Long Pass Read online

CONTENT

  You died in the back of a Cairo cab

  thinking of a man wrapped in: bandages

  and the twenty thousand tonnes of sandstone

  it takes to point a pyramid at the sky.

  Another time you died outside a Calais café

  tasting a coral-pink macaroon in the February air.

  On the drive to a Stockholm hotel you remember

  dying on the steps of a university library,

  a handsome dark-haired man bending to restore

  your dropped books and each death was only

  a part of that starry arsenal of memory from which

  you had daily recrafted your idea of home

  slipping off. The foundations

  are not the thing, the contents

  of the cupboards are not the thing, the draught

  both entering and escaping is not

  that thing. But there are bandages, there is indication

  and there is cold air, and every carven moment

  will shed the memories we have of it

  like you, slipping from an old, comfortable bathrobe

  into a death of body temperature and steam.

  COMING TO PASS

  two versions of a fragment (‘Reif Sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet…’) by Friedrich Hölderlin

  I.

  The way fruit, arriving

  at its moment of ripeness, is glazed with fire,

  cooked and checked by the earth’s close process. It’s law,

  after all, how all things

  come to pass, temptress

  but unearthly. And as

  the heavy stake of kindling, resting

  on the shoulders, there is much to bear

  in mind. But the trails

  are evil. And everything

  bridled will anyhow

  wander off, like horses

  into dusk; everything

  shot-through with this longing

  to go beyond bounds. But so much

  stands to be lost. And loyalty

  a must; which rules out prophecy

  or nostalgia. Let us surrender, be rocked –

  cradling ourselves against the moment –

  like a boat, lapped by the waves.

  II.

  For a moment the project

  will come perfectly to fruition,

  each word glossed by its

  plunge into the fire of the present, that flicker

  from which everything is once again

  made anew. It’s almost gospel

  the way things arrive, slip askew,

  and depart: as a snake,

  dreaming of the cloths of heaven, its mounds

  of laundry, its drying lines. And as

  the weighted intellect is kindle

  to any moment’s inspiration

  or distraction, there is much to bear

  in mind. And the previous versions

  of the damn thing verge

  on the diabolical. And everything

  you think you’ve got bridled, every axiom

  you’ve nailed, will wander off, like horses

  into dusk, appearing

  to dissolve into the dust of secondary

  and tertiary meanings. And the constant

  temptation to reach beyond what’s

  suitable, beyond bounds, into the dense red

  of yourself, your vague

  and useless gloss. And so much,

  so much stands to be lost! And loyalty

  a must: this raking up of foreign soil –

  the spoiled quarantine of adherence

  to original – is no good. No good. All of which

  rules out the possibility of prophecy,

  or nostalgia. Let us rock between the two,

  like a little skin-keeled coracle on a sea of confusion,

  lapped by the various camberings

  of serial and distinct waves, one

  after the other, made up

  of the exact same water.

  NETHERLANDS

  Ann’s Story

  I was any three-year-old: a dream of curiosity. If you see

  an open door you go through:

  that’s what doors are. An inconstancy

  of right and wrong – of action and its kinds of truth

  had inhabited my vacation head

  that holiday – the Netherlands, Nineteen-fifty-two.

  And the bright suburban street’s nearest door was ajar, and my tread

  still absence-soft enough to pass whichever off-guard parent,

  and I was in. I remember a bed,

  and solider even than its dark-wood frame the astonishment

  at the eyes – on me! – of the woman half-amid the sheets,

  small and dense: a surprise of curves. I’ve spent

  such heavy hours since, retreading these curving streets

  of the words I’ve hung on every memory I’ve had

  of those wavering Netherlands, wholly incomplete

  by now with passing through and through of that Dutch red,

  half-hoping still to find a heart of flesh among the deep white

  of empty sheets; and every memory a now-vacated, still-warm bed.

  OF SOME SUBSTANCE, ONCE

  and for all there is no other thing

  in which the soul or any soul-like thing consists:

  clear as lipstick is lips. Or the free will

  of one hand, moving for another: a vanity. A sun,

  spun around the Earths we weave of ourselves.

  I do not say this. I watch you watching the moon.

  And any moment I will take my chest and I will kiss you.

  For the first time. And so to the materialist I say:

  if you can’t ride two horses at once

  you shouldn’t be in the circus.

  AN OCEAN,

  two versions of a fragment (‘Antico, sono ubriacato dalla voce…’)

  from ‘Mediterraneo’ by Eugenio Montale

  I.

  antiquer by far than the best furniture my father

  was given to restore, to piece together from other woods,

  to fix, and I’m hammered with the voice

  that hauls itself from all your mouths, opening

  into the moodswing gape of bells, greenish

  and self-effacing, ringing into nothingness

  and returning. I lived here once, at your shore, the sun

  making a midday bakery of every point between these

  three horizons, mosquitoes thickening the air. And so I

  thicken back into presence, only now

  lacking the target-part for the dressing-down

  you have for me, the short shrift under your

  breath. You showed me

  how the petty unrest of my heart

  was just a moment’s symptom of yours,

  your cause; that down at the seafloor of my

  life is that incomprehensible absolute:

  to be the occurring shift of hugeness, its change and still

  to be fixed in place. And so to slough off, like you

  the rubble and filth of myself,

  the dregs and starfish of your abyss.

  II.

  and ‘ocean’ is as good a term as any

  for the startless thing

  you are, and anyhow I’m stripped

  of agency, reckless drunk

  with a voice which springs from all your mouths –

  the bells and pretty lines, the confessions and recollections I can’t

  keep from getting in,

  from soaking what good people have made dry.

  I try to find a way the voices

  can rise and dissolve into the stuff

  they’re of. Like waves, but ideas have words

  and words ideas and they get

  everywhere, sand in sandwiches

  at the beach. I think, helplessly, of the place

  I used to live; I Sheffield and I thicken.<
br />
  I make recollections like new bread and I absentee myself

  from the proper rigours of responsibility. You showed me

  the shallows of my heart, how its storming

  was only a fractal part of the language

  in which it stormed: that down at the seafloor of my life

  is that incomprehensible absolute: to be

  III.

  what Morgan calls as various as vast,

  yet fixed in place, – the stability I imagine

  of constant renewal, of permanent momentum; the gyroscope

  steadied by the movement

  of its elements. Galassi

  has voracious for vast, and fast

  for various. And so to work, so

  to slough off, like you, the rubble and filth

  of myself, the seaweed and the starfish of your abyss.

  SOME PECUNIARY OBSERVATIONS

  Like a hopelessly bourgeois but charming market town

  in the heartlands, in which

  the moment the poetry festival ends

  the In Bloom horticultural extravaganza

  grows inaugurate. Town criers in regal blues

  roam the squares, ringing bells,

  the pealings of which startle upwards

  like the sudden flight of noisome, heraldic birds.

  Oh heartlands, you garlanded warehouse

  of cherished ideals and cosy ropes of conjecture;

  you trader motoring to the market town

  with a trunkful of chintz you know you’ll shift

  at magnificently bemargined prices. Accordingly

  and moreover, the pursed lips of the very beautiful;

  the conclusive redundancy of simple pleasures

  in the face of those yet simpler. The barter

  of comfort for hope. Oh heartlands,

  you total 24/7 engine of destruction.

  THE WAY OF DOING THINGS TREES HAVE

  I’m getting surer

  it’s inescapable, this

  way of doing things the leaves on trees have,

  the dull madness of profusion, the tumble

  of identicals, the huddle

  of uniformed kids breaking out

  into a wild but contained game

  of chase or tag or kiss-chase at the slightest tug

  of a breeze

  so this insane design, this drunken Fibonacci –

  as fast as we replace it

  with brick and facility it reasserts itself

  – the tumble, the frantic contact –

  in the play of meaning over meaning,

  so our signs – perfectly dichromatic

  oblong boards reading Pandora’s or

  Sam’s Auto Parts – start, at the first

  drift of the mind, leafing

  through the banks of their noirish associations, their

  bluey steam of suggestion, and so

  we’re back at that familiar same-thing-again-

  and-again that leaves have of running

  against each other and together, of being

  identical looking, only not quite, (it being

  no coincidence, the way

  the spinal rippling of a river close-up

  sets itself so firmly against the sill

  of its shore, the way

  the shiver of leaves is only a shiver

  against one or other implacable sky)

  which is

  your mind repeating the functions

  which just take nature’s shape, its bundle

  of angles, and the green

  and the green of unstopping

  CARRYING

  The pigeons carry their reputation for disease like a canker

  hidden in the beak. They peck mechanically about my feet

  in my Thames-side café: the bitterer the coffee the more here I feel

  in the same drowse of survival they bespeak, filthy doven clods

  of proof for evolution. They carry their reputation for disease

  like a sixties schoolgirl her clothbound volume of Sartre,

  mildewed and risky. The pigeons are iron furbelows

  ruffling the café patio’s concrete flagging. How much really do I need

  to confront myself with history? I could raise my eyes

  to the thin, pigeon-crowded piers like dark tongues

  furred with nerves for the determined endless tasting of the old

  river. Lucy and I held hands again for the first time last night

  since the final kiss of our long relationship; my father had tickets

  to the game that became the Hillsborough Disaster.

  My mum’s father stole his older brother’s passport

  to escape Ireland for the Second World War. But that’s

  all over now, truly; and my dad was called, last-minute,

  to work. And my grandfather returned, though not again

  to old Ireland; ferried that inaccurate, harped passport

  to Dagenham, where at last he made my mother. Essex girls

  have such a reputation and are surely proof

  that none of this has any value whatsoever. Think of her –

  outside the secondary modern in the shadow of Ford’s

  relentless heavy plant – a new flagship of French existentialism.

  It’s only that each thing carries another. The tongue,

  so evolved, has five types of cell for tasting: my own

  is deficient at savour and has nothing at all for the forces

  which have brought over time these things to their being.

  AVERAGE TEMPERATURE AT SURFACE LEVEL

  A man is falling asleep in the plush comfort

  of a hotel armchair, a lit cigarette trembling

  barely between his fingers. Any moment the air will grow

  hot to the touch with the discomfort of inaction. Later

  the windowframes will take, the light-fittings themselves

  drift in imperceptible degrees from a plastic white

  to the vaguely patterned brown of inattention, the plush armchair

  to fire in a room of fire.

  Elsewhere a painter is at his concentration.

  He measures out his attention like a liqueur,

  ignoring the mild furore of the late sun, its fading glare

  seeming to ruffle the sea it lights on. A sea, as usual,

  he can barely ignore. His still life

  both stills and saturates its oranges;

  the sharp edges of the table fray

  and give as they approach the costly blue

  of the vase; the fruit bowl

  ceases to contain that fruit

  which falls below its lip and out of the hard line of sight.

  The gaze abstracts as it objectifies; object

  bleeds into type, the starvation-ration of quiddity,

  the hardtack of category, like interlocking

  fingers – the posture of an infinitely sympathetic refusal

  cast off

  across the copper-inlaid oak of a café coffee table,

  perhaps in a piazza of Venice, maybe

  years ago now, before that thennish city

  was understood to be sinking – the gesture

  descending to a scrimshaw, sunk into still-living bones.

  In every Western ever made

  there’s a cowboy, his face a cave of oranges

  and greys in the campfire’s, yes, flickering light.

  He’s an exacting mechanistic archetype of machismo, sure,

  but is pictured as somehow one with nature, running his

  calloused hand across the rope-burned collar of hide

  decorating the neck of the lassoed steer, damaged

  by the way we gather it to us.

  In the evolving technology of chess piece manufacture the unrefined chits of maple and rosewood are known as blanks. We remove from them what’s unnecessary until the desired form is attained. The desired form is one that sign
ifies only within the system of rules of the game for which it’s intended. Remove a bow of wood here and here and the piece will move maybe three spaces instead of four. Pieces meant for finer sets receive their inlay. After, one of two varnishes will be applied.

  Adjectives queue like interior designers

  fingering the fabric samples for the refitting

  of a burnt-out hotel room. The felt swatches of material claim their titles

  only insofar as they defer to another scene, absent

  and imagined. Like the flamboyant designers they specify

  at the same time they subject themselves

  to something larger. We have such a mania for outfitting.

  Reach out; alter into an admittable shape; utilise.

  Place the grey scent of an old twenty pence piece

  into the slot below a seaside telescope. Turn to your mother

  The chemical the human brain employs

  in the access of a memory

  (the fingers of a perfume

  and a person and an ideal

  description of a perfume interlocking

  imperfectly, that

  vase)

  is also the chemical that reaches in to rearrange

  the synaptic pattern – the stick mandala

  of an unlit campfire – which

  incarnates that memory; that

  which once again unchars these sticks anew.

  As new, still-wet permanent marker is the best plan

  for erasing old permanent marker, being in a place

  is the best way to undo that place. Try

  as best you can

  to hold on to what it is we face

  now – that charlatan, that impostor.

  It’s an artist’s impression of the world, a reconstruction

  of the chase, after the fact,

  the unsentenced con mid-getaway, face turned