Plus a Joker’s device which, someone claimed, had devolved from one of the ’50s Batman serial flicks —
Which proves there’s nothing new sub specie aeternitatis, or it’s part of the general, Heraclitean flux.
Like the orange-sized plastic tomato that glows on the Formica counter of the all-night caff,
Your actual’s slantindicular as the letter zed, and a long shot from being all kiff,
As you’d guess from the blobs and squiggles they’d squidged on their chips and someone got on his cuff.
It was raining on the neon writing as they upped and offed and packed themselves into the pick-up truck;
The drizzly sound of the words seeped out and will-o’-the-wisped on the nearby railway track;
But when the deal came down and the Enterprise glimmed through, they’d be n cards short of a trick.
For they couldn’t computate how many beans made five; a has-been Celticamerad had vizzed them to the Picts.
And, chauffed through the dark, they were well on the drag to becoming commemorative plaques —
Which is hickery-pickery, Indian smoke to the pipe of the aberkayheybo Hibernian Pax.
So it’s mercury tilt and quicksilver flash as the Johnson slammed on the brakes
And it’s indecipherababble bits and bods, skuddicked and scrabbled like alphabet bricks —
A red hand. A rubber glove. The skewed grin of the clock.
A clip of ammunition. A breastpocketful of Bics.
Opus Operandi
1
Fatima handed out twelve teaching modules of the ‘empathy belly’
To the variously expectant fathers. Some were Paddy, and some were Billy.
Today’s lesson was the concept ‘Orange’. They parsed it into segments: some were kith,
And some were kin. They spat out the pips and learned to peel the pith.
Then the deep grammar of the handshake, the shibboleths of aitch and haitch:
It’s a bit like tying knots, whether Gordian or sheepshank, clove or hitch.
In the half-dark of their lapidary parliament, you can just make out the shape
Of chimeras and minotaurs. Anthropomorphic goats are blethering to the demi-sheep.
It seems the gene-pool got contaminated. Everything was neither one thing nor the other;
So now they’re trying to agree on a formula for a petition to the Author.
He’s working overtime just now, dismembering a goose for goose-quills.
Tomorrow will be calfskin parchment, then the limitation clauses and the codicils.
2
Jerome imagined Babel with its laminates and overlapping tongues
And grooves, the secret theatre with its clamps and vices, pincers, tongs.
It’s like an Ark or quinquereme he prised apart, to find the little oarsmen
At their benches. They looked somewhat surprised as he began the seminar
On hieroglyphs, using them as prime examples. They began to strain
Against the shackles of his language, his sentences, his full-stop and his chain.
He tapped the clinker-built antique and it disgorged its clichés.
He upturned it and it struggled like a turtle full of cogs and helices.
A school of clocks swarmed out from the Underwood’s overturned undercarriage,
Full of alphabetical intentions, led astray by braggadocio and verbiage.
Typecast letters seethed on the carpet, trying to adopt its garbled Turkish
Convolutions. They were baffled by the script’s auctoritas.
Bug-like, they attached themselves to the underside of the rug and hung there
Bat-like, colonised in non-pareils and minions, hugger-mugger.
3
Dr Moreau contemplated the Doormouse. It was wearing an elegant penguin
Suit. Moreau handed it his hat and went on in. He hoped the operetta would be sanguine.
Die Fledermaus was dressed up in his usual bat-suit. Crocodile-
Skin shoes. A cape for wings, and an absolutely Dracula-like
Dicky-bow. An as-yet-unbloodied bib. He bared his fangs as far back as the epiglottis
And began to aria an echolalia of aspirates and glottal stops.
Eventually he found a disguised Countess, and sunk an umlaut in her jugular.
He gargled in her tautonyms and phonemes, her Transylvanian corpuscular.
Her eyes drooled and grew as he imbibed her, as they glided through the mirror
And came out on the other side; then, clinging to each other, dimmed into tomorrow.
Moreau’s yesterday was their tomorrow. His fossil study of the pterodactyl
Had led him to believe that man could fly, fuelled by iambics, alcohol, and dactyls.
Jerome drank the vision in. He put on his airman’s snorkel and got into the bubble.
He gave the thumbs-up sign, and set the ultrasonic scan for Babel.
In his amphibian, the hero limped home in a grand Byronic
Gesture; Fatima dismissed the Twelve; it was the end of therapy and embryonics.
The Ballad of HMS Belfast
On the first of April, Belfast disengaged her moorings, and sailed away
From old Belfast. Sealed orders held our destination, somewhere in the Briny Say.
Our crew of Jacks was aromatic with tobacco-twist and alcoholic
Reekings from the night before. Both Catestants and Protholics,
We were tarry-breeked and pig-tailed, and sailed beneath the White Ensign;
We loved each other nautically, though most landlubbers thought we were insane.
We were full-rigged like the Beagle, piston-driven like the Enterprise
Express; each system was a back-up for the other, auxiliarizing verse with prose.
Our engines ticked and tacked us up the Lough, cranks and link-pins, cross-rods
Working ninety to the dozen; our shrouds and ratlines rattled like a cross-roads
Dance, while swivels, hook blocks, cleats, and fiddles jigged their semi-colons
On the staves. We staggered up the rigging like a bunch of demi-golems,
Tipsy still, and dreamed of underdecks — state-rooms, crystal chandeliers,
And saloon bars — until we got to gulp the ozone; then we swayed like gondoliers
Above the aqua. We gazed at imperceptible horizons, where amethyst
Dims into blue, and pondered them again that night, before the mast.
Some sang of Zanzibar and Montalban, and others of the lands unascertained
On maps; we entertained the Phoenix and the Unicorn, till we were grogged and concertina’ed.
We’ve been immersed, since then, in cruises to the Podes and Antipodes;
The dolphin and the flying fish would chaperone us like aquatic aunties
In their second, mermaid childhood, till we ourselves felt neither fish nor flesh, but
Breathed through gills of rum and brandy. We’d flounder on the randy decks like halibut.
Then our Captain would emerge to scold us from his three days’ incommunicado
And promenaded on the poop-deck, sashed and epauletted like a grand Mikado
To bribe us with the Future: new Empires, Realms of Gold, and precious ore
Unheard-of since the days of Homer: we’d boldly go where none had gone before.
Ice to Archangel, tea to China, coals to Tyne: such would be our cargo.
We’d confound the speculators’ markets and their exchequered, logical embargo.
Then were we like the Nautilus, that trawls the vast and purple catacomb
For cloudy shipwrecks, settled in their off-the-beam, intractable aplomb.
Electric denizens glide through the Pisan masts, flickering their Pisces’ lumière;
We regard them with a Cyclops eye, from our bathyscope beneath la mer.
Scattered cutlery and dinner-services lie, hugger-mugger, on the murky floor.
An empty deck-chair yawns and undulates its aw
ning like a semaphore.
Our rising bubble then went bloop, bloop till it burst the swaying window-pane;
Unfathomed from the cobalt deep, we breathed the broad Pacific once again.
Kon-Tiki-like, we’d drift for days, abandoning ourselves to all the elements,
Guided only by the aromatic coconut, till the wind brought us the scent of lemons —
Then we’d disembark at Vallambroso or Gibraltar to explore the bars;
Adorned in sequin-scales, we glimmered phosphorescently like stars
That crowd innumerably in midnight harbours. O olive-dark interior,
All splashed with salt and wine! Havana gloom within the humidor!
The atmosphere dripped heavy with the oil of anchovies, tobacco-smoke, and chaw;
We grew languorous with grass and opium and kif, the very best of draw,
And sprawled in urinous piazzas; slept until the fog-horn trump of Gabriel.
We woke, and rubbed our eyes, half-gargled still with braggadocio and garble.
And then the smell of docks and ropeworks. Horse-dung. The tolling of the Albert clock.
Its Pisan slant. The whirring of its ratchets. Then everything began to click:
I lay bound in iron chains, alone, my aisling gone, my sentence passed.
Grey Belfast dawn illuminated me, on board the prison ship Belfast.
The Ballad of HMS Belfast
CIARAN CARSON was born in 1948. His other poetry collections include The Irish for No (1987); The New Estate and Other Poems (1988); Belfast Confetti, which won the 1989 Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize; First Language, which won the 1993 T. S. Eliot Prize; Opera Et Cetera (1996), a Poetry Book Society Choice; The Alexandrine Plan (1998) and The Twelfth of Never. He has also published two books of prose – Last Night’s Fun and The Star Factory. He lives in Belfast with his family.
First published 1999 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2015 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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In association with The Gallery Press
ISBN 978-1-5098-1829-7
Copyright © Ciaran Carson 1999
Cover photograph © Jake Rajs, Photonica
The right of Ciaran Carson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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