More Spares

To call someone who has committed some atrocity 'an animal' is a gross insult to all our fellow fauna. Human is one thing, humane quite another.

The Dust Collector*

The Dust Collector *

gets down on his knees

in some corner of a cathedral, not to pray but see

if there’s a speck, a bloom, a trace,

or if the infernal place

is as emptied of history

as London’s National Gallery or the Uffizi.

Out of ‘all these actions that took place here’, his eye falls

on anything at all

for the scanning electron microscope: his Rose

Window on the genius

of what escapes us.

*Wolfgang Stoecker ‘My Empire of Dust’

Of A Man, Falling

At-ease-looking, almost poised –
though his soiled shirt

has come untucked – he might
be attempting to pass

the one-leg-stand test
or lounging, between drinks,

at a party, his back
braced by a wall, if

the world had not turned
him upside down

into the plummet
of streetwindowsky,

the brain in its cockpit – flight
the flight of his thought

a ten second freight –
for all we know

a counterweight.


From my third collection, Fade Street (Salt, 2010) and my forthcoming New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 2017).

Image 'September 11 from Space', from NASA

Spares

Some Epigrams and Aphorisms

Speaking ill of the dead is one of the surest ways of keeping them alive.

My grandfather could never master driving, but was a great believer in hitching, especially in his old age. To hitch a lift was to marry two of his pet delights, thriftiness and talk. Getting from A to B was strictly secondary; a car was a vehicle for the captive audience.

Project ‘Iffy’: to refashion Kipling’s most cherished (and possibly worst) poem. The first stanza might begin:

Never mind keeping your head, if you’ve some idea
Where heads are located, while idiots who haven’t a clue
Are scrambling, rifling the dictionary, the fridge, IKEA…
Then blaming their headless-chicken-shit on you

Tragically, the decline of religion in the West has done little or nothing to discourage the average individual succumbing, every now and again, to sociopathic orgies of self-worship.

God is not Great

says Christopher Hitchins. I say
god is great, only
with a small g
and atheism with a small a.

Memo. Beware taxi drivers who talk politics. Especially those who announce ‘I’m voting BNP’ and follow this by declaring ‘They should pull the shutters up!’[sic] These are the kind who may curtail your incredibly naive attempt to discuss such matters with a Travis Bickle glare and the accusatory conversation-stopper: ‘You’re toying with me mate, you’re toying with me!’

Racism is the refuge of the deranged sheep, the kind that has managed to furiously pull the wool into its own eyes.

Politics

we can set aside as easily as the cat its fur-ball,
the hedgehog its ticks.
Just remember: any creature can scratch, bring up its gall.

On Radio 4, a woman on the joys of wandering naked in a garden with fellow ‘naturists’, sniffing the roses etc. As if, while enacting a reversal of Adam and Eve’s shameful discovery, they might forget to notice each other’s nakedness. And that is what naturism is: dressing for indifference, as if this were, somehow, a virtue.

Unless it is intended to remain hermetic, I think the worldlet created in any given poem should have at least some aspect of the familiar. But its greater obligation is to provide the Three S’s: Surprise, Surprise, Surprise.

Aerialist

To condemn the wide-eyed, well-balanced poem for staying on the fence
that is its glory
makes as much sense
as reprimanding a novel for telling a story.

Auden (who sang the praises of the permeable limestone landscape) called poetry ‘memorable speech.’ I think great, or even just good, poems should have at least an element of this; they should resonate in the way that a good song or piece of music does. If they manage that I will forgive them much, including a good deal of impermeability.

Historical irony should come tempered with humility. What Milosz called ‘praising art with the help of irony’ can ruin a poem. And weak irony, the smirk behind the frown (or behind the scream, in silly movies such as ‘Fright Night’) is good for nothing but guffaws. Yet irony is the iron in literature’s blood. Life itself is intrinsically ironic, its brightening flare never quite touching the end of the bricked-up tunnel.

Diversion

Having long since bypassed the old distillery,
we overshot the bypass. These days
most tributaries are in a hurry
to forget how to praise.

On The Reek

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…
Except it isn’t April but the end
of a dark, damp summer.

**

So we drive through Saturday and pull in
at the evening car park: artic lorries, shops
for fast food, ice cream, the great white elephantantry
of shiny statues, rosaries, scapulars, all

the luggage you might need for what loured ahead:
blue-green slopes decapitated by cloud,
the most ominous-looking mountain I ever dreamed
of setting foot on

**

yet already there, above the burger stand,
the variously coloured trickle is in place:
people marking a zigzag route, a bright
sprinkle of hundreds and thousands.

**

Only the third tallest in the county,
somewhere between a mountain and high hill,
yet there is something in those compact angles,
a rough-drawn, broody pyramid, a hay rick
of the older gods: Pagan Cruachán Aigle
where sinister Crom Dúbh hangs out.

**

My cousin’s idea: we’d bring along our cameras,
keeping in mind our icon, Josef Koudelka’s
black and white: three men in shirts and jackets
kneeling, bent over their staffs in the 1970s,
backdropped by a geological matinee,
the islands in Clew Bay.

**

A relief, a break, an adolescent lapse:
to be more or less footloose on the road
in our fifties, remembering similar trips
when next to no one depended on us, and we
depended on little enough, our old friendship

that took us to odd corners, a procession in Louth,
or longer ago (when driving our own cars
seemed exotic as marriage, a child, a house…),
when it made perfect sense to try to hitch
from Dublin to Dingle after six in the evening
to a New Year’s party in Cong; to fall asleep
in a warm car and wake on the outskirts of Limerick,
to walk and walk and walk and walk and walk
through flat, mizzling darkness till we saw

a light in an upstairs window, above a lounge-bar,
and called till the window opened and a man in a vest
growled: ‘What the fuck are you doing, hitching
to Tralee at this hour of the night?’ Then closed the window
only to open his door: ‘Step into the light
and let’s look at you.’

**

A road atlas, a tent, duvets, sleeping bags
(and sleeping pads), as if we could shore up
against our old, well-tested indecisiveness;

a bit of rain and the wipers wipe all thoughts
of camping, out. I phone and book a room
in The Ocean Lodge, some miles and a burst of starlings

past Lousiberg: a place I haven’t been to
since my first visit, in my early 20s
properly camping with an organized friend:

wave-thump, sizzling sausages, the white noise
of The Milky Way. Or the evening we followed a trail
of posters on lampposts, for a 'Disco Inferno’

which, it turned out, was for youngsters, girls and boys
sipping ‘minerals’ on opposite sides of the hall,
a mirrorball stirring the floor.

**

The shower goes on in a nearby room and I wake
again, to the humming and roaring, in a music box
lodged under a waterfall.

**

Intending to be there by 7, we make it by 9.
Apocalypse weather. An army chopper harrows
overhead towards the party-coloured trail

that has thickened since yesterday, its two streams –
going up coming down – looking from here
like a convergence, aftermath of survivors
migrating to and from.

**

A rack of ashplants, freshly hewed, for sale
lined against a dry stone wall: €5. Beautiful.
But carrying a camera and bulky shoulder bag…

I buy a one-litre bottle of water, follow
the flow, past the man with the megaphone
holding up a picture of Padre Pio,

the first of a gauntlet of leaflets, holy hustlers
of burnished Truths, Pro-Lifers, Born Agains…
washed out by a stream’s low chuckling

under bramble: a lift.

**

The starting point: white Adze-Head on a plinth
in Popish robes, holding a shamrock: below him,
eddying around his feet (three times or seven?)
the clack and thunk of walking sticks, and the talk
circling clockwise.

**

The first or last or once-in-a-life-timers,
the charity climbers and record breakers (twelve times
in twentyfour hours or twice a day for a year),
the old man with a sanguine smile who’d climbed it
forty years ago ‘…and always said
I’d come and do it again like.’

**

Each must carry something, a belief,
grievance or grief, a camera, a curiosity
or sure-footed uncertainty as to why
we are here, or anywhere.

**

Among the backpacked and walking-booted the odd
white feet, black-soled, mud squelching through toes
bleeding a little from the sharper stones,
or gingerly working their way down, off the track,
over soothing bracken and grass. A woman passes
singing quietly, a couple chanting the rosary,
a lanky man in a white linen suit and hat,
working his ashplant, loping ahead, spotless
apart from his shoes and cuffs, a teenager talking
to herself (but no, it’s her phone).

**

Another rocky stretch and I feel it now,
every step in my bones and tendons: scree,
(a lovely word, like shale): decisive crunch
of heels on quartzite gravel, and the gold seam
farther down, the one the Mayo council
declared ‘fine where it is’.

**

Are you keeping faith with Mohammed or the mountain
or neither of them, or both?

**

Steepening more and more, till it’s an effort
to raise the head higher than rising ground,
the Order of Malta in high-vis yellow jackets
at their dome tent, watching us pass.

**

Near the first stall (bales of bottled water),
off to the left the mountain dips and rolls
into The Saddle, maybe seventy feet
to a dark blue tarn: encircled by stones, words:
INDIA, BILBAO, RUSSIA… a nesting place
for mapless geography, borders melted away:
countries, cities, continents laid out
in cloud-script, an SOS.

**

Steepening towards the summit, the air is dense
with mountain-breath. We come to a cairn broad
as a hay stack: the first station, and again
that eddy of people circling clockwise; I start
to step in line then don’t; that rote rotation
Van Gogh’s tight grey roundabout of men
in a prison exercise yard.

**

Nothing but wet scree now, going up and up,
and the others coming down, half toppling
onto us. So that’s what the sticks are for,
to be dug like oars into sliding rocks as they stumble
downwards into the upcoming Sisyphean
rubble on conveyor belts,

**

and then we are becoming there, becoming solid
as the blocky mirage of stone huts like Slievemore’s
ghost village, but with blue tarpaulin roofs
weighed down by ballast-rocks: dealing out Mars Bars,
Club Orange, crisps… and why not? Prayer is trade,
a mark-up for the ones who made it, soaked
queuing on muddy shale laced with a froth
of jostling empty bottles.

**

A hoarse Ave Maria like a hand
wiping at condensation; murmuring walls,
people walking in circles doing the stations,
kneeling, bent over their sticks (as in Koudelka’s,
though today the view is closed)

**

a lank-haired old man sagging, bowing to grip
the grave-rails the bed

**

roving restlessness of little groups
thickening before the cloud-pale chapel,
the priest in his glassed-in pulpit intoning mass
over a tannoy (a dismal background strumming
as someone strangles a guitar)

**

two gorgeous traveler girls with great hooped earrings

**

a family group: four children with the parents
unpacking sandwiches

**

a lad with his arm draped on a smiling girl
sitting on a rock (a seat on a bus, a snug,
side of an unmade bed)

**

Purgatory’s kitchen: someone has left
the kettle on. High time to shuffle off
like precipitation, find the weaker force,
the clogged rockslide down.

**

Weeks later I remember the first time
I climbed a mountain (or high hill) in West Cork
rapidly, in my sixteen-year-old stride,

how I found a dead bird and hoped I hadn’t stepped on it,
a cairn of stones at the top I dubbed ‘the alter’,

and nearby, in a little grassy hollow,
an egg-shaped boulder (plucked up and laid there
by the erratic ice-gods) and how it came:

the muttering stream of the first poem I ever wrote,
whose words I never fully understood:

something about the compulsion to climb and hear
‘the loud mouths the soft mouths of cows
tearing the grass from rock’ and ‘the sea climbing

the sand’, and what it felt like to look down
at our orange tent ‘waving up’ and try
to sing ‘the small song of the beast that might love
the impossible delicate gift.’

Opening Lines

FATHER: I like the sound of rain on the car roof.

SON: So do I.

FATHER: What else do you like the sound of?

SON: I like the sound of rain on a balloon.

FATHER: What tastes do you like?

SON: I like the taste of the salt of the sea on my skin.

Geronimo (or I Read the News Today Oh Boy)

I was in Wexford at my wife's parent's place when I heard. The initial reports seemed muddled or contradictory, and it now appears that many of them were: that OBL was living in a 'luxury compound' (called 'ramshackle' on The News At Ten), that he returned fire with the Navy Seals (apparently he was unarmed), that one of the helicopters was shot down (apparently it made a hard landing and had to be destroyed), that OBL attempted to use his wife as a 'human shield' (it now appears that she was considerably more animated than any shield and got shot in the leg for her pains). Then there is the matter of that strange and speedy burial at sea, though apparently they have genetic proof that the target actually was OBL. More significantly, there is talk of film footage, evidence apparently too gruesome to be released to the public.

So, the reportage continues, and probably will for some time, a rich compost of fact and rumour, out of which will sprout who knows what conspiracy theories, myths, books, films, etc. As Heaney put it so perfectly in his take on an ode by Horace, 'anything can happen.' A soft-spoken man with a Guru-beard can be responsible for nearly 3000 deaths (in three fell swoops), can in fact be the architect of the slaughter and, not incidentally, the demolisher of that very singular dual-edifice, the 'twin towers', which Norman Mailer so detested, calling them 'two huge buck teeth', declaring 'the ruin more beautiful than the buildings.'

The act reverberated, and still does, a tuning fork for a different century, a different way of being uncertain. For me (as with most people, I imagine), it also embodies a particular time and place in my own life. I have, at most, a very dim memory of where I was when the Kennedys or John Lennon were killed. But I can recall exactly where I was when September 11 took place. I was with my cousin Isobel, looking for some decent coffee in a supermarket in the little town of Silvesh in Portugal. We were there with our mothers, Sheila and Nuala (both in their early eighties at that stage) and their older, very English sister, Moira. Isobel had arranged the holiday, which turned out to be the last time these sisters would travel together. We had been there perhaps two weeks at this stage, two thirds of our holiday, well-settled in the house we were renting: white arches, cool tiled floors and marble stairs, with a lovely large pool, all nested among lemon groves at the end of a long, loudly crunching stone-and-dirt lane which trailed and twisted under leafy canopies, through a wildly barking farm, before emerging onto the hot, smooth road into town.

Being the only driver, I had agreed to rent a car at the airport and follow the instructions and map sent by the estate agent. A silly plan. I had never driven outside Ireland and we soon became lost. As evening abruptly switched to night, we ended up in a tiny village off the motorway, with hardly any idea where we were. Stressed and tense, I entered a roundabout the wrong way, and when a lone motorist speeded towards me and honked aggressively I shouted at him (stating the obvious): 'Can't you see I'm a fucking tourist?' Unfortunately, all this occurred under the eyes of a couple of local policemen, so we had to pay an on-the-spot fine of 80 Euro.

We finally gave in and called the estate agent. She arrived fairly quickly and offered to lead us to the villa, a journey of perhaps twenty minutes or so. When her taillights took a totally obscure turn into the unmarked drive I realised that we would never have found the place. As we followed her car around the narrow bends, we began to discern an odd orangy flickering, as if the whole horizon were aflame and we were entering some ominous fairy tale. I can still hear Moira's queenly, unruffled drawl: 'Oh my god, we're driving into a forest fire.' And there was a forest fire, or a bushfire anyway. But it was far more distant than it had appeared. I came down to breakfast to find the lemon groves untouched, but on a rounded, not-too-distant hillside you could see the damage: a little crest of spent match-sticks.

So, back to the supermarket two weeks later. We asked a couple of Scottish tourists if they could help us find some coffee, and they did their best. Before parting, they asked us (by the way, as it were) if we'd heard about Manhattan being 'under attack'. We thought they must be regurgitating some half-digested tidbit. Then, a little later, walking through the charming narrow streets, possibly in search of a little café, somewhere with a bit of shade to sit and talk (and drink coffee), we noticed a modest crowd bulging out from a little sports shop. We became curious when we realised they were all gazing at a TV mounted on the wall inside. Then we saw the planes, the orange-black plumes, indelible and unforgettable. I had thought till recently that what we had seen was one of the endless action replays, but Isobel has since told me that she checked the time and is now convinced that we actually witnessed the second plane hitting its target in 'real' time.

Of course we wanted more information, but we were in Portugal. Back at the house, the only English-speaking TV was an American business channel (might have been CNBC) mainly concerned with stockbroker news, though we were given the occasional update or interview, and endless reruns of the exploding towers along with old footage of OBL, probably taken in Afghanistan. Thus we became familiar with the man's placid features, in his white robe or camouflage-jacket in the Afghan mountains, seemingly at ease, holding some weapon or other. Was OBL a suspect or had he claimed responsibility in those first days of the 'new world order'? I remember wondering why he didn't declare his hand more quickly, since everything had gone so spectacularly to plan. What could be more perfect? Not merely 'terrorism' but, as Martin Amis coined it, 'horrorism', an OTT 'Die Hard' sequel in brutally ironic (though in some ways even less real) flesh and blood.

Other things conspired to make that holiday memorable. It had been memorable in a good way up till then, the ladies relaxing in the pool, my mother's infernal arthritis all but forgotten.. After The Event, we kept the TV on, hopeful for some more detailed news in between financial updates; the screen followed us around the living room like an unsleeping eye and we were neither there nor there, in an anteroom of one of 'those big words that make us so unhappy.' Then, towards the end of our holiday, the youngest sister, Nuala (Isobel's mother), began to feel a bit shaky in her legs. This occurred perhaps a day before we left. We didn't know the signs, or didn't know them well enough, though Isobel was worried. We managed to get her mother to a doctor on the day of our departure. He didn't appear too concerned, advised a scan as soon as it might be convenient.

The airport was chaotic, long queues, police and soldiers with automatic weapons, our mothers in wheelchairs. We had to dump anything sharp, so mum sacrificed a pair of decorative old nail scissors, her mother's. Nuala was groggy now. We tried to decide whether we should try to get her back to that doctor; I even made a call, but nobody spoke any English and I hadn't a word of Portuguese or Spanish. And suddenly our queue was on the move, we could be back in Dublin in a couple of hours. So we boarded, and Nuala went into a coma. I asked one of the cabin crew if they could call ahead to have an ambulance ready in Dublin. This was a mistake, and we were a hair from being told to leave the plane (they don't fly gravely ill passengers), but we managed to convince them (or they allowed us to convince them) that it wasn't all that serious after all, no worries, we'd be fine, honestly.

We did manage to get an ambulance very shortly after landing, and though Nuala had a 'massive cerebral hemorrhage' she survived another decade, and weathered a few more strokes, to die peacefully, and mercifully quickly, in St Vincent's hospital last year. And Moira, the eldest, has recently died at nearly 95. And now they've shot the man who loomed so large in that strange, dislocated holiday. It all might have happened last week, or yesterday.

A couple of other things Mailer said in the aftermath of September 11: 'I'm always dubious about patriotism.'So am I, though I can understand the jingoistic flag-waving, the celebrations, and even emapthise a little with the festival atmosphere that must prevail in American cities, especially NY. Who could argue with the mother of one of the firefighters who died that day, her belief that this is what he would have wished? Mailer thought Georg W. Bush seemed like 'a man who had never been embarrassed by himself.' Absolutely. So I am very glad it was Obama's terse, grave sentence 'Justice has been done' that helped set the mood, a counterpoint to all the misplaced optimism and gaiety. Imagine if this had happened on GWB's watch; the thick-skulled, insufferable gloating, the victory parades, the great, self-congratulatory banquet of bullshit.

6 a.m. Question Time

Daddy?

[sleepily] Yeah?

I have a question for you.

What?

What are stretch limos for?

[blank pause]

Are they for Rock Stars?

Throw It Away, Why Don't You?

What is a short memory good for? Forgetting.

Forgetting that Fine Gáel is part of the same old deeply compromised Civil War machinery that created Fíanna Fáil.

Forgetting that terms like 'Blueshirt values' are rancid, stinking with irony.

Forgetting that part of our problem is our gullibility.

Forgetting that 'liberal economic policies' are what landed us in this.

Forgetting that our innate conservatism (in thrall to the banks' and big business's Happy Hour) is what landed us in this.

Forgetting that FG's pride in 'fiscal rectitude and minimal government interference' (not to mention 'liberal economic policies') should make our scalps creep and our hair (if we possess any) stand on end.

Forgetting that it's high time to change the channel.

Forgetting that, if we must use terms like 'values', Labour's are worth voting for.

Forgetting that, if we do not change the channel (or at least modify it), we may get what we deserve: a FG government who have a mandate to do whatever they they like.

A Place On A Map

Reading Katy's blog today, about the recent events in Egypt, I found myself commenting rather extensively, so felt it might be more pertinent to say my piece here, since this is not only a blog, but also functions as my personal journal, my space for disentangling thoughts.

Not that my thoughts are going to amount to very much. Egypt, whether in its present incarnation or as depicted in the 15th Century (above) is, for me, a place on a map. I've read some travelers' accounts (or I think I have, though I can't recall them) and seen numerous programs about the Egypt of the Pharaohs. I love Cavafy's poetry, and in my 20s I raced (and waded) through Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. But I know next to nothing about Egyptian politics or people.

Mubarak's was, apparently, a horrifyingly corrupt and brutal regime, so good riddance to it. At least 300 people have been killed, but an objective has been achieved; a government has been overthrown by the very people it had thought to govern for perhaps another 30 years. And now what? The Muslim Brotherhood (slogan: 'Islam is the solution') is in the wings, or close to the stage. Should they step into the spotlight, are they likely to bring in a more egalitarian society, or go the way of Iran and steer the revolution into a narrow, airless cul-de-sac?

Katy also posted this moving Youtube vlog by Asmaa Mahfouz, who is said to have helped 'spark the revolution'. Asmaa is earnest and passionate (and her delivery seems, to me, to have some of the chanting, incantatory music of a poem). Although she begins by mentioning how four men burned themselves in protest, I like the way she insists that people should NOT burn (i.e. 'martyr') themselves, but simply come onto the streets and support each other. The only thing that distances me slightly (due to my own cultural tics and reservations) are the references to peoples' 'manhood' and, finally, God.

One of the commentators on Katy's blog wrote: Bless the martyrs. Really? What I would wish, if I felt qualified to wish anything, is that the Egyptians somehow wind up with a society we might call democratic (botched, battered and degraded as that word is); a society, in any case, is which martyrdom doesn't play a part, is, in fact as alien to the citizens as the repressions of the police state they are struggling to emerge from. I would also wish for widespread empathy and a tolerance that extends to those who have no religion: the atheists, the agnostics, the hopelessly befuddled or those who barely give a thought to such things. I would wish for the wonderful scope and sanity of human scepticism that recoils in disgust and utter contempt from repressing or persecuting anyone merely because of their race, politics, gender or sexual orientation (or religion). Something along those lines anyway; if I had anyone (or thing) to pray to I'd pray for that, or for the whopping dose of good luck that is long overdue the Egyptians, not to mention the Bahrainis, Iranians, Libyans, etc, etc.

Photo from Wikipedia: Nile River Valley and the city of Bulaq, as seen by Piri Reis, a Turkish admiral, geographer and cartographer who lived from 1465 to 1555.

Metaphorical Portrait (Almost Finished)

Or perhaps I should say 'it will be nice when it's finished' (as one of the Python film crew apparently replied when asked what he thought of Scotland).
Or borrow that actual/metaphorical snow from Joyce's The Dead:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Or, hard on the heels of that, Derek Mahon's fabulous Snow Party, which has snow 'falling / Like leaves on the cold sea.' Here's the last three stanzas:

Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares,

Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;

But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of Ise.

The newspapers are indeed right: snow is (almost) general. Outside my window, right now, the hedges are bowed under it, tree branches meticulously overlaid, wires in their winter coats, the large ceramic pot on the doorstep skull-capped with a perfectly white dome. Whiteout, bailout, our drained economy... there seems to be a metaphorical synchronicity at work. But of course, metaphors are cheap. Above is a snap of the old sod as it lay yesterday, on Dec. 2, 2010. Image from the NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response website, where there are many more, all in the public domain and free to use.

Coming On Here With Yer Oul Palaver

Someone had to say it, finally, on TV, in this instance on RTE's Prime Time. Rabbitte's anger is refreshing, especially when it is articulated so concisely. Reminds me of Barney Frank's excellent response to the moron who questioned Obama's 'Nazi' health care policies.

All Souls

Remember all the clocks glow
black tonight. Do you know
who that is, knocking VERY LOUD,
so the dog whimper-drags its household
under the table? Cacophony
is the new literacy, a library
of graves open their traps,
and walking dead are snapped
face-painting and jogging
in the park, a letterbox bangs
open its genie smoking (who sends
letters anymore? Fuck em!)
But who will blow-dry the choked
gutters? That man in the raincoat
keeps three suitcases stuffed
with leaves under his bed.
Air needs a new cocoon,
orange and black balloons
on gateposts, old crones
ubiquitous as traffic cones,
a stark simpler colour,
pumpkins and burnt paper,
the ink-spotted tree that burst
into rooks. And what's the worst
he can do? There he is again
(he always is) behind you
if you turn in the leaf-padded lane
behind the new houses where
we'd poke for hours – a stick
snaps, a distant firework –
and what's the worst game
we can play, and whose turn
is it now, who'll be It this time?

October Streetlight

A crisp night, enough breath to blow
a fallen sycamore leaf
in and out of its bat-shadow
on the car roof.

For The Scrapbook: 10/10/10

I just wanted to do a post with that title, particularly the triple 10. So I drove out to the docks again and found this heap of scrap metal, which I've photographed before. But it was larger than I'd seen, and I liked the way it staged a mountain, a metal Sugarloaf, in front of the Pigeonhouse chimneys.

Detail: San Francisco, 1982

Even telegraph poles look foreign: tarry, scuffed
and twice as thick,

stapled with colourful fliers: travel ads, want ads,
apartments, missing pets, people –

When torn off to make way for new ones (torn in their turn),
the tiny corners remain,

a mesh of staked claims, stitches, a wound
that won’t close. I zoom and click,

wondering what my roommates will make of
the furious mosaic.

One thinks it’s a shanty town, another a beach
or city dump, or maybe a march

or sit-in, people holding up placards, right?
Close enough.

In The Dead Zoo

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
– Seamus Heaney

Aflame with antlers,
almost tapping the ceiling, a roof-raiser
bursting with sex and death.

Should we view it from over or under –
stand on the tiled floor
or the tundra?

*

More inscrutable than the Sphinx:

the trophy-head of a rhino
shot and stuffed over a century ago

by Colonel Spinks.

*

Where is he,
my frog-hunting, 12 year old self,
soft-eyed hoarder
of Wildlife magazines, dogged haunter
of ditches and bogs?

*

DO NOT TOUCH

the rhino’s tarry flesh
just yet –

wait for the rat kangaroo
and the parchment bats

to undo.

*

Here, touching what
he should not:
an elephant’s cunt,
a wound
in an old coat.

*

How to fade
from a dazzling op-art zebra
into just that shade
of sepia.

*

Upstairs, along the galleries,
dust-coloured moths and butterflies

(ribbons from an antique war)
recall the killing jar,

though one or two
flash – forget-me-not blue


*

Or here, this boy who holds
to his hiding place among
the grown-up coats hung
in a glass wardrobe.

*

Creaking Victorian ark
whose hold is a maze
of mirrors, our faces
float over the glass
eyes of your great
and less great apes,
your frozen tableaux
(white hares in the snow
from a snow globe),
libraries of learned
dust which is not returned.

*

The Fin Whale’s skeleton,
suspended on wires, swims
overhead. Its mammal spine
(black against fogged glass)
is an x-ray that might pass
for all of us.

Fridge Detail: How Cool Is Cool?

I was reading a thread in an online forum and noticed that several people replied to a particular comment with that ubiquitous, one-size-fits-all adjective: 'Cool'. I have occasionally done so myself and can understand its attraction: a pleasantly retro, street-smart throwback to the Beats, or earlier, to the 'stay cool' 1950s, the jazzy 40s. It is one of those words with a variable temperature, depending on its user's tone of voice: from (often high pitched) red hot, gorgeous, superb, 'wicked', etc. to (flat, low-pitched) lukewarm, so-so, okay, a shorthand for 'can we talk about something else now?'

Reading about it on the excellent World Wide Words, I was only slightly surprised to learn that its roots (as a slang term) can be traced farther still,'a subtle transformation of a standard English form that goes back to Beowulf, in a rather literary metaphor for being unexcited, calm or dispassionate.' Apparently it resurfaced and became fashionable in the 18th Century, with those still-used phrases 'cool as a cucumber' and 'keeping a cool head', and began to shift into its current (more positive) meaning in the mid 20th century.

I think a large part of its attraction is in the sound, that refreshingly breezy double-vowel blowing through two portholes, and its tactility: hinged shut on the tip of the tongue's L, like licking a stamp, posting a seal of approval.

Fine and dandy, but I'm a little weary of its ubiquity. In fact, I've probably been weary of it for decades, like the American-Irish cousin I once shared a house with in the 1970s; whenever some visitor thought something 'really cool', my cousin's zippy retort was invariably 'Yeah, man, put it in the ice-box!' So, to resurrect an anachronistic antonym from the deep-freeze, I'm beginning to find 'cool' distinctly uncool.

Saint Patrick On Nipples

I've just started 'Ireland: A History', by Thomas Bartlett. I'd read a couple of reviews and it sounded interesting, the kind of history I might actually read through (instead of making my way through the first 50 pages then setting it down to get a cup of coffee, never to raise it again). The reviewers noted, however, that he is rather scanty on the earlier bits, covering the pre-medieval period (431, St. Patrick's arrival, to 1541: Protestant Ireland) in under 80 pages. But I am greatly encouraged by passages such as the following, in which Bartlett quotes then comments on an odd phrase from the writings of Patrick (about his initial sojourn in Ireland, as a slave):

Lastly, as an aside, Patrick discloses than when he sought to flee Ireland on the ship, he entered into terms with the sailors, but that he 'refused, for fear of god, to suck their nipples'. This startling remark – given matter of factly – has been a cause of some embarrassment to Patrician enthusiasts, but it has to be seen in the context of Patrick's detestation of 'cults or idols and abominations' which he had dedicated his life to overthrowing. What Patrick was doing was pointing to the prevalence of pagan practices – sucking nipples was a way to pledge loyalty – and in doing so he was making the obvious point that the Ireland in which he had been a slave was largely pagan.

It is for revelations such as these that I persist in my lifelong battle to educate myself.

An Ars Poetica In Fragments

I am not familiar with Jennifer Moxley's work, though I have come across her name before, usually on Ron Silliman's blog. And it is Ron I owe thanks to for providing a link to her recent Fragments of a Broken Poetics on Poetry Daily.

Moxley concludes her series with an Afterword, in which she describes how 'three French points of contact converged to create the conditions for the writing and occasion of these fragments', such as René Char's Fureur et mystère—

particularly his writing on the architecture of the poem, "Partage formel" ("The Formal Share")—that sparked some new thinking in me. Char's use of aphorism, as well as his delightfully fanciful logic, suggested a refreshing way to avoid the line-in-the-sand rigidity of writing a contractual poetics—those manifestos of orthodoxy that, in laying down the poetic law, always manage to spontaneously recruit an army of cops to enforce it. Reading these statements activated my critical muse and I began to write my own series of aphoristic statements; to think from where I was, to try and state—simply, concisely—what I believed at that moment about the poetic art.

I am glad she spared us yet another orthodox manifesto. And I have a fondness for aphorism (Auden and Don Paterson come to mind, as do Beckett's versions of Chamfort). I like the form's constraints, the way it pushes a thought or idea to be fully born then cuts the cord. And the aphorism's yen for clarity can certainly be refreshing, especially when many contemporary offstream poets seem less interested in fragmentation than disintegration; their poetry (or 'poetics') is all too often bursting to explain itself while simultaneously tightening the gag. Anyway, here's a small selection of Moxley's [apologies for the disrupted formatting]:

III

A poet only needs one poem, a poem only one reader. Moving from singular to shared in this instance is a rudimentary economy. It is less affecting than a mortal kiss, more than a passing conversation. The poem will always provoke an acute desire to know its creator, "acute" because hopeless.


VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.


IX

Poets whose readings lead us to believe ourselves part of a spontaneous and instinctive consensus have left poetry behind. Perhaps for the better.


XI

In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn't what it used to be.


XIII

The book is the means, not the end. It should conform to the poem, not vice versa. Otherwise the imagination becomes a small box, which thinks only of the larger box it wishes to resemble. An ideal book is a bed: a comforting place in which poems can sleep while awaiting illumination. Both poem and book, however, are subject to the capricious lens of human attention.


XIX

A momentary bewilderment arouses the mind. Many words, lines, and phrases may temporarily baffle without spoiling the reading experience as a whole.


XXIII

The poet is buried in the obliterated whiteness beneath the dark letters of poem.


XXVIII

Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.


XLIII

Poetry is not politically efficacious in countries where it is not valued as a cultural necessity by the general populace.

I am not sure all of these work (though this may just be due to my own misunderstanding). For example, I suspect IX may be read in at least two very different ways. And XXVIII seems, to me, a bit overwrought. Overall though, many of Moxley's Fragments did what good aphorisms ought to do: they made me think.