But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark
and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim –
our will and nature’s are the same;
we are its living word, and not
a book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song
inscribed in both our right and wrong –
so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on your spoiled work and useless kit,
you just can’t help but broadcast it:
look at the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
filling with the perfect ring
singing under everything.
The Lie
As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.
I was by then so practised in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.
I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.
Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.
He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more
and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door
Correctives
The shudder in my son’s left hand
he cures with one touch from his right,
two fingertips laid feather-light
to still his pen. He understands
the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone;
though some of us have never known
the one hand’s kindness to the other.
Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze
O Natalie, O TBA, O Tusja: I had long assumed the terrorist’s balaclava that you sport on the cover of Annulé –
which was, for too long, the only image of you I possessed – was there to conceal some ugliness or deformity
or perhaps merely spoke (and here, I hoped against hope) of a young woman struggling
with a crippling shyness. How richly this latter theory has been confirmed by my Googling!
O who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows ranged like two duelling pistols, lightly sweating in the pale light of the TTF screen?
O behold her shaded, infolded concentration, her heartbreakingly beautiful face so clearly betraying the true focus of one not merely content – as, no doubt, were others at the Manöver Elektronische Festival in Wien –
to hit play while making some fraudulent correction to a volume slider
but instead deep in the manipulation of some complex real-time software, such as Ableton Live, MAX/MSP or Supercollider.
O Natalie, how can I pay tribute to your infinitely versatile blend of Nancarrow, Mille Plateaux, Venetian Snares, Xenakis, Boards of Canada and Nobukazu Takemura
to say nothing of those radiant pads – so strongly reminiscent of the mid-century bitonal pastoral of Charles Koechlin in their harmonic bravura –
or your fine vocals, which, while admittedly limited in range and force, are nonetheless so much more affecting
than the affected Arctic whisperings of those interchangeably dreary
Stinas and Hannes and Björks, being in fact far closer in spirit to a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie?
I have also deduced from your staggeringly ingenious employment of some pretty basic wavetables
that unlike many of your East European counterparts, all your VST plug-ins, while not perhaps the best available
probably all have a legitimate upgrade path – indeed I imagine your entire DAW as pure as the driven snow, and not in any way buggy or virusy
which makes me love you more, demonstrating as it does an excess of virtue given your country’s well-known talent for software piracy.
Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing
the range with those bat-scaring ring-modulated sine-bursts and the more distressing psychoacoustic properties of phase inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing
you are nonetheless as beautiful as the mighty Boards themselves in your shameless organicising of the code,
as if you had mined those saws and squares and ramps straight from the Georgian motherlode.
O Natalie – I forgive you everything, even your catastrophic adaptation of those lines from ‘Dylan’s’ already shite
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
in the otherwise magnificent ‘Sleepwalkers’, and when you open up those low-
pass filters in what sounds like a Minimoog emulation they seem to open in my heart also.
O Natalie: know that I do not, repeat, do not imagine you with a reconditioned laptop bought with a small grant from the local arts cooperative in the cramped back bedroom of an ex-communist apartment block in Tbilisi or Kutaisi
but at the time of writing your biographical details are extremely hazy;
however, I feel sure that by the time this poem sees the light of day Wire magazine will have honoured you with a far more extensive profile than you last merited when mention of that wonderful Pharrell remix
was sandwiched between longer pieces on the notorious Kyoto-based noise guitarist Idiot O’Clock, and a woman called Sonic Pleasure who plays the housebricks.
However this little I have gleaned: firstly, that you are married to Thomas Brinkmann, whose records are boring – an opinion I held long before love carried me away –
and secondly, that TBA
is not an acronym, as I had first assumed, but Georgian for ‘lake’ – in which case it probably has a silent ‘t’, like ‘Tbilisi’, and so is pronounced baa
which serendipitously rhymes a bit with my only other word of Georgian, being your term for ‘mother’ which is ‘dada’, or possibly ‘father’ which is ‘mama’.
I doubt we will ever meet, unless this somehow reaches you on the wind;
we will never sit with a glass of tea in your local wood-lined café while I close-question you on how you programmed that unbelievably great snare on ‘Wind’,
of such brickwalled yet elastic snap it sounded exactly like a 12" plastic ruler bent back and released with great violence on the soft gong
of a large white arse, if not one white for long.
But Natalie – Tusja, if I may – I will not pretend I hold much hope for us, although I have, I confess, worked up my little apologia:
I am not like those other middle-agey I-
DM enthusiasts: I have none of their hangdog pathos, my geekery is the dirty secret that it should be
and what I lack in hair, muscle-tone and rugged good looks I make up for with a dry and ready wit … but I know that time and space conspire against me.
At least, my dear, let me wish you the specific best:
may you be blessed
with the wonderful instrument you deserve, fitted – at the time of writing – with a 2 GHz dual-core Intel chip and enough double-pumped DDR2 RAM for the most CPU-intensive processes;
then no longer will all those gorgeous acoustic spaces
be accessible only via an offline procedure involving a freeware convolution reverb and an imperfectly recorded impulse response of the Concertgebouw made illegally with a hastily erected stereo pair and an exploded crisp bag
for I would have all your plug-ins run in real-time, in the blameless zero-latency heaven of the 32-bit floating-point environment, with no buffer-glitch or freeze or dropout or lag;
I would also grant you a golden midi controller, of such responsiveness, smoothness of automation, travel and increment
that you would think it a transparent intercessor, a mere copula, and feel machine and animal suddenly blent.
This I wish you as I leave Inverkeithing and Fife
listening to Trepa N for the two hundred and thirty-fourth time in my life
with every hair on my right arm rising in non-fascistic one-armed salutation
towards Natalie, Tba, my Tusja, and all the mountain lakes of her small nation.
The Story of the Blue Flower
My boy was miles away, yes, I admit it,
but the place was empty, my lines of sight were good
and besides, such things were unknown in this town –
though none of this did much to comfort me
when I raised my head to see the two of them
stop his mouth and lift him from the swing
with a kind of goblin-like economy
and hurry off his little flexing torso
to the orange van laid up behind the gate.
And that was that. I knew it was all over.
I was in the northeast corner of the park,
waist-deep in the ferns where I’d been hunting
the small black ball we’d lost the day before.
I howled, of course I did, but nothing came.
I only knew that failure of the will
as when you wake inside your sleeping body
and find you have no choice but to fall back
to your dead dream again. And so I did.
I fell to somewhere far below the earth
beside the roar of blind and nameless rivers.
Night followed night. I’d been a lifetime there
when through the dark I saw a pale blue star
I half-recalled, like a detail from a book
I’d loved and feared as a child. Then weeds, and sky
and all was bright and terrible again
except that I was fixed on the blue flower,
like one of those they say are always with us
whose silent glamour makes invisible.
Either way, I was suddenly on my knees
filling and filling my mouth with its bad leaves.
I can call back nothing of the missing hours
but vague things, between image and sensation:
a black wind, a white knife in my head,
and an awful centrifugal déjà vu
slowly slowing to the place I knew
as home, and the boy safe, and the boy safe.
They found them wandering the park at dusk
crying like two wee birds, their crimson faces
streaming with the jellies of their eyes
and no story they could tell of anything.
Parallax
the unbearable lightness of being no one
Slavoj Žižek
The moon lay silent on the sea
as on a polished shelf
rolling out and rolling out
its white path to the self
But while I stood illumined
like a man in his own book
I knew I was encircled by
the blindspot of its look
Because the long pole of my gaze
was all that made it turn
I was the only thing on earth
the moon could not discern
At such unearthly distance
we are better overheard.
The moon was in my mouth. It said
A million eyes. One word
for Michael Longley
The Day
for Maureen and Gus
Life is no miracle. Its sparks flare up
invisibly across the night. The heart
kicks off again where any rock can cup
some heat and wet and hold it to its star.
We are not chosen, just too far apart
to know ourselves the commonplace we are,
as precious only as the gold in the sea:
nowhere and everywhere. So be assured
that even in our own small galaxy
there is another town whose today-light
won’t reach a night of ours till Kirriemuir
is nothing but a vein of hematite
where right now, two – say hairless, tall and dark,
but still as like ourselves as makes no odds –
push their wheeled contraptions through the park
under the red-leafed trees and the white birds.
Last week, while sceptic of their laws and gods
they made them witness to their given word.
They talk, as we do now, of the Divide;
but figure that who else should think of this
might also find some warmth there, and decide
to set apart one minute of the day
to dream across the parsecs, the abyss,
a kind of cosmic solidarity.
‘But it’s still so sad,’ he says. ‘Think: all of us
as cut off as the living from the dead.
It’s the size that’s all wrong here. The emptiness.’
She says, ‘Well it’s a miracle I found you
in all this space and dust.’ He turns his head
and smiles the smile she recognized him through.
‘I wasn’t saying differently. It’s just –
the biggest flashlight we could put together
is a match struck in the wind out here. We’re lost.’
than the space between us. The sun up there’s no farther.
We’re each of us a separate universe.
We talk, make love, we sleep in the same bed –
but no matter what we do, you can’t be me.
We only dream this place up in one head.’
‘Thanks for that … You’re saying that because
the bed’s a light-year wide, or might as well be,
I’m even lonelier than I thought I was?’
‘No … just that it’s why we have this crap
of souls and gods and ghosts and afterlives.
Not to … bridge eternity. Just the gap’ –
she measures it – ‘from here to here.’ ‘Tough call.
Death or voodoo. Some alternatives.’
‘There’s one more. That you trust me with it all.’
The wind is rising slowly through the trees;
the dark comes, and the first moon shows; they turn
their lighter talk to what daft ceremonies
the people of that star – he points to ours –
might make, what songs and speeches they might learn,
how they might dress for it, their hats and flowers,
and what signs they exchange (as stars might do,
their signals meeting in the empty bands)
to say even in this nothingness I found you;
I was lucky in the timing of my birth.
They stare down at their own five-fingered hands
and the rings that look like nothing on that earth.
Phantom
i.m. M.D.
I
The night’s surveillance. Its heavy breathing
even in the day it hides behind.
Enough is enough for anyone, and so
you crossed your brilliant room, threw up the shade
to catch the night pressed hard against the glass,
threw up the sas
h and looked it in the eye.
Yet it did not stare you out of your own mind
or roll into the room like a black fog,
but sat there at the sill’s edge, patiently,
like a priest into whose hearing you confessed
every earthly thing that tortured you.
While you spoke, it reached into the room
switching off the mirrors in their frames
and undeveloping your photographs;
it gently drew a knife across the threads
that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept;
it slipped into a thousand murmuring books
and laid a black leaf next to every white;
it turned your desk-lamp off, then lower still.
Soon there was nothing in that soundless dark
but, afloat on nothing, one white cup
which somehow had escaped your inventory.
The night bent down, and as a final kindness
placed it in your hands so you’d remember
to halt and stoop and drink when the time came
in that river whose name was now beyond you
as was, you found indifferently, your own.
II
Zurbarán’s St Francis in Meditation
is west-lit, hooded, kneeling, tight in his frame;
his hands are joined, both in supplication
and to clasp the old skull to his breast.
This he is at pains to hold along
the knit-line of the parietal bone
the better, I would say, to feel the teeth