Remember, brother soul, that day spent cleaving
nothing from nothing, like a thrown knife?
Then there was no arriving and no leaving,
just a dream of the disintricated life –
crucified and free, the still man moving,
the balancing his work, the wind his wife.
Waking with Russell
Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.
The Thread
Jamie made his landing in the world
so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth.
They caught him by the thread of his one breath
and pulled him up. They don’t know how it held.
And so today I thank what higher will
brought us to here, to you and me and Russ,
the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us
roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill
and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving
every engine in the universe.
All that trouble just to turn up dead
was all I thought that long week. Now the thread
is holding all of us: look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.
The Forest of the Suicides
Inferno, Canto xiii
Who are these pietàs?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.
Sylvia Plath, ‘Winter Trees’
Nessus was still midriver, trotting back
to the far bank, when suddenly I found
I was back in a dark wood, this time unmarked
by any path at all. I looked around.
Each barren, blood-black tree was like a plate
from a sailor’s book of knots, its branches bent
and pleached and coiled as if to demonstrate
some novel and ingenious kind of torment.
In the topmost branches of those wretched trees
I saw the Snatcher build its nest; whose kin
drove Aeneas from the Strophades,
spoiled his table, and spat out his ruin.
There it squats, its human face all wrong
above its fledged gut, wide-winged, razor-clawed.
With its avian knack of mimicry, its song
is a loop-tape of the children it has tortured.
I felt so desolate, it gave me a start
to hear his voice. ‘Now, friend; before we leave
stand still for just a moment, and listen hard.
This place is almost too strange to believe.’
Below the pitiful sobs and chokes and cries
lower moans were echoing through the glade,
yet I saw no one to make them. ‘Master, why
do they hide from us?’ I asked. ‘Are they afraid?’
Then he replied: ‘Break off a little spray
from any plant here: then I guarantee
things will become clearer.’ I snapped away
a twig from the bush that stood closest to me.
In the trunk, a red mouth opened like a cut.
Then a voice screamed out ‘Why are you tearing me?’
It was a woman’s voice. Blood began to spurt
from the broken tip. ‘You, are you hearing me?
When exactly did I earn your scorn?
Supposing I’d a heart black as a snake’s,
I was a woman once, that now am thorn.
What would a little pity have set you back?’
Just in the way a split cord of green wood,
lit at one end, starts to spit and blister
at the other, so it was the words and blood
bubbled from her splintered mouth. ‘Dear sister,’
my guide interrupted, ‘if only my poor friend
had recalled what I had written of this hell
I know he never would have raised his hand
against you; but the truth is so incredible
I urged him on. Forgive his ignorance –
but he can make amends; just tell him who
you were, and how you came here. When he returns
to the upper world, your fame can bloom anew.’
And then the tree laughed. ‘Bravo sir! Well said.
You’d spend a lifetime trying to put it worse.
In my design, that scalded beach ahead
would be reserved for the biographers.
And if it’s self-improvement your friend seeks
perhaps it’s courtesy you need to teach …
Ah. But you can see that I am weak,
and lured into a little human speech.
Very well. When I was small, I held both keys
that fitted my father’s heart; which I unlocked
and locked again with such a delicate ease
he felt no turning, and he heard no click.
He desired no other confidence but mine;
nor would I permit one. I was so bound
to my splendid office that, when he resigned,
I followed. They had to dig me from the ground.
So the post remained, and I remained as true;
and, in time, I came to interview
for his successor. None of them would do
until a black shape cut the light in two
and at once I knew my ideal candidate.
But that green-eyed courtesan, that vice of courts
who had always stalked his halls and kept his gate –
the years had steeped me in her sullen arts
and my tongue grew hot with her abysmal need.
Slowly, I turned it on my second Caesar
until it seemed to him his every deed
did nothing but disgrace his predecessor.
So he left me too; but the tongue still burned away
till I sung the bright world only to estrange it,
and prophesied my end so nakedly
mere decency insisted I arrange it.
My mind, then, in its voice of reasoned harm
told me Death would broker my release
from every shame, and back into his arms;
so I made my date. It was bad advice.
But if your friend should somehow cut a path
back to the light, then tell them I betrayed
the spirit, not the letter of the oath –
by far the lesser crime in our dark trade.’
My master hissed: ‘Listen – she’s silent now.
Quickly, don’t just throw away your chance;
ask her, if there’s more you wish to know.’
I replied: ‘My lord, you know the questions
I brought with me; so ask what I would ask.
I have no stomach for this conversation.’
He nodded. ‘That this man may fulfil his task
and witness for you at his final station,
imprisoned soul – if you could bear to – say
just how the spirit comes to be so caught
in these terrible spasms, and if perhaps one day
it might be wrested free of its own knots.’
Long seconds passed before she spoke again.
‘Remember: though these words are some relief,
the breath I draw to fill them gives a
pain
beyond your knowledge. I will be brief.
The very instant that the furious soul
tears itself from the flesh, some inverse power
bundles it screaming down the sudden hole
that opens in the bed or bath or floor;
then Minos directs it to the seventh pit
where it spins down to this starless nursery
to seed wherever fortune tosses it.
There it roots, and drives up through the clay
to grow into the shape of its own anguish.
Finally, the Harpies swarm to crop
the leaves and buds – a blessing and a scourge,
since it pains us, and yet lets the pain escape.
And like you, at the final clarion,
we’ll return to fish our bodies from the ground,
but never again to wear them: such is the sin
of our ingratitude. Instead, we’ll drag them down
to this dark street; and here they’ll stay, strung out
forever in their miserable parade –
naked and still, each hung like a white coat
on the hook of its own alienated shade.’
The Hunt
By the time he met his death
I’d counted off twelve years
and in the crossed and harrowed path
could read my whole career
the nights of circling alone
in corridors of earth
the days like paler nights, my lodestone
dying to the north
while I lived by what uncertain meat
was left from his repast
and what rainwater and bitter light
could worm in through the crust
And in that time my axe had swung
no closer to his neck
than the echo of his sullen tongue
or the hot smell of his wake
Though now and then I’d find a scrap
of gold thread in the dirt
and once, a corner of the map
she’d sewn into my shirt
I had no use for either here
being so long deranged
by the tortuous familiar
as once I’d been the strange
Then one day near the heart, making
a break in my patrol
I drained my flask and leant my aching
back against the wall
Across the way I saw a gap.
I conjured up a flame
and cupped it down twelve narrow steps
into an airless tomb
I gave the light from side to side.
The little vault unfurled
its mockery of the life I’d led
back in the upper world
The walls were lined with skinbound books
the floor with braided hair
in the corner, stuck with shite and wax
a bone table, a bone chair
On the table lay a dish of gall
and by it, for my lamp
a thighbone propping up a skull
inside, a tallow stump
I gently slid my spill into
one eye, then cut my breath
until a thin partitioned glow
strained out between the teeth
It was then my misbegotten quarry
swam up from the gloom
loitering in the darker doorway
to a second room
We shuffled close, like two old fools
and stood there for an age
trying to recollect the rules
by which we were engaged
I read no terror in his frown
no threat and no intrigue
the massive head was canted down
in pity or fatigue
so I put my hand out, hoping this
might break our dead impasse
and he had made to tender his
when my hand hit the glass
Letter to the Twins
… for it is said, they went to school at Gabii, and were well instructed in letters, and other accomplishments befitting their birth. And they were called Romulus and Remus (from ruma, the dug), as we had before, because they were found sucking the wolf.
Plutarch, Parallel Lives
Dear sons – for I am not, as you believed,
your uncle – forgive me now my dereliction.
In those nine months the single thought that grieved
me most was not your terrible instruction
in the works of men, the disillusionments –
Nanking and Srebrenica, Babi Yar –
you, bent above those tables of events
by whose low indices you might infer
how far you’d fallen. No, it was instead
the years you’d spend reconstituting all
the billion tedious skills of humanhood:
the infinite laws of Rome, the protocols
of every minor court and consulate –
that city that must rise up from its razed
foundations, mirrored and immaculate,
for as often as we come back to this place.
In sum, they might account it a disaster
but whatever I did, I did it as a deft
composer of the elements, the master
of all terrestrial drag and spin and heft;
look at this hand – the way it knows how light
to grip the pen, how far above the brim
to fill the cup, or hard to steer the kite,
or slowly it can travel through the flame.
More, it knows the vanity of each.
But were I to commend just one reserve
you nothing of use, and so not merely serve
to deepen your attachment or your debt,
where each small talent added to the horde
is doubled in its spending, and somehow yet
no more or less than its own clean reward –
it would be this: the honouring of your lover.
Learn this and she will guide you, if not home
then at least to its true memory. Then wherever
the world loses you, in her you are the same.
First, she will address you in a tongue
so secret she must close her mouth on yours.
In the curves and corners of this silent song
will lie the whole code of your intercourse.
Then, as you break, at once you understand
how the roses of her breast will draw in tight
at your touch, how that parched scrubland
between her thighs breaks open into wet
suddenly, as though you’d found the stream
running through it like a seam of milk;
know, by its tiny pulse and its low gleam
just where the pearl sits knuckled in its silk,
how that ochre-pink anemone relaxes
and unknots under your light hand and white spit;
and how that lovely mouth that has no kiss
will take the deepest you can plant in it;
and how to make that shape that boys, alas,
will know already as the sign for gun
yet slide it with a woman’s gentleness
till you meet that other muzzle coming down.
Now, in all humility, retrace
your steps, that you might understand in full
the privilege that brought you to this place,
that let you know the break below the wool:
and as you lie there by her side, and feel
the wet snout of her womb nuzzle and lather
your fingertips – then you might recall
your mother; or her who said she was your mother.
A Fraud
I was twenty, and crossing
a field near Bridgefoot
when I saw something glossing
the toe of my boot
and ben
t down to spread
the bracken and dock
where a tiny wellhead
had broken the rock
It strained through the gap
as a little clear tongue
that replenished its shape
by the shape of its song
Then it spoke. It said Son
I’ve no business with you.
Whatever I own
is the next fellow’s due.
But if I’m his doom
or Castalian spring –
your directive’s the same:
keep walking.
But before it could soak
back into the stone
I dropped like a hawk
and I made it my own
and I bit its slim root
until it confessed
then swallowed its shout
in the cave of my breast
Now two strangers shiver
under one roof
the one who delivers
the promise and proof
and the one I deploy
for the poem or the kiss.
It gives me no joy
to tell you this.
The Reading
The first time I came to your wandering attention
my name was Simonides. Poets,
whose air of ingratitude forms in the womb,
have reason at least to thank me:
I invented the thing you now call the commission.
Oh – and one other frivolity
refined by Aquinas, tuned up by Bruno
and perfected by Hannibal Lecter.
All in good time. But first to the theme