Long Pass Read online

  JOEY CONNOLLY

  LONG PASS

  FOR TERI, NIGEL AND JUDE

  ‘Better the erratic approach, which wins all or at least loses nothing, than the cautious semifailure; better Don Quixote and his windmills than all the Sancho Panzas in the world…’

  John Ashbery, Three Poems

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Theories

  The Finest Fire-Proofing We Have

  The Draft

  Chekhov’s Gun

  Poem in Which Go I

  The Rider’s Song

  First Letter from the Frontier

  [untititled]

  Beauties of the Northwest

  I. a daytrip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

  II. a walk around Manley Park

  Six Filters

  Failed State

  Content

  Coming to Pass

  Netherlands

  Of Some Substance, Once

  An Ocean,

  Some Pecuniary Observations

  The Way of Doing Things Trees Have

  Carrying

  Average Temperature at Surface Level

  The Big House

  History

  2. Windmills

  Escape to the Reservoir Café

  For the Very Last Time

  Comprehension Test

  What You’ve Done

  Incapable though the cards are

  In the Process

  That rogue longing

  Your room at midnight was suddenly

  Saturation

  Loss

  Poem in Which if not Well

  On Latterly Overcoming Last October’s Loss

  Themselves

  2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014,

  Didn’t Jokes Used to be Funny?

  Liguria

  In the moment,

  Third Ballad

  A Picture

  Fantasy of Manners

  A Brief Glosa

  I am positioned

  Why?

  Last Letter from the Frontier

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1. Theories

  THE FINEST FIRE-PROOFING WE HAVE

  It’s a poem about a father insulating his family home,

  written some time in 1924. It notices, the poem,

  the knotted rope of his spine through his

  flannel workshirt as he hunches to the skirting;

  his intent fingers working loose the dark wood,

  panel by panel, and pressing in material from the roll of

  asbestos matting behind him. With love he does the work

  that fathers do. With aching thumbs he rocks the tacks

  back into their beds, as the poem tucks its nouns into their gullies,

  investing itself as fully as it can in how this father,

  out of the dust of 1919, this father surrounds with love his

  young wife, their new son. It drags and it dwells on this love,

  it stalls and weeps for it, almost, this love inhabiting 1919

  and written of in 1924. There’s love in the way panels are pried up

  and replaced. And something else. How the poem’s author, reading

  of the Medical Board’s classification of asbestosis

  in 1925, how she was reminded of that young wife arriving home,

  and the pride already metastasising inside the husband how

  she’d never know how anything behind the boards had changed.

  THE DRAFT

  First this. Who is speaking? Careful,

  it’s dark. No, no, say careful, the darkness

  is brimming with something. Yes.

  First this: who is speaking? Careful,

  the darkness is brimming with something.

  With what? The darkness is swarming

  with resolution. First this: who is

  speaking? Careful, the darkness is swimming

  with resolution. Put your hand out.

  CHEKHOV’S GUN

  From a train, she passes how all things pass, wrapped

  in their instants, messy and simple as the as-yet unlooked-at

  complication, under the sign for a rail-station named Marsden –

  which is like the surname of a first love, from

  before I understood, like now – standing alone,

  the inscrutable woman, all cheekbones

  and short hair, and red polkadots rapped onto their white,

  her hand raised to rest against her cheek. Life,

  for Chekhov, is neither horrible, nor happy,

  but strange-unique-fleeting-beautiful-awful, according to Gerhardie

  in this book I was reading before I shot by and saw the lee

  of the sign for Marsden. And for me, also — and for me.

  POEM IN WHICH GO I

  There but for the conciliatory haze of fiction go I.

  There but for the crazy kindness of strangers

  go our crises of conscience. There

  but for the salt wind off the sea

  goes the gold-drenched memory of 1992’s

  family holiday. There but for the graze of fog go we.

  There but for the winnowing of Yahweh

  go so many of our quaintest folk-statuettes. There

  but for the faintest sense of justice

  goes the conciliatory haze of fiction. There but for the

  uncomfortable persistence of humanity

  goes the neighbourhood.

  There but for the harrowing frequency of laundry-days

  goes the grace of god. There but for the slough of despond

  goes our Christian. There but for one specific curtain of

  palm-fronds goes the amber clarity of our faith.

  There but for the goes of going walks our lord. There

  but for the gauze of saying so goes all.

  THE RIDER’S SONG

  two versions of ‘Canción de Jinete’ by Federico García Lorca

  I.

  Córdoba. Apart

  and apart.

  Powder-dark horse; charged moon;

  unpitted olives loose-panniered and khaki.

  A road I believed familiar spells itself out

  strangely, uninflected by memory

  or Córdoba.

  Through dust and across dust

  (powder horse; flame moon)

  there’s a death

  aware and waiting

  in the wings and the spires

  of Córdoba.

  Ah so long road!

  Ah powder-fine horse, stoic and disintegrating!

  Ah patient death, that

  skilful interception. Córdoba!

  Córdoba! Córdoba.

  Córdoba.

  II.

  Córdoba: romantic

  and apart, and – the Instituto Cervantes research grant

  blown on olives – lonely as this

  bedsit study. I slant my pen to see

  an ink-dark horse; an A5 of moon;

  unpitted olives loose-panniered and khaki; and,

  parting from the river, a road

  I considered familiar spelling itself out strangely,

  uninflected by memory – Córdoba. The word

  is unpocketable as the place.

  Through dust and across dust, as

  desert and air alternate furiously around

  a blinkered horse, a tired-to-bloodshot moon. My eyes,

  they weaken. I lose my hands to the sand-laden air,

  my thoughts to the pull of Córdoba, and my pony,

  its becoming its shape, its name. I cannot separate myself.

  Ah! Road like a ten-clause-sentence!

/>   Ah! Inky and well-meaning and disintegrating pony!

  Ah, my glasses returning to sand, my cash

  to blank discs and paper, and I

  all a word loses to its repetition. Córdoba.

  Córdoba.

  Córdoba.

  FIRST LETTER FROM THE FRONTIER

  ‘Mearc’, Old English: mark, sign, character, boundary, limit

  Our Bishop has stationed us at borders

  and on boundaries, to force up a congregation – to find what passes

  through these mountains as we can – and has gone into the night.

  We plucky few with our taken orders

  held out flower-like to these unlettered masses, an information

  their crass tongue is proof against. Thus I write,

  put down this mark which drives between us,

  pressing me into the paper and you

  outward from it, to breathe out in the piercing air

  of the world, bounded by its skies of bone and water. Thus

  I am alone. So much unnamed: the trees, their branches. What’s true

  rises from what’s sweet like incense smoke. But here

  every written word’s a convoluted signature

  and every painting seems a drawing of a picture.

  [UNTITITLED]

  for AW

  The orthodontic meddling of language

  with the world, its snaggling malocclusions

  between a group of objects and their name

  or the unnameable collusion of object and fact which

  fritter truth like a spendthrift thrush

  its energy in song. The determined unorthodoxy

  in the solitary stance of a dock leaf, miles

  from the nettles we suppose are its cause.

  All I want is to tell you that I love you,

  but how to trust that craft – its shoddy caulk – on those

  bracing seas between us? And the jaws have

  already sprung closed over the moment, albeit gappily.

  And I am stung into refuge among such

  exquisite cosmetic meaninglessnesses as the

  awkward stagger of a branch across the sky above me as it

  divides the blue into jagged, arbitrary portions.

  All I want is to propose that we be wrong

  in corresponding ways.

  BEAUTIES OF THE NORTHWEST

  I. a daytrip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

  which comes back to you in drifts of memory

  the shape of the sculptures,

  the properly mysterious knotting and bunching

  of Merlot-black materials, metals

  and white marble and fibreglass, as if

  the Yorkshire air had been ruffled

  and calloused into solidity, or like scrap,

  these jeep-sized bits of space, trailing their

  explanatory plaques, weather-lacquered

  and futile; trailing their talk of

  bringing out the inherent resonance

  of material; a mystery, a mystery to you; mysterious also

  the meaning other visitors found or appeared to in these

  dense clutterings of properties, these pieces of space that rest

  so heavy on the haunches of their predicates.

  But the lunchtime conversation

  in the tea-shop was a good one, hard

  to understand now, the ideas

  catching between the teacups and the scones,

  but clear is the feeling of something

  being hammered out between you

  and your parents, of a thought coming together

  in the mouths of a youth counsellor, an antique restorer,

  and a student. Something about

  how beauty is best understood as a way of seeing,

  so – the way a river is always busy with carving

  the route it will come to flow, or the pose of a question

  so often describes the shape

  of its answer, or how a sound

  cuts a noise-shaped gully

  in your attention to settle into – the reach

  of your looking, its rough branch, can be

  stripped and whittled to a molecule-fine point

  of concentration. And between the scones and teacups

  our words given shape

  by the idea they fail to complete.

  II. a walk around Manley Park

  which is heralded – out of the comfortable

  white district you live in – by the boxy, uniform terraces

  and a woman whose headscarf happens

  to match the fading hydrangeas, leaning

  over the garden walls, hovering

  like a collection of hopes

  over the pavement.

  Around the corner small niqabis gather

  around a burqa’d woman, making

  birds of their hands, hooking thumbs and forcing

  wings from the wave of their fingers; you cross the street

  to avoid intruding, to offer

  the olive branch of attention

  to decorum. So it’s this neat frame

  of mind, walking home,

  the woman steps into, with a movement

  inside you – a wash

  of ruffled blood – as much as of herself, her

  body, appearing from its tiny

  terraced house, old gold–shade sari-wrapped and so off-key

  with her pebbledash surround, olive-and-marble eyes

  only for her rotund goddamn husband

  swinging his car door closed; she neuters

  all other prettinesses

  at a stroke. So you think of

  how much beauty and detail

  could be contained in every one of these

  tidy domestic units, and you think

  of atoms giving off their

  minute particles, parcels of the most

  immeasurable quantities of energy, barely keeping

  it down, holding it together in their radiant

  pink-gold glow, or electric-blue, and you walk

  back past the globing hydrangeas,

  a system of complicated hopes

  floating over the August pavement.

  SIX FILTERS

  Every quitter carries in their greyer pockets a marginal awareness

  of the number of filters they possess, and papers,

  and of how much tobacco there is, and if the lighter

  still burns at the first attempt: the mental dance

  between these poles a waltz in the Aeolian mode.

  And Ireland Argentinas as Egypt Burmas. Little Librans,

  all of us; all of us scientific calculators upon which

  precocious teenagers first discover the possibility of typing

  obscene words. Your eyes blur as Rome burns, and it’s the lack of focus

  which matters most. We are stacked odds, and the means

  to decidedly obscured ends. And the backs of all our minds

  are the stats sections of long-discarded football cards,

  and Greece Irelands as Syria Egypts, and the fingers

  move across the keys they are able to reach.

  FAILED STATE

  I.

  So for the time it takes to exhale

  everything is breathing together, the quiet, the blood

  in your glad-rags, in this battered

  and sweet-smelling jeep, somewhere

  on these new borders of former Rhodesia.

  The air, set to echo. The glass sand.

  II.

  Everything goes heat-hazy

  with what feels like

  but isn’t held breath.

  When it goes, this stillness, it will go down

  like a country collapsing, currency

  skittering from control, the cop’s revolver

  in a blockbuster: the conceit

  is excuse for a fistfight, for a brawl. Yes,

  countries could collapse and p
eople die

  in droves and what’s important

  would be those moments

  of intensest experience in the extinguished lives

  of the deceased. Isn’t it. Their rattling brevity, the failed states

  of ecstasy. Yes, the senate falls and the priesthood

  goes to ground, and the national bank

  shuts its doors. The state falters

  and goes down – once, for all – taking

  its market partners with it and so

  any hope of resurface. Bread disappears

  from the market-stalls, women appear on doorsteps

  waving their stubborn arms at reporters

  from the first world. They begin to look like seaweed

  swaying, unconscious and miles from the good

  dry oxygen of the IMF. People return to custom

  as they will in such times; headscarves

  begin to reappear – the divorce rate plummets,

  awfully. Children rehearse the national anthem,

  and dictators mass on the sidelines. The place

  is begging for a Junta as you shudder your last breath

  into the handkerchief I hold – for no reason – to your lips.

  Or not. There is a death: a moment,

  a person, a country. What matter

  which? States arrive, touching the sides

  pleasurably as they do. Easy go, easy go.