of the upper jaw gnaw into his sternum.
His face is tilted upwards, heavenwards,
while the skull, in turn, beholds his upturned face.
I would say that Francis’ eyes are closed
but this is guesswork, since they are occluded
wholly by the shadow of his cowl,
for which we read the larger dark he claims
beyond the local evening of his cell.
But I would say the fetish-point, the punctum,
is not the skull, the white cup of his hands
or the frayed hole in the elbow of his robe,
but the tiny batwing of his open mouth
and its vowel, the ah of revelation, grief
or agony, but in this case I would say
there is something in the care of its depiction
to prove that we arrest the saint mid-speech.
I would say something had passed between
the man and his interrogated night.
I would say his words are not his words.
I would say the skull is working him.
III
(Or to put it otherwise: consider this
pinwheel of white linen, at its heart
a hollow, in the hollow a small hole.
We cannot say or see whether the hole
passes through the cloth, or if the cloth
darkens itself – by which I mean gives rise
to it, the black star at its heart,
and hosts it as a mere emergent trait
of its own intricate infolded structure.
Either way, towards the framing edge
something else is calling into question
the linen’s own materiality
and the folds depicted are impossible.)
after Alison Watt: ‘Breath’
IV
Zurbarán knew he could guarantee
at least one fainting fit at the unveiling
if he arranged the torch- or window-light
to echo what he’d painted in the frame.
This way, to those who first beheld the saint,
the light that fell on him seemed literal.
In the same way I might have you read these words
on a black moon, in a forest after midnight,
a thousand miles from anywhere your plea
for hearth or water might be understood
and have you strike one match, and then another –
not to light these rooms, or to augment
what little light they shed upon themselves
but to see the kind of dark I laid between them.
V
We come from nothing and return to it.
It lends us out to time, and when we lie
in silent contemplation of the void
they say we feel it contemplating us.
This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.
We are ourselves the void in contemplation.
We are its only nerve and hand and eye.
There is something vast and distant and enthroned
with which you are one and continuous,
staring through your mind, staring and staring
like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant
with neither love nor hate nor apathy
as we have no human name for its regard.
Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes
as it plays across the objects of the earth
or such icons of them as your mind has forged.
The book in sunlight or the tree in rain
bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs.
But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,
the tree will rise untethered to its station
between earth and heaven, the open book
turn runic and unreadable again,
and if a word then rises to our lips
we speak it on behalf of everything.
VI
For one whole year, when I lay down, the eye
looked through my mind uninterruptedly
and I knew a peace like nothing breathing should.
I was the no one that I was in the dark womb.
One night when I was lying in meditation
the I-Am-That-I-Am-Not spoke to me
in silence from its black and ashless blaze
in the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet.
It had lost his lightness and his gentleness
and took on that plain cadence he would use
when he read out from the Iliad or the Táin.
Your eye is no eye but an exit wound.
Mind has fired through you into the world
the way a hired thug might unload his gun
through the silk-lined pocket of his overcoat.
And even yet the dying world maintains
its air of near-hysteric unconcern
like a stateroom on a doomed ship, every
table, chair and trinket nailed in place
against the rising storm of its unbeing.
If only you had known the storm was you.
Once this place was wholly free of you.
Before life there was futureless event
and as the gases cooled and thinned and gathered
time had nothing to regret its passing
and everywhere lay lightly upon space
as daylight on the world’s manifest.
Then matter somehow wrenched itself around
to see – or rather just in time to miss –
the infinite laws collapse, and there behold
the perfect niche that had been carved for it.
It made an eye to look at its fine home,
but there, within its home, it saw its death;
and so it made a self to look at death,
but then within the self it saw its death;
and so it made a soul to look at self,
but then within the soul it saw its death;
and so it made a god to look at soul,
and god could not see death within the soul
for god was death. In making death its god
the eye had lost its home in finding it.
We find this everywhere the eye appears.
Were there design, this would have been the flaw.
VII
The voice paused; and when it resumed
it had softened, and I heard the smile in it.
Donno, I can’t keep this bullshit up.
I left this message planted in your head
like a letter in a book you wouldn’t find
till I was long gone. Look – do this for me:
just plot a course between the Orphic oak
and fuck ’em all if they can’t take a joke
and stick to it. Avoid the fancy lies
by which you would betray me worse than looking
the jerk that you’re obliged to now and then.
A shame unfelt is no shame, so a man’s
can’t outlive him. Not that I ever worried.
Take that ancient evening, long before
my present existential disadvantage,
in Earl’s Court Square with Maddy, you and Eva,
when I found those giant barcodes on the floor
and did my drunken hopscotch up and down them
while the artist watched in ashen disbelief …
Oh, I was always first to jump; but just because
I never got it with the gravity.
I loved the living but I hated life.
I got sick of trying to make them all forgive me
when no one found a thing to be forgiven,
sick of my knee-jerk apologies
to every lampstand that I blundered into.
Just remember these three things for me:
always take a spoon – it might rain soup;
it’s as strange to be here once as to return;
and there’s nothing at all between the snow and the roses.
A
nd don’t let them misread those poems of mine
as the jeux d’esprit I had to dress them as
to get them past myself. And don’t let pass
talk of my saintliness, or those attempts
to praise my average musicianship
beyond its own ambitions: music for dancers.
All I wanted was to keep the drum
so tight it was lost under their feet,
the downbeat I’d invisibly increased,
my silent augmentation of the One –
the cup I’d filled brimful … then even above the brim!
Nor you or I could read that line aloud
and still keep it together. But that’s my point:
what kind of twisted ape ends up believing
the rushlight of his little human art
truer than the great sun on his back?
I knew the game was up for me the day
I stood before my father’s corpse and thought
If I can’t get a poem out of this …
Did you think any differently with mine?
He went on with his speech, but soon the eye
had turned on him once more, and I’d no wish
to hear him take that tone with me again.
I closed my mouth and put out its dark light.
I put down Michael’s skull and held my own.
Rain
I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;
one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,
and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,
so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,
I think to when we opened cold
on a starlit gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign
and I’d read into its blazing line:
forget the ink, the milk, the blood –
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.
About the Author
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He is the author of Nil Nil (1993), winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; God’s Gift to Women (1997), winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; and Landing Light (2003), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Rain, his most recent collection, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2009, the same year that he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He has also published versions of Antonio Machado (The Eyes, 1999) and Rainer Maria Rilke (Orpheus, 2006), as well as two collections of aphorisms.
By the Same Author
poetry
NIL NIL
GOD’S GIFT TO WOMEN
THE EYES
LANDING LIGHT
ORPHEUS
RAIN
prose
READING SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS
aphorism
THE BOOK OF SHADOWS
THE BLIND EYE
editor
101 SONNETS
ROBERT BURNS: SELECTED POEMS
DON’T ASK ME WHAT I MEAN
(with Clare Brown)
NEW BRITISH POETRY
(with Charles Simic)
Copyright
First published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Don Paterson, 2012
The right of Don Paterson to be identified as 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, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, 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
ISBN 978–0–571–28179–4