That someone else had snuffed it: a name drifting like an afterthought,
A scribbled wisp of smoke you try and grasp, as it becomes diminuendo, then
Vanishes. For fál is also frontier, boundary, as in the undiscovered country
From whose bourne no traveller returns, the illegible, thorny hedge of time itself —
Heartstopping moments, measured not by the pulse of a wrist-watch, nor
The archaic anarchists’ alarm-clock, but a mercury tilt device
Which ‘only connects’ on any given bump on the road. So, by this wingèd messenger
The promise ‘to pay the bearer’ is fulfilled:
As someone buys another round, an Allied Irish Banks £10 note drowns in
The slops of the counter; a Guinness stain blooms on the artist’s impression
Of the sinking of The Girona; a tiny foam hisses round the salamander brooch
Dredged up to show how love and money endure, beyond death and the Armada,
Like the bomb-disposal expert in his suit of salamander-cloth.
Shielded against the blast of time by a strangely-mediaeval visor,
He’s been outmoded by this jerky robot whose various attachments include
A large hook for turning over corpses that may be booby-trapped;
But I still have this picture of his hands held up to avert the future
In a final act of No surrender, as, twisting through the murky fathoms
Of what might have been, he is washed ashore as pearl and coral.
This strange eruption to our state is seen in other versions of the Falls:
A no-go area, a ghetto, a demolition zone. For the ghost, as it turns out —
All this according to your man, and I can well believe it — this tin ghost,
Since the streets it haunted were abolished, was never heard again.
The sleeve of Raglan Street has been unravelled; the helmet of Balaclava
Is torn away from the mouth. The dim glow of Garnet has gone out,
And with it, all but the memory of where I lived. I, too, heard the ghost:
A roulette trickle, or the hesitant annunciation of a downpour, ricochetting
Off the window; a goods train shunting distantly into a siding,
Then groaning to a halt; the rainy cries of children after dusk.
For the voice from the grave reverberates in others’ mouths, as the sails
Of the whitethorn hedge swell up in a little breeze, and tremble
Like the spiral blossom of Andromeda: so suddenly are shrouds and branches
Hung with street-lights, celebrating all that’s lost, as fields are reclaimed
By the Starry Plough. So we name the constellations, to put a shape
On what was there; so, the storyteller picks his way between the isolated stars.
But, Was it really like that? And, Is the story true?
You might as well tear off the iron mask, and find that no one, after all,
Is there: nothing but a cry, a summons, clanking out from the smoke
Of demolition. Like some son looking for his father, or the father for his son,
We try to piece together the exploded fragments. Let these broken spars
Stand for the Armada and its proud full sails, for even if
The clock is put to rights, everyone will still believe it’s fast:
The barman’s shouts of time will be ignored in any case, since time
Is conversation; it is the hedge that flits incessantly into the present,
As words blossom from the drinkers’ mouths, and the flotilla returns to harbour,
Long after hours.
Second Language
English not being yet a language, I wrapped my lubber-lips around my thumb;
Brain-deaf as an embryo, I was snuggled in my comfort-blanket dumb.
Growling figures campaniled above me, and twanged their carillons of bronze
Sienna consonants embedded with the vowels alexandrite, emerald and topaz.
The topos of their discourse seemed to do with me and convoluted genealogy;
Wordy whorls and braids and skeins and spiral helices, unskeletoned from laminate geology —
How this one’s slate-blue gaze is correspondent to another’s new-born eyes;
Gentians, forget-me-nots, and cornflowers, diurnal in a heliotrope surmise.
Alexandrine tropes came gowling out like beagles, loped and unroped
On a snuffly Autumn. Nimrod followed after with his bold Arapahoes,
Who whooped and hollered in their unforked tongue. The trail was starred with
Myrrh and frankincense of Anno Domini; the Wise Men wisely paid their tariff.
A single star blazed at my window. Crepuscular, its acoustic perfume dims
And swells like flowers on the stanzaic-papered wall. Shipyard hymns
Then echoed from the East: gantry-clank and rivet-ranks, Six-County hexametric
Brackets, bulkheads, girders, beams, and stanchions; convocated and Titanic.
Leviathans of rope snarled out from ropeworks: disgorged hawsers, unkinkable lay,
Ratlines, S-twists, plaited halyards, Z-twists, catlines; all had their say.
Tobacco-scent and snuff breathed out in gouts of factory smoke like aromatic camomile;
Sheaves of brick-built mill-stacks glowered in the sulphur-mustard fog like campaniles.
The dim bronze noise of midnight-noon and Angelus then boomed and clinked in Latin
Conjugations; statues wore their shrouds of amaranth; the thurible chinked out its smoky patina.
I inhaled amo, amas, amat in quids of pros and versus and Introibos
Ad altare Dei; incomprehensibly to others, spoke in Irish. I slept through the Introit.
The enormous Monastery surrounded me with nave and architrave. Its ornate pulpit
Spoke to me in fleurs-de-lys of Purgatory. Its sacerdotal gaze became my pupil.
My pupil’s nose was bathed in Pharaonic unguents of dope and glue.
Flimsy tissue-paper plans of aeroplanes unfolded whimsical ideas of the blue,
Where, unwound, the prop’s elastic is unpropped and balsa-wood extends its wings
Into the hazardous azure of April. It whirrs into the realm of things.
Things are kinks that came in tubes; like glue or paint extruded, that became
A hieroglyphic alphabet. Incestuous in pyramids, Egyptians were becalmed.
I climbed into it, delved its passageways, its sepulchral interior, its things of kings
Embalmed; sarcophagi, whose perfume I exhumed in chancy versions of the I-Ching.
A chink of dawn was revelated by the window. Far-off cocks crowed crowingly
And I woke up, verbed and tensed with speaking English; I lisped the words so knowingly.
I love the as-yet morning, when no one’s abroad, and I am like a postman on his walk,
Distributing strange messages and bills, and arbitrations with the world of talk:
I foot the snow and almost-dark. My shoes are crisp, and bite into the blue-
White firmament of pavement. My father holds my hand and goes blah-
Blah with me into the ceremonial dawn. I’m wearing tweed. The universe is Lent
And Easter is an unspun cerement, the gritty, knitty, tickly cloth of unspent
Time. I feel its warp and weft. Bobbins pirn and shuttle in Imperial
Typewriterspeak. I hit the keys. The ribbon-black clunks out the words in serial.
What comes next is next, and no one knows the che sarà of it, but must allow
The Tipp-Ex present at the fingertips. Listen now: an angel whispers of the here-and-now.
The future looms into the mouth incessantly, gulped-at and unspoken;
Its guardian is intangible, but gives you hints and winks and nudges as its broken token.
I woke up blabbering and dumb with too much sleep. I rubbed my eyes and ears.
I closed my eyes again and
flittingly, forgetfully, I glimpsed the noise of years.
Eesti
I wandered homesick-lonely through that Saturday of silent Tallinn
When a carillon impinged a thousand raining quavers on my ear, tumbling
Dimly from immeasurable heights into imaginary brazen gong-space, trembling
Dimpled in their puddled, rain-drop halo-pools, concentrically assembling.
I glimpsed the far-off, weeping onion-domes. I was inveigled towards the church
Through an aural labyrinth of streets until I sheltered in its porch.
I thumbed the warm brass worn thumb-scoop of the latch. Tock. I entered into bronze-
Dark, shrines and niches lit by beeswax tapers and the sheen of ikons.
Their eyes and the holes in their hands were nailed into my gaze, quod erat demonstrandum:
Digits poised and pointed towards their hearts. They are beautiful Panjandrums
Invoked by murmuring and incense, hymns that father passes on to father,
The patina of faces under painted faces. They evoke another
Time, where I am going with you, father, to first Mass. We walked
The starry frozen pavement, holding hands to stop ourselves from falling. There was no talk,
Nor need for it. Our incense-breath was words enough as we approached the Gothic,
Shivering in top-coats, on the verge of sliding off the metronomic
Azure-gradual dawn, as nave and transept summoned us with beaded, thumbed
And fingered whispering. Silk-tasselled missals. Rosaries. Statues stricken dumb
Beneath their rustling purple shrouds, as candles wavered in the holy smoke.
The mosaic chapel echoed with a clinking, chinking censer-music.
This red-letter day would not be written, had I not wandered through the land of Eesti.
I asked my father how he thought it went. He said to me in Irish, Listen: Éist.
Apparat
Unparalysed, the robot bomb-disposal expert inched and tacked across the mezzanine
As casually as someone to be barbered sits relaxing with a magazine.
It was using ‘deep creep’ and ‘infinite hair’, conversing in its base-of-two conundrum.
Its chips were bugged like all the toasters in the apparatchniks’ condominium.
Turnbull twiddled with the radio controls. He twitched his robot’s claws.
He felt the Mobile Ordinance Disposal Unit index through its dictionary of clues.
Umbilical, he was in the waiting room. Barberlike, he opened up his case of instruments.
He was beckoned by the realms of Nod. He entered in with incense and Byzantine vestments.
The smart bomb got the message and intoned the right liturgical analysis.
Latinate, they swapped explosive bits and pieces; they re-emerged in Nemesis.
The Brain of Edward Carson
They cracked the skull and watched its two halves creak apart, like the decks
Of some Byzantine trireme. The herringboned, zipped oars, the chains and shackles.
The bronze circuitry. The locks. The Titanic, legal depositions of the cells.
The hammered rivets. The rivetted, internal gaze. The screws. The nails.
The caulked bulwarks. The slaves, embalmed in honeycomb prismatic.
Barbaric instruments inserted there, like hook and razor, iron picks
By which they will extrapolate its history: the bronze, eternal static
Of his right, uplifted hand. The left hand like a shield. The bolted-on, external
Eyes. The seraphic frown. The borders and the chains contained therein. The fraternal
Gaze of the Exclusive Brethren: orange and bruised purple, cataleptic.
The map of Ulster opened up, hexagonal and intricate, tectonic:
Its shifting plates were clunked and welded into place by laws Masonic.
The ladder and the rope. The codicils. The compasses by which they sail
Uncharted futures. The outstretched hand. The crown. The sash. The secret nail.
And then disintegration intervened, the brain eluded them: Sphinxlike, catatonic.
Opus 14
Hole Blown in Baroque Splendour of Opera House (designed by Frank Matcham):
The Security Forces were specifically looking for terrorists but spectacularly failed to catch them.
Newly-appointed innumerate Chancellor of the Exchequer What-Do-You-Call-Him Clarke
Was counting his stars in twos like the innumerable animals in Noah’s Ark.
Did you know that ‘the set of all objects describable in exactly eleven English words’
Is called an ‘R-Set’? I didn’t. It was dreamed up by the people who put the ‘surd’ in ‘absurd’.
Spokesman for censored political party spoke in someone else’s lip-synch
So perfectly, you’d think it was the man himself, though much of this is double-think.
So I woke up this morning with yet another wrong solution to Fermat’s Last
Theorem, which bore about the same relationship to global X as does the world to Atlas.
He had a pocketful of pocket calculators, palindromes, and anagrams. The Name
Of Names eluded him as yet, but he was working on it and had found the Name of the Game.
The idea was that one and one made three, like in the Holy Family
Or Trinity, where ‘three’ is pronounced ‘tree’, as in the Irish Christian Brother’s homily.
I think this goes to show that Cajori’s study of mathematical symbols
Is in part, like not to see the wood for trees, a graveyard for dead symbols.
For you can deconstruct all sorts of words from ‘England’: angel, gland and dangle;
It’s the way the Germans have captured the Gaolainn-speaking industry in Dingle.
Sums are funny. Wars 2. Legs 1. Wives 2. Children 4. Wounds 2. Total 11. You know?
Which reminds me to go and check out Nik Cohn’s book Yes, We Have No.
Bananas is understood. It’s not known by many, or maybe it is, that Cohn’s from Londonderry or Derry,
Which might account for the ambivalence of the fact of the Foyle’s not having a ferry.
Of course, it has this double-decker bridge, at which you’re doubly checked.
The soldier looks at you and then he looks at your picture. It’s pronounced echt.
At the previous Chancellor’s Last Supper, he was seized by a sudden triskaidecaphobia
Which took him to the fourteenth floor, where he became immersed in a conference of bankers from the Bank of Wachovia.
It likes to do that. Wachovia. Which brings me back to baroque Opera House designed by Frank.
The googolplex security net had been full of innumerable holes held together by string, to be frank.
All Souls
The unWalkman headphones stick out awkwardly, because they are receiving
Not the packaged record of a song, but real-time input, a form of blah
Alive with intimations of mortality, the loud and unclear garbled static.
It’s the peripatetic buzz of static, like it was a Hallowe’en-like weather
That you rarely get at Hallowe’en. The mushrooms mushroomed as per
Usual, that is to say, in subterfuge, slowly dawning through on Instamatic.
Like putting on spectacles, when what it was was blurred, then swims
Into your focus. You can see they come from the Planet X, with their walkie-
Talkies, the heavy warbling of their heavy Heaney tyres and automatic,
Gyroscope-type-tank-surveillance technique, their faces blacked like
Boots. Their antennae quivered on that Hallowe’en encountered just beyond Sans
Souci. It was, in fact, outside the Fire Station, and the firemen, with Platonic
Abandon, were going through their exercises, rehearsing for the Fire,
The Bomb, the Incident, some routine dot on the dial, where the wireless
/> Lights with intimations of Hilversum or Moscow, and the Radio Symphonic
Orchestra is playing someone’s Dead March through the whistles and the static
Of the dark you listen to. To which you listen, like routine intimations
Of the precinct where the oblique Mandarins decreed antique
Examinations. Then the sound was turned up suddenly, anorectic candidates
Blew their fuses; they had failed to comprehend their hierophantic elders, who
Laid the rubric down so many yonks ago in ancient mnemonic.
Demonic intimations went on daily; routine, undercover orchestrations
Of the nominated discipline of alphabetic, proscribed areas
That ended, as they always do, in tragic, tired recriminations; rhetoric.
It then occurred the Firemen had a Ball, it was at Hallowe’en. Ecstatically, they
Didn’t have false faces on. They were plastic, not explosively, but faces. Then
They tore their faces off. UnWalkmanlike. Laconic. Workmanlike.
58
They’d rehearsed the usual Heinz variety of condoms, clocks, fertilizer, and electrical flex,
The Ballad of HMS Belfast Page 6