New Poetries VII

by Michael Schmidt

in its cells. No such urgency

  is found in a vase, though there may

  have been a hope in giving,

  in the short brightening of this room

  where a corolla frowningly describes

  a person’s heart.

  JAMES LEO MASKILL

  These selected poems have some features in common. Perhaps immediately obvious is their occasional use of the two-line stanza. This form gives the poems a uniformity of appearance yet it is put to different use in each. ‘Days’ utilises the couplet’s ability to create comparison. Two seemingly disparate images side by side in a repeating process. Since these images and events, which cover the historical, social and personal, are all given in the present tense, the effect is to condense time, to remove from it a linear progression. ‘Coming Thunder’, a loose sonnet, plays on this form’s inherent capacity to create and emphasise the notion of coupling. Its effect is visual as well as symbolic. In ‘The Norseman’s First Summer’, a poem which mixes plain English and fragmentary Old Norse, the form is used to control the poem’s pace, something crucial when two languages are in balance. And lastly in Labour, a poem exhaustively taxonomical, the form shapes the poem into a kind of ladder, each stanza break aiding the reader’s descent as well as their re-ascent after the poem’s final couplet.

  In other works, such as ‘Coffee Morning’ and ‘from Lasts’, form is less fixed. ‘Coffee Morning’ tumbles from its initial conversational beginning, getting curt and sudden by the close. ‘from Lasts’, being an extract from a longer work, has a narrative drive, so follows the nature of that narrative. In ‘Odessa’, the first section of the poem, the narrative voice uses stanzas and stanza changes to progress, invert or encase individual thoughts and moments. Whereas later in the poem, in ‘Vicissitude’, each stanza exists to present complete or incomplete acts, a kind of poetical to-do list.

  Thematically these nine poems are a somewhat broad nonagon held together by common concerns such as time, image and speech. There is a certain consideration for history as well as for the contemporary; with how things are said as well as how things are seen. Yet, perhaps most significantly, they are as different as they are similar, and are meant to be read as such.

  Days

  They are cleaning the bells in Viterbe.

  The bus is near Urbino.

  The oak-green cascades are falling in the North-West.

  A sheep is watching the sea hit the rocks.

  Rick is doing his loft in the sunset.

  Brown clouds are above Nantong.

  Justinian bathes, and drinks the water he bathes in.

  A film projector loops Gone with the Wind.

  Coventry is twinned with Dresden.

  Sarcasm is invented, then contravened.

  The fish eat at a shipwreck of fingers and gold.

  A century turns to another.

  Laura never looks the same in any two pictures.

  Hiro and his wife are at a weighing.

  The unpeopled earth is illuminated by a billion stars.

  The toes are going through the grapes.

  Nobody ever bothers to call.

  The people in the rainforest have never heard of the Portuguese.

  Usman is feeling tired but doesn’t know why.

  They make the area into a national park.

  A child’s clitoris is removed with a piece of glass.

  Gin is invented.

  In the basement there are things no one should see.

  Something is shimmering on the water, in the air.

  Charlemagne regrets his trip to Rome.

  Natale can only see his kids at weekends.

  Women and Men rebuild the cathedral at Chartres.

  They go out on the water in the rain.

  What his father tells him, he tells his son.

  The plane crashes in Munich in the snow.

  Her waist bends to the will of her clothing.

  The wanderers arrive at Skelig Michael.

  They wait and wait but he never comes.

  People scatter determinedly around the continents.

  Ira wakes from a confusing dream.

  The ancestors line the longhouse and sing

  sing

  sing.

  Coming Thunder

  When we stole the eggs from the barn that June

  you said we held life in our hands.

  Untrue I said as I carried a near score

  in my upturned t-shirt.

  And even if I could hold one

  it would never get born

  not in those hands that you let

  be put on you

  or in the grass nest we made

  smelling of piss-yellow sunshine

  or by us two, old enough to ourselves

  be parents

  but still going around like foxes

  wasting things other people might like to use.

  Joke

  for C.C.

  I said I was

  nella Campagna, nella campagna

  that was my joke

  as you took the car off the road

  and wordlessly through green branches

  to where wide earth

  was silent by vines and horse houses.

  You put me inside you

  under your skirts

  and that’s when I thought of my joke.

  Sometimes the simplest way is silence

  the car so hot I could only make out

  horse sounds in the back

  our two bodies moving beyond a joke.

  Coffee Morning

  What a perfect morning you say

  the milk’s gone bad.

  I smell it because I want to know

  how bad

  Very you say and we are

  wrinkled noses and frowns

  and black coffee drinkers now

  I choose a path that goes far down

  that does not reek

  nor connect to home

  to bury

  what will grow white

  soft and wet

  yet I reach a stump

  full with ants and dry

  and spill its top with our milk.

  The ants sail and roll.

  This is their problem now.

  Baghdad

  What words come from jealousy?

  The walls of encircling palaces

  and a barely traceable line.

  The market became many markets

  as the Prophet became many men,

  and, at the hand of the cloth seller,

  the Caliph whispered

  I am not he.

  The disguise of a distempered Araby.

  The world from Cairo to Bukhara.

  At the highest point,

  the stone heart of the city,

  the richness of a religious heart

  turned.

  The Norseman’s First Summer

  Fok-pykkr, in rás sæti

  the leave-gone from water mountain

  day, day, day, black-day, ne slæpe,

  see dust yellow, push, push, live,

  vision, ne boll, kið, geit, geit-punnr, live

  tree small, mansize, unstrong

  green maker yellow oil and hot, beard

  and wine hot. Kið, geit, tree-small

  unsnowed, unvile land, fok-punnr

  wifmen-light, light wimmen, housers

  uncolded, unfat, black, dark-soft

  yellow-oil wifmen in this tree-small.

  Fok leg-spread by skeið, vǫlvur

  in song-lag, ear-turners dream

  in day-passion, skeið to edgewater

  to vǫlvur, fok-pykkr and slæpe.

  Radix (Augury)

  The future is tomatoes

  you know will grow fat

  red and different

  on the budding vine

  you lace yourself –

  a spider lacing a trap –

  to catch the future

  tense. All else is now

  perp
etually, the tomatos,

  too, are now

  as you throw

  what was once

  going to happen.

  Labour

  They say it is the oldest profession.

  Older than the sea-vacuuming fishermen;

  the proverbial sheep-and-goatherds;

  the sweat-faced smiths and smith’s apprentice

  unable to find a girlfriend on an unsalaried

  internship, sharing a room south of the river;

  the milliners; the winemakers; the builders,

  dragging slop mud into squares of dry mudbrick

  for a mosque and a house and a brothel;

  the accountants; the taxmen; all those

  of jobs immoral enough to bring about

  religious conversion, a change of heart,

  hold a burgeoning civilisation together;

  the cross-makers; the athletes;

  those who did things with wood

  before the Romans; the transubstantiationists;

  the producers of religions and religious stories;

  the road-footed messengers;

  the breakers of horses and donkeys;

  the finders of navigable routes over mountains

  through seas and forests and marshland;

  the stalkers, approachers and fellers of deer

  elephant, buffalo, whale and whale shark;

  the singers; the incorrigible upright walkers.

  Well, with all this work being done

  why shouldn’t a woman have a job?

  from Lasts

  I. ODESSA

  I have memories of the day I knew my future

  that I would marry a soldier

  in the wax-fizzing shapes

  you cannot read yourself –

  premonitions are for someone else

  to see – and I balled all night

  at the certainty of my sleeping

  curled around a rifle

  a horse and sword at the breakfast table

  his steady hand decapitating my egg

  with the functional twitch

  of putting down bodies not yet dead

  yet it’s a growth industry

  and sure to keep me good and safe

  and clothed in the modernest ways

  women and men at the tea trays

  day and night performances

  all the staples house and life require

  unsnowed hours in the pleasure grounds

  mind-projected flowers in the rush

  a finger to my mouth to hush

  my breathing words of all the planted names

  and patterns of pine shadows

  that never go out of leaf. And when my daughter sleeps

  to her ear I will sing

  the sound the water makes in Odessa

  each note a star in the star-ecstatic sky.

  I am sure I know how I will die –

  when all the people of the world come to Odessa

  filing secretly, secretly to themselves,

  down the Potemkin steps, idempotent

  and glad toward the sea, to wash there,

  to feel how good cold can be

  when you have no cares for drowning

  nor deep water’s charming

  murmur of mouth-bubbling water.

  I will tell these moments to my daughter

  when drip drop they all go over

  the great populations in coats and hats

  deliberate dress for deliberate acts

  bringing the water back.

  He was thin and cautious as a cat

  surly behind a baroque moustache

  spine like a brushstroke

  and when he spoke

  all good and hiding complexity

  I waited

  for the day he walked me round by the arm

  the ocean horse-kicking itself calm

  and black

  as such days.

  He was quick to talk of love

  and not shy to reach

  his body up and over me,

  waves reaching out above the sea

  and sand-plumes of wind

  below my hands.

  He fascinated in the salon

  walls clad with conversation

  a nice line of argument when asked

  of bears he killed

  in the north

  in the past

  leaning in the inside fire shine.

  The pleasure it seems was only mine

  half a season of love shaped with time

  and victory beauty refinement dense

  as a bad cold.

  I will tell my daughter this when I am old.

  II. LAKE CHAD

  Bedoved above the silent water

  there are nonagons of vulture

  sense-hovering, escaping the wetlands

  and current social limitations, for Niger,

  for the Air mountains, for bones to pick.

  V. VICISSITUDE

  In chintz along the San Martine she promised

  she would be back

  when all the death-houses were hotels

  and each new language

  from the inflowing people

  was prismed into a single tongue

  when the one-eyed boys joined hands

  and shared the job of seeing

  heavy changes,

  the repeating apocalypse of Tuesdays

  when all we had to do

  had been done.

  The waist-high water split her like a question

  to an answer I had already begun.

  VI. SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE

  I showed her the emptiest half of the world

  islands snow-curled in white sand

  whales filling whale throats

  time-old fishing and freight boats

  lungs of wind below the world ceiling

  we made good our living

  two stones anchoring beach towels

  head-flipped centimes for dolmades

  taro and manioc soft

  salt lips drunk of kava

  laplap in the nakamal doorway.

  We spoke much of the night and looked across the islands

  to Menelaus in his war-fond tupenu

  tattooed with all accompaniments of rank

  the top half of his body big and out

  lumping his man-breasted power all about

  ready to launch a thousand-canoed assault

  as though to peg a hurricane to the ground.

  Each and every night behind the sound

  of men in low-lying warboats just because

  he couldn’t fight a war for only love.

  I showed her the emptiest half of the world

  festooned in rare birds and space

  half her face

  upon the pillowcase

  the backward moving ceiling fan

  reflecting helicopters on the divan

  to all the tired nights –

  to all the tired nights I prayed

  as in São Cristóvão, as in that golden glade

  of tired nights

  of carrying her upon my back, sleeping

  in the angled mountain rain

  in a house of mud-daubed walls and skin

  and llama in the drunken mist

  of names of rain and words for raining

  and ancestors vanished for never having lived.

  The ever-forest canopy dropped our eyelids

  till all the hours and all the days reversed

  and all the warboats journeyed back in time

  and Qusqu raised its blood hearts to the fire

  and green in golden magic gods returned

  and tapestries of spiders reeled and burned

  to celebrate the world-destroying world.

  We know now what we never learned, how

  expressible in her throat were lyric words

  she heard each night from song-wing birds

  who fly and fly sunlight arou
nd the world

  till inexpressible in her throat we heard

  the brown voiced Ucayali

  the infinity of trees where no one ever dies.

  ROWLAND BAGNALL

  Many of the these poems are constructed from the bits and pieces of experience – loose words and phrases, persistent images and thoughts – that decided to stick around, for whatever reason, after the party. Eventually, a group of them will draw together and become a scaffold, which can then be used to make a poem. I’m interested in glitches, particularly when language, sense, and memory go wrong, and in the different ways of using/abusing these malfunctions. I also think a lot about the images we keep, and how we can’t really control the way those images relate, or what can happen to them once they’re set loose in the Jungle Gym of our imaginations. It’s possible that my writing has something in common with collage’s particular species of vandalism, although this hasn’t been a conscious choice. I do find lots to write about in visual art and film, however, which I suppose will be apparent here. More often than not, the shape of a poem tends to determine itself, so I usually end up paying closer attention to its sounds, its rhythms, and its repetitions. Occasionally, during the process of writing, a poem will begin to feed upon itself, biting off its fingernails, which I expect relates to glitches, too; something like this is happening in ‘Hothouse’. I like to think of these poems as having nothing to do with me personally, but get the feeling this is not the case.