the Last Day,

  And rain, and rain, and angels

  Silent in Heaven, and dare I believe

  In God, nothing is ever truly lost?

  II.

  A body dies and I sing Requiem,

  Man hath but a short time to live,

  Man hath but the validity of material things!

  Requiem is black universe,

  Word is gravity,

  Body is praise!

  III.

  Yet to find one’s final form,

  Surely that’s the meaning

  Of spes contra spem?

  The ashes of a neighbour wait

  In my study for burial in a garden

  Of grit and peonies and loam,

  Soon to be carried a final time,

  Soon to be earthbound,

  A statement in ontology.

  Ecstatic. Cool. Unravelled.

  Chaucer on Eccles New Road

  ‘Canterbury Gardens comprises a hundred stylish apartments for the modern city-dweller…’ – Estate agent’s leaflet

  From between the lines – yellow, white, stained –

  speak, Theseus, speak. Of the great chain of love,

  kyndely enclyning. Breathe and speak, worthy knyght.

  Requite, dronke Robyn, or stynt thy clappe.

  Traffic has a language of its own:

  whispers and sighs, the chime of speeding steel,

  and prying’s no sin. Inquire of tram tracks,

  of Goddes pryvetee, how long it takes to lay.

  Gras tyme is doon; my fodder is now forage;

  A plea for peace, Oswald reve, but here’s truth:

  Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype.

  We all become earth, but mortar and brick?

  The Pardoner is a court, prefab walls,

  Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones,

  carpet and paint. Shopping malls are relics

  swarmed with pilgrims. Your garden, Theseus,

  is poison. Enclyne your roof, shelter me.

  Til it be roten in mullok or in stree.

  Reading Ovid on the Underground

  Look, Niobe comes… as beautiful as anger will let her be.

  Mansion House, Monument, Cannon Street, Bank,

  the electric underworld: carriages of wrists,

  elbows, ripe armpits. Stand clear of the doors.

  Words curve on all the walls. Last chance to see!

  Five Stars, A Triumph! Pin-up faces peel.

  Lear stares, his girls. He waits our flattery.

  No phases of the moon for us. No sun

  to mark the days. It’s all show: white light, glare.

  At the edge of electrocution

  corpse boys, corpse girls walk the tunnels

  and halls: stale breath, bodies out of time,

  they teach me the meaning of words:

  frantic, fears, daughters, sons, tears, alone, gone.

  St Pancras, Angel, Old Street, Moorgate. Bank.

  St Pancras, do you ever hear our prayers?

  Our prayers are escalators. Scala

  sounds so classy, elevating, but handrails

  are loops of black. Vinyl prayers spin on.

  Covent Garden, Piccadilly, Leicester Square.

  As far down as this world goes, I go down.

  Staircases move up, topple out of sight,

  metal waterfalls, but no one believes my tears.

  It’s theatre-land. Everyone a busker here.

  Michelle, ma belle. Dry your tears, I seh.

  East. East. All gods arise in the east.

  East Acton. East Finchley. East Cote. East Ham.

  Back to the source, through the burial grounds

  the Navvies bored, back beyond the dead.

  Heaven’s the top of a stair.

  Hell’s a blur, hot wind, an empty platform.

  The Priest Finds Eve in Piccadilly Gardens

  Mamucium: breast-place, mother, Eve –

  Oh bone of my flesh, flesh of my bone,

  Clay and water dredged, sweet Daub Hole.

  Tonight the mysteries of glaciers

  Spend themselves on tarmac. Ice-caps soak us.

  We’re the damp-arsed. Your favoured kids.

  So this is what it’s like to be cast out –

  East of Eden, East of Salford, benched

  With drunks. Beyond the wall, buses squeal.

  We’re in the dark and forget the garden

  Was an asylum once. Bright lights, fierce crowds

  Dance along its edge. We’d leave if we could.

  Mamucium: breast-place, mother, Eve –

  Clay and water. Raw bone. It’s what we are.

  Can you hear me, Eve? Our breath is fumes.

  St Elisabeth Zacharias

  Come. Beyond thirst, beyond tending,

  where rose petals crisp, water greens

  in a vase.

  Move closer. Breathe my dust, my very flesh

  settling. Be dust with me. Here where

  we place the things we’ve gathered –

  the china Labradors,

  the endless cats,

  the Cliff Richard plates


  Isn’t this how it should be? Piling

  fold on fold, letting gravity pull

  on our bones, till we can resist no more?

  Don’t touch me. My cells ache. My skin

  so thin spiders fall through.

  It would be a sin to hold someone else.

  Evensong

  ‘Love is a phoenix that will revive

  its own ashes’ – Thomas Traherne

  September, and the orchard sags with prayer:

  Strip the Fruit of Sin! Reap! Reap!

  Wye lifts lime, spins pools of silt at the tip

  Of fields and it is late, late, late, oh priest

  Hurry on! Sing, O miserable offender,