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  when it’s otherwise all in order –

  all settle and glister – every feeling

  accounted for, all told: it occurs

  like a gnat which skips my swat –

  chip of will – squat loaf

  of matter – bold little exister.

  YOUR ROOM AT MIDNIGHT WAS SUDDENLY

  Two versions of ‘Απολείπειν ο θεός Aντώνιον’ by C. P. Cavafy

  I.

  rich with the feeling of your hearing

  an unseen procession, a procession rich itself

  with the strains of its beauty, a low

  darkness of voices – but now

  is no time to mourn your loss,

  your departing fortune – a life’s work

  spoiling before your eyes, a host of plans

  proving illusory. As if you were

  prepared, ever (as if you were brave),

  say farewell to the Alexandria that is leaving.

  And further: do not allow yourself

  the lie of having dreamt, that your ears fail,

  or your draining mind. Do not sully this

  moment’s song with the baseness of your desire

  for stability. But as if

  you were prepared, ever –

  as if you were brave – move,

  steady, to the window, as one

  given for a city such as this,

  this hugeness, move to the window and

  beat with the pulse of feeling,

  a feeling far off

  from the pitched reed and entreaty of cowardice: no,

  listen as a fatal delicacy to that voice,

  that mass of beauty, that strange

  and passing procession off

  in the distant absence

  of the Alexandria you are anyway losing.

  II.

  on the table because god knows I’m no

  romantic but I

  want you. And underneath that

  we sip our coffee and your eyes

  are darker than any history or coffee, than any

  Greek coffee ever was and hold the gloss

  of depth only such darkness has. God knows

  I want you to the point

  of shucking the woman I love,

  our house, the home we built

  so slowly. And there is a procession offstage

  which accompanies the upward swing

  of your eyes, harmonises the argument

  for discord, and you’re explaining in an

  almost unbroken English a poem from the Greek

  of Cavafy: I don’t know it. As if I were a coward

  I keep quiet. On the table of my mind, I mean –

  your room – hopeless

  coward as I never thought

  I was, hopeless neighbour of these

  strains of romance language (the names

  for your description, the country

  my instinct will use to define you), close as I get

  to the classicism of your Greek heart,

  the close, Doric order of your form.

  I don’t know what it is which is leaving,

  only the sweet draw of its

  pain as it goes from me.

  SATURATION

  In the sun in Madrid there was something

  about the shine of her hair and also if that complex

  delicate net of self-worth has left her

  less able to locate the proper value in others. From music school

  in Berlin my brother complains of these days

  hearing always music’s patterned fade into production

  and soundwaves, compression and lowpass filters

  and saturation. The same way London’s incredible

  pooled blaze of communal brightness

  has cost us our constellations. Or how it’s possible,

  in an eerie Toronto that still insists

  seriously on Hallowe’en, to miss the actual ghoul

  amid the clever, home-made costumes.

  That fucking hair.

  How in the attempt to justify my disgusted pride

  the search for the apposite putdown is like dodgems,

  garish and glaring off their 1920’s Illinois production line.

  LOSS

  What is it – reassurance? – I get

  from the thought of obscure & complicated

  numerical transactions occurring

  in sad, former-Soviet towns,

  in cold, dusty, Eastern-European townsteads ringed

  by collapsing fences, in post-offices or

  private rooms, with balance books

  & iron-looking machines with

  sliding parts & till-rolls or ribbons

  & outdated conversion tables

  to rely on, unlaminated & hopeless?

  & when that post-Soviet economy went down

  so much became worthless; but to know

  that tiny, tangle-fine flares

  of complication are going up, everywhere

  and always: data is the only mark we can make

  in the streaming tickertape of passing time.

  But how to compare such

  wonderful detail to the billions

  that were lost in transaction, in conversion

  to untranslatably richer currencies? How the light

  settles in its million angles

  on the leaves of the raspberry canes

  which provide the primary export,

  those sweet bright globes

  which flow across borders, like fact

  or rumour, handed from one person

  to another, bound in their

  rich units of red, rich

  as the unthinkable desiderata

  of bickering gods. And with what

  loss, what adjustment

  for conversion? Think of us, our words

  & figures, the richness

  of the detail we imply, our rituals

  & calculations & lookings-up. How everything

  is being set down, somehow, and nothing

  at all is slipping past too easily.

  POEM IN WHICH IF NOT WELL

  If not spires then phone masts; not explosives

  then the nagging ethics of democracy.

  If not fresh paint then the toadskin upholstery

  of the railings and ironwork

  of this city’s eastern reaches. If not now, well, then whatall

  of the children we can make. If not

  two nil then four three. If not hope

  then parades; not bells then whistles.

  If not the delicate tentacles of the ability

  to cope then the wealth of the loam.

  If not the epitome then the persuasive

  stranger. If not the hiss and clatter of Autechre

  or Venetian Snares through your old laptop’s speakers

  then a punitive silence: if not time

  then service. If not a sparkling metropolis

  then an arctic of peace, if not a riot

  then an act. Try to remember

  that in mixing any two of Ireland’s finest wines

  their exquisite and respective bouquets

  will still engender piss. Remember this, and move always

  as if to accept the lesser of the two. If not a blessing then a

  genuine well-wishing; if not a lesson then a lyric.

  ON LATTERLY OVERCOMING LAST OCTOBER’S LOSS

  for Rosa Tomalin

  Laugh out loud, oh lover of levity, our lingering optimism lightens our load. Observe, lover, our lashings of luxurious ornament: lilac oil, Lebanese ocarinas, legumes, oriental lanterns, oranges, lemons or limes; O listful of lissom, obdurate, lifely objects, lighting opulently like old-fashioned lamp-posts onto liveries of limbic obsidian; like object layered onto looser object. Listen:

  our love of life ornaments life.

  Oh! Lots of love! Outrageous levies on last October’s loss! Outspoken lauding of lin
guistic observation! Lavish objections looming over lazy ontologies! Let others languish over lost opportunities: let’s overturn long outstanding limitations. Our lovely organic laudanum obliterates longings, or lessens our lisping objections, or leastwise outlaws languor. Oh listing Occident, lapse outwards.

  Lux. Omnia. Laeto.

  THEMSELVES

  I have learned the words – curlicue,

  arabesque, craquelure – and I have done my best

  to feel that well-spoken weft &c. beneath

  the skin of things, with ketamines or caffeines

  mingling with the bloodstream I have long

  been shifting, twice changing between Liverpool Street,

  between St Pancras and here. All preparation

  dissolves like cardboard-minded

  hangover-morning vitamin supplement at this

  sudden coast, the mist-hung edges of this shingle beach,

  its pitchless singing, its pebble-rattle intensifying

  to the static hiss of unthinkable numbers, this

  vast variegate of stone being

  dragged across itself by the persistent

  knowing drugged retreat

  of the waves, and the gentle waves – patina, spindrift,

  astringent – and the waves. The vast multiplication table

  of its rattle. The mingling of the symbols for stones

  with the symbol for seawater rinsing the two,

  the three-inch give of a tortoiseshell of shingle

  underfoot, the way every rounded collateral pressure

  of stone on deeper stone comes up

  through the shoesoles, the soles of the feet,

  up through some rail-cartographer’s dream of nerves,

  up to the neck and the graze there of the salt-air

  on the tongue, scouring off the need for words

  and, a breath after that, the words

  2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014,

  at an indeterminate point of a night

  hot as an hourglass of finest Sahara familiar hands

  remake the disorient echoing

  chamber of your room and all of you

  out of glass planes drawn implacably

  across faces of schist and brass discs

  so tenderly they will never break. Your world must

  sometimes be the world. Rises again. Were it

  some balaclava of the psyche… but it’s not:

  it’s gas and rent and rail and all those

  hyperreal almighty sappers which will

  not be salved by any

  shrink or deep breath or mythy tincture,

  nor any counting backwards

  DIDN’T JOKES USED TO BE FUNNY?

  after Louis MacNeice

  Time was away, and somewhere else. Pied birds

  hung like muted baubles in the trees,

  the leaves of which were proof against the

  Christmas breeze of that shocking December day’s

  hour’s minute’s second. The word you will now

  have forever chosen resting like an ice-cube

  at half-melt on your red lower lip and I wondered slowly

  where time had gone: off and elsewhere. Everything

  suddenly had far too much detail; the stuff was pasted

  crazily on, like glitter on a schoolkid’s Christmas project.

  Christmas had come so early it passed

  unnoticed, and the Christmas after

  loomed like a punchline, and then you’re thinking

  irrelevantly of shame, of what

  a colossal fucking shame and that time was away

  and somewhere unrecognisably else

  had come rushing in to fill its place.

  LIGURIA

  On the one hand, there is the morning sunlight

  insinuating itself helically with the fibres

  of the canes and their dusty-leaved tomato plants

  about them. On the other, the plump primary note

  of a woodpigeon swelling rhythmically into the air

  like the drop at the lip of a non-off tap, swelling

  into the dialetheic air, clean but ripe, gamey, with its two

  quick stabilisers: the glue goes. We pool so, it

  schools us. The rules: yes, they fooled you, accruing…

  The air is in the constant moment

  of being rinsed so clean by the sunlight

  that it vitrifies into sunlight, thin and brazen. And then

  because light and air are ten things

  it’s thickened again by the baking masonry which insists

  on a history magnificently, manifestly distinct

  from the ferrous bramble it seems in England; a history

  of certain people completing dignified tasks

  in sonorous metals; of Indian summers both cruel

  and unusual. But this brittle bauble, this Mexican standoff

  of air, and light, and time avers (retooling)

  what nonsense it is to talk (it’s true, Joe)

  of elements. We are pylons of yew, made up

  of the smell of dry grass, the scent of its silent rustle,

  its quiver like a decision going unmade,

  the glucose unspooling, the bluest undoing.

  IN THE MOMENT,

  you are saturated with body, and inhabit it the way darkness disperses through water:

  with shadows of deeper concentrate, wrecks yawing on the seabed with stowaways

  of the least-known and so intensest hollows of attention, and potentially bright fish pushing

  blindly at rusted bulwarks, miles from the surface we want to claim to like

  best. You might be right that our obsession with the ends of things

  derives from our thinking so much about sex,

  or when we were young our thinking so much about sex. Younger, anyway:

  remember the bluey darkness it used to be like

  suddenly finding yourself in? Remember the obsession of sex with sex?

  But your skin grows depearlescent, and the wrecks of old ideas become manifest as things:

  they are the scurf of refuse on the surface of our old park’s only pond, pushing

  harmlessly at its borders. For only the hollow are awarded borders; think of water

  with its no inner edge; the hollows it rushes to fill, like

  it’s been thinking only of erasing emptiness (because yes, this is amongst the things

  staining the surface of our any tipsy talk of sex). Later, a tall cool glass of water

  stands stilly in the darkness of a midnight kitchen, with midnight pushing

  at the windows from the wrecks left of summer’s only oak-trees, while nobody upstairs has sex.

  If it is not to be a stain, then it must be an obsession. And if there is any way

  of ennobling an obsession, it lies with the things

  which obsess you being never left to ring hollow; in pushing

  deeper into the wrecks of ideals made by the examples and instances which are anyway

  all we have. It is the so-much thinking through which drags down sex

  from its admittedly synthetic pedestal, which vexes the capacity of its darkness and waters-down

  the intensity of the dissolution of your sole surface, the like-for-like

  exchange of one surface giving onto another. Think of two men, breathlessly pushing

  their broke-down Skoda home in the obsession they foster like so many of their sex

  with self-reliance. Around them, darkness starts to fall, like

  one hollow is growing inside a finer hollow, the water

  from the cracked radiator thinking its thought-bubbles onto the tarmac, and anyway

  the wrecked driveshaft as which these two men exist, now – far more than the things

  and ways of their separate bodies – this wreck, jointly hauled, is as much sex

  as anything is. Such facts are beginning to surface in our species, felt in the rough water
s

  surrounding the isle of our lord, that bent and thin king, reason. There are always things

  swimming inwards with the press of obsession to find any way

  of entering that hollow. And it will never be the mirror itself which is your lookalike.

  Because it’s the speculation as to what it is makes up our darkness which is pushing

  this obsession with thinking things – like sex, like water, like darkness.

  It all makes wrecks of all these sensuous surfaces pushing outwards

  from the dark echoic hollows which is anyway all we are.

  THIRD BALLAD

  Two versions of ‘Ballade III’ by Christine de Pizan

  I.

  And as Leander crossed that salted strait,

  alive at his skin to the water, in all its

  unsettled electrolytes, all craftless and concealed,

  a disappearing small packet of risk, breathing her name

  into his fearful shoulder with every

  fifth stroke, her home on the snatched in-breath.

  As she waited, Hero, composed of that same, dark water:

  look how love orders the lover.

  Across the sound – from which

  so many have shouted – our little Leander pants

  for old love, unsatisfactory and noble, parcelled inside

  the unfolded carnation of heat his chest holds

  against the near-freezing water. Against that passage:

  raw chance, the violence of numbers, voltage, charts