Long Pass Read online

and patterns, the hubris of analysis, weather-fronts: a storm.

  Foresight. See how love orders the lover.

  Look how seeing preempts the gulf.

  And Leander drowned himself in it, noble

  and unsatisfactory. And Hero, in all things fit-for-purpose,

  lost herself to it, too, at the same time as he,

  if later. As this: one cause, one effect.

  See this, poor etiolated lovers, at

  the seafloor of love’s furious cause:

  look at how love orders the lover. Look

  and learn nothing. I beg you.

  This ordering, this deluging myth-kitty; we crave it

  overrule our cretin solitude: are desperate for it.

  Look at how love orders the lover.

  II.

  Always a line I told myself I’d never cross,

  this retelling of the Greeks, a long game

  I’m utterly without feeling for. And now (no hero, no claim

  to heroism) I find you handing me the literal and I fold,

  craftless and concealed in the face of

  you, your mind, your body. Breathing the metre of it,

  Medieval French to English. Parcelling something across.

  Look how love orders the lover.

  This sound, these English vowels I’ve made – if anything –

  my home, I shout from them my hectors at the French.

  Watch me struggle, craftless in the face of order.

  Listen, Frenchy: the gap between our tongues

  is just the blackest water, nothingy and unbreathable

  with wordlessness, knowable at exactly and only those points at which

  waves raise like scars from the skin

  to catch that scattered, consonantal moonlight.

  What survives the crossing? The correspondence

  of two white corpses (look how love…)

  pushed together by the tide of odds, these

  devastated, idiolected lovers. Ten causes,

  uncountable effects, a mess of want and

  best guess, a sad seafloor of unthinkable love, everybody

  just basically wanting to look good, everybody

  just trying to write one good poem.

  And to push it across, through the nasty insulation

  of language, of the straight and the sound.

  Don’t stop. I’m sorry. Watch

  for that washed-up body, white

  and spoken with love.

  A PICTURE

  You’ll have had me, the sight of me, down on the sand

  in the wind, distant as the ships from the

  shipping forecast we’ll be ignoring

  come quarter-to-one (being in bed, doing again

  what we’d be doing next), caught on the empty strand

  in the web of kitestring from the kite we’d won

  on the arcades, its line as it flies dividing the beach, catching

  the September evening’s fibrous shine on its otherwise

  vanishing fineness. You’ve a photo, in fact,

  that’s your battered laptop’s desktop still.

  Still, you won’t have seen the three swans

  painstakingly splitting the sky the sky

  was determinedly becoming

  as what happened next happened next.

  FANTASY OF MANNERS

  What is this Highway Code of need to behave myself, even

  in the empty backroads of late at night? I feel to be

  literally observing my own hailmary explanatory,

  my pyrotechnic internal self-justificatory habitualism –

  post hoc ergo propter hoc. Post hoc ergo bollocks hoc.

  Bollocks hoc ergo proper shite. Shite bollocks ergo

  propter shite and always allowing the bitter anaesthetic of intellect

  to play across my hurts like sunlight

  cancelling the water it returns from,

  turning and re-turning in the retinal hollows,

  cavernous and reptile. But no!, let us ply our tools,

  though curious things they are,

  delicate coils of meat and sugar

  thriving in the marshy cloaca of the mind.

  Let us bring our batteries to bear,

  our coalitions of the will, and all the crashing

  and imparallel highways of conjecture we have managed

  to hold on to. Until

  now. Until now. Until now, until now set out

  your little stall then, moment, lay the table

  for a prissy meal of chitter, lamb and judge,

  offer up the gentle pitfalls of conversation. Christ,

  it’s hardly Gormenghast.

  A BRIEF GLOSA

  I know that each one of us travels to love alone,

  alone, to faith and to death.

  I know. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.

  Let me come with you.

  after Yannis Ritsos, Moonlight Sonata

  Twenty-four days, really, all told,

  straggling Manchester’s dive-bars until five for the pretext of drink

  between the kitsch and neons as if there was no agony

  keeping our bodies apart. Three-something weeks there, and then perhaps

  three-thousand emails, Manchester to France. Praise be for smartphones.

  I know that each one of us travels to love alone,

  but this – this is surely unnecessary. By the time you left we’d settled

  to a nightly routine: The Temple, The Thirsty Scholar,

  the failing Black Dog Ballroom, always open, desperately, until dawn

  with always a floor to ourselves. The cluttered inbox of lust

  already blinking in my chest. And then we left,

  alone, to faith and to death.

  As in the time you took me back to the place you shared

  with your absent fiancé to read me the Greek

  of Yannis Ritsos, in Greek, until the sounds

  worked by your tongue brought your tongue too much

  into focus. Certain lusts can be swallowed, that noble, necessary gulp.

  I know. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.

  Ritsos, with his faith and his death, is thinking more

  of that intricate momentary balancing act, the fiddle of drink and time

  by which we can hope to produce our presentable selves;

  the phone screens and mildewed old editions

  of the old translations you left me, all we believed we could afford

  to eschew. Let me come with you.

  I AM POSITIONED

  at the edge of whatever bridge this is called so the breakbeat/sitar fusion being

  vaguely beatmatched by the dj on the bank below is ranged against the scope

  of the busking clarinettist skipping through the klezmer songbook further down the bridge

  and they both have those eerie semitone intervals so it’s not

  so discordant as it sounds. Also it’s dusk so there’s all this sunset in pastels chosen

  by a tired and emotional aesthete coming up behind the huge lights on what must be

  the Egyptian embassy and falling half on the embankment’s concrete very smoothly

  and half on the choppish Thames, where the pretence of surface

  is shattered. But it’s not about London’s emulsion of cultures or

  the fragmentary nature of modern life: it’s about romance

  because I’m thinking of the woman who has asked

  for us to keep apart, for two months, while she

  works things out: the woman I love. Although

  I didn’t, I suppose, make that clear.

  WHY?

  x to mimic the slow pass

  of memory, the glassy recollection of a cheap print

  of a painting by Bonnard in the university bedroom

  of an old friend. x to pass the time:

  to go past it, into the space of a page.

  x as an excuse to sit, ha
ndled by the August sun

  on a fourth-story Turinese balcony,

  swallowed by the late afternoon heat

  and Peter Sarstedt playing from inside,

  moving your toes in a pool of shade cast

  by the laundry drying on the storey above. x

  to bring tokens of then and now into brief relation,

  a lamp-shadowed, concentrating face into the

  bright but declining North Italian sunlight.

  x to prove something false about the endurance

  of feeling the sun on one’s face. x

  like a gesture towards marble. Consider the way

  uv-exposure lifts the tan to the surface of your skin,

  as if risen from a health that rests in your

  subdermal tissues, coddled around your bones. x to coax it. x

  to winch the forms which once were ships of state

  from out the greenish water, which won’t

  even for a moment quiet into the stillness

  of a concentrating face, offset by the cheap print

  on a Bonnard picture in your long-gone university

  bedroom. x to retrieve the slow shelter of memory

  and the love story below it,

  all the bravura genitive syntax of desire

  elected up from the tangled backstreets of memory,

  flickeringly lamplit and persistent. x

  because what else is there to do?

  There is nothing: make friends with people

  who will only subsequently insist upon

  going on to die? Rescue from itself

  a society which is constitutionally uninterested

  in rescue, a princess in a tower with a jigsaw

  of terrible beauty and seven billion pieces?

  Cook and eat exotic dishes the subtleties of which

  you cannot be equipped to taste? Haul up

  the terrific wreck we’ve made of gender,

  sunk into every one of our stories?

  Haul that up, again? No, x in order

  to linger on this balcony, hoping the striking

  self-possession of the woman

  smoking on the opposite balcony late last

  night will reappear, her gathered-back ringlets:

  her arms crossing and recrossing after raising her

  cigarette to her lips, she reminded me of someone.

  x because you have a strange internal grammar

  which always uses the second person for self-reference

  but also for the irregular but sudden and insistent

  addressing of various archetypical

  love interests. x to bring that idiolected grammar,

  that ragged coalition of playing pieces from various

  and even incompatible games, to bring it to the surface, like the tan

  on the skin of the woman on the balcony on the courtyard,

  across the courtyard, to whom you never will speak.

  x in digression from your financial

  and romantic perplexities. x because hope

  is purer than happiness. x like you imagine

  an existentialist might, bent over a coffee table

  late at night, partially obscured

  by an inherited piano, the lid closed and the key

  lost long ago. x as if every moment’s perception

  was a new year’s do and demanded a new

  Auld Lang Syne all its own. A perception

  of the host of miscellanea suspended above the street

  by the opposite block’s many balconies – potted azalea,

  clayey spades, bales of cable, grey-mildewed notepads, a radio.

  x in order to oblige a friend with whom

  you frequently exchange work to visualise

  a parade of new things – the apparently

  random scatter of gothic chimneypots rising

  asymmetrically from the terracotta of the opposite block’s roof

  or the naked body of a shared friend, the bold curves

  of his calves, the sweep of his navel like an intake of breath

  down towards the gentle axolotl of his penis.

  x to insist it’s okay that some things are

  radically distinct. My love for you, for

  each of you. x for that old story. x as if in song,

  distracted by the song; x

  because what else is there to do? Watch Amélie again?

  Mastubate in your flat’s communal shower? Fantasise

  about winning the lottery, of getting a flat

  in the backstreets of Naples, with a balcony, watching the bats

  flicker across the piazza flycatchers all, as if

  from that confused movement you could take

  what passes for an answer?

  LAST LETTER FROM THE FRONTIER

  It’s true the music here is plainsongy and austere

  and there is little by way of gunpowder.

  But I’ve learned that the fraction of what you will meet

  in the world that is capable of requiting

  anything is tiny and obscure. We make do. Frequently

  I recount this self-destructive, back-biting anecdotal patter

  amid the strange branches I’ve renamed myself. Make

  do, and go out with a gag. God, for the tiny requital

  of receipt, some relief across the home-made traps

  and walls and hokey decoys. Which after all

  are all the sign I have that something’s out there.

  I know that we have years – perhaps forever – to wait

  until the drawling missionaries and the thrill and the skin drums

  of pirates. And until then, I am bricking myself in.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank the editors of the publications in which some of these poems, often in earlier versions, first appeared: PN Review, Poetry London, The Sunday Times, Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt), Magma, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, The Lifeboat, Cadaverine, Best of Manchester Poets Volume 2 (Puppywolf), Shearsman, Ambit, New Poetries VI (Carcanet), For the Very Last Time (Ambergris Editions), Poems in Which, Agenda, The Manchester Review, Stand, Laudanum Chapbook Anthology: Volume One (Laudanum), Lookout: Poetry from Aldeburgh Beach (Lookout Editions), The Tangerine and Blackbox Manifold.

  I’d like to acknowledge the previous translators of the reworkings in this book. These include (but are not limited to) Martin Sorrell, Richard Sieburth, Michael Hamburger, Jonathan Galassi, Jamie McKendrick, Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherrard, Maryann Corbett, Nancy Rose, Lyudmila Purgina and particularly Edwin Morgan.

  Thanks are also due to the people who’ve helped me write this book: Nadia Connor, Chrissy Williams, Matthew Halliday, Stephen Nashef, James Horrocks, Aime Williams, John McAuliffe, Vona Groarke, Amy Key, John Clegg, Emily Hasler, Jon Sayers and Brenda Hillman. And especially, and enormously, to Jemima Foxtrot.

  About the Author

  JOEY CONNOLLY grew up in Yorkshire, studied in Manchester and now lives and writes in London. He co-founded Kaffeeklatsch poetry magazine, and has been the manager of the Poetry Book Fair for several years. In 2012 he received an Eric Gregory Award, and he has been Writing Fellow at the University of Manchester. His poetry featured in Carcanet’s New Poetries VI (2015).

  Copyright

  Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

  This eBook edition first published in 2017.

  Text copyright © Joey Connolly, 2017, all rights reserved. The right of Joey Connolly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, lea
sed, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 9781784103293

  Mobi ISBN 9781784103309

  PDF ISBN 9781784103316

  The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.