I woke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream
so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.
George Seferis, ‘Mythistorema’
Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying’
Contents
I
Disinformation
GPS
Pyramid
Bishop in Louisiana
The Bridge in the Mirror
A Token
IUD
Iresine
Parma Violet
The Paperweight
II
The Golden Age
Sulis
Woodland Burial
Hill Top Fort
Emblem
Propylaea
Reconstruction
Attica
Midsummer Loop
Athenaeum
III
The Taiga
Kassandra
Trimmings
Caribou
Octagonal Rug
The Eclipse
Memory Foam
The Historical Voice
A Shrunken Head
Story
Acknowledgements
I
Disinformation
I am making jelly
for my nephew’s fourth birthday party,
any flavour as long as it’s red,
bouncy cubes snipped and stirred into hot water
in a cloudy Pyrex dish,
rediscovering the secret of isinglass,
or is it horse gelatin, while a radio announcer
intimates that certain unpopular
facts about the operations
hitherto repressed, like signs removed
from crossroads and bridges in occupied lands,
can now be revealed, if we just stay tuned.
Party bags designed
to please infants pile on the counter,
too-bright colours, badly made; blue napkins,
party-poppers; my red hands
put cylinders of sausage on cocktail sticks
(these pass for traditions)
and all the time I listen to them talk
fluently about foreknowledge, proactivity, stations.
It is winter,
treacherous to walk.
The children are on their way by now,
adults too, bundled against the promise of snow
and the entertainer, with tricks and jokes
hidden under a blanket in the boot of his Volvo,
limp balloons into which he will blow
his lungs full of ideal animals, practises misdirection.
I chop yellow cheese. Out the kitchen window
the whirligig turns, metal spokes
merciless as diagrams
cutting the air
no clothing softens, tiny gems
icing the nodes where their lines intersect.
Every extant leaf is fixed
with glitter where the glue’s dried clear.
GPS
Like a wet dream this snow-globe was a gift
to myself. She rides shotgun
or stuck to the dashboard, swirling and swirling
across the carpet of potholes to my house.
Mantelpiece matryoshka,
she wears an inscrutable face:
there’s no telling how many dolls deep she goes
beyond her one red peanut-shell,
her pupa’s lacquered shine,
superglued to a painted knoll, brilliantly magnified
by an atmosphere of cerebrospinal fluid
under the smooth glass dome’s museum,
a solid case of ozone.
When I do a U-turn it triggers another storm.
Her compass boggles. Lie down there in that drift,
and something big is about to make sense
if we just keep going in the opposite direction.
Pyramid
All along the skyline, cranes
quiet above rooftops,
conspicuous as knives dropped
vertically into carpet,
folded ironing-board-upright
or set at right-
angles, corner brackets
bolting the sky to the ground.
They dangle claws on chains,
unbaited hooks
balanced by elevated breeze-blocks,
into the unfinished town,
fishing a pond
that hasn’t been stocked.
Their paintwork’s bright as macs
in rain, or the mops and pans
a woman once persuaded me to sell
door to door,
describing in the air
of her living room a pyramid,
most mysterious
of all mysterious extancies, her red
nail climbing floors
to the vertex, where it stood
or floated
as she effortlessly said
In no time at all
you’ll have a lifestyle just like mine.
Through the cranes’
necks the cloud-burst rings,
across the clad-
stone hotel still missing
its penthouse, its punchline,
bucketing down
like the old cartoon
where a skeleton drinks champagne.
Bishop in Louisiana
Twelve days since I took up my post in this village,
a handful of clapboard houses crowded round the harbour
and the concrete yards glittering with scales
where church groups serve up grits and tamales
from long trestle tables and the interiors of white vans.
I myself eat at the hotel: beef, pasta, anything but fish,
watching the black sea break foamlessly
against the chemical barricade. On its surface orange curds
ride like surfboards or children’s life-preservers.
After dinner I take my coffee in the privacy of my suite.
There is little to accomplish here. I walk on the beach
where the nests of common terns driven upwind to breed
are marked with red flags mounted on popsicle sticks,
hundreds of them, bunting in the wind. Each nest is no more
than a dint in the sand, easily made with a fist.
Yesterday I saw a dead sea-turtle turning to soup
inside its own shell. I am not immune to the irony of this.
I write cheques for the fishermen fitting their boats
with booms to skim the water, and speak to sad newscasters
under a flypast of helicopters and a crop-duster salute.
Try to imagine what a hundred million litres means.
You can’t. At night, before bed, in the surprisingly deep bath,
I push my big toe into the streaming faucet
and feel its pressure turn to a hot, relentless gush,
nightmarishly pleasurable, like pissing myself in my sleep.
The Bridge in the Mirror
Power flares on command from a central faucet
into the white tub of the flagship hotel,
confirming our worst suspicions of comfort,
whipping the clear worm of complimentary gel
to a fairies’ castle, unsupportable. Testimony
built round air-conditioned air and a dose of sparkle
&nbs
p; dissolves when a live somebody enters
with their oils and smells that melon-tinted water.
The summit is over. Protesters disperse
against plastic shield-walls tough as double-glazing.
Orderly behind panelled veneer, the mini-bar
committee sits in darkness for the hour
it’s called upon, no expenses spared, cutesy bottles
rattling in their seats when the choppers pass,
like draft dodgers jumpy in the House of Representatives,
like working class heroes in the House of Lords.
Arms and legs exiting through the bathwater’s lens
to reliable applause from extractor fans
bend at strange angles, without broken bones, revealing
a second, smaller person, peacefully submerged
and dormant as a property that no one seems to own.
The midget hairdryer and the bible abridged
in the mirror belong to her. That foot would fit the shoe
in the heritage museum two clicks from here.
A Token
In the poky attic
bedroom a bit-broken
cocktail umbrella
made of blonde toothpicks
and crêpe paper
stands proud of a shut
paperback book
on the tallest shelf –
a shiny edition
of Hamlet or Othello,
incidental not symbolic –
downcasting its tiny
disc of shade
under the damp skylight.
You’d miss it at first
then find it garish,
a finch in the Dolomites
glued to a tree,
trembling in the noonday
blaze to be found
by the bird-catcher,
seized-upon,
pickled and crunched.
Somebody sentimental
kept it
close after dinner
in a Japanese restaurant
decorated just
like a joke about Japan –
waitress in kimono,
walls hung with ideograms,
an indoor pool
where fat gold carp
drift under a wooden bridge,
drifted, never swam . . .
Well, but what
is sentiment? Emotion
out of time
with its occasion?
Pocketed, then
with a flourish produced
right in the middle
of an argument, there it stands:
a wish-coin welded
to the tiles of a fountain,
a green anachronistic
needle in the head.
IUD
This gadget intrudes so nothing else can. It froths
the way a widget froths beer, agitant,
dispenses with the problem of abstinence – don’t –
and plants a dull pea under the mattress.
Childless. Sleepless. Rings on cushions do this too,
diamonds in the toilet. I placed a jar in Tennessee;
in the wilderness I buried my witch’s bottle,
half-full of screws, pins, piss and curse blood,
keeping a promise in a place I’ve forgotten.
A prize in every box! A mine in a mitten. Automated
night-time sprinkler system. The walk-in wardrobe’s
coat-hangers cannon and tinkle, turning to hooks.
Iresine
Shocking pink and plasticky-looking,
like something that would titivate an antechamber
or teach medics nerves,
its leaves contuse around their perimeters.
When the sunset shines through it, it responds in kind,
glowing until the horizon intervenes
as if it doesn’t belong on land.
Picture it undersea, thriving on saline,
whining theremin-ethereal where the underwaves
wash through its rounded dividends, its tender branches
impersonating anemone and coral,
parts forever colourful
and moist and scared: flinching clitoral architecture,
the glans inside its cowl.
Parma Violet
Egyptian sofas, old anaglypta,
the drop-leaf table where the pine tree posed
every mild December,
on its pedestal the dodo, crackle-glazed,
and hung above the hearth and the dormant fire
a painting I supposed
must be a distant cousin, or a great grandmother,
but was neither of those –
only a junk-shop likeness of a stranger,
all tarnished oils and shadows,
that when my friends visited made them shudder
in the cruel, exaggerated manner of girls.
A Gothic effect, the narrow shoulder
turned aside, the plain, black, high-necked blouse;
governess, or dowager,
she looked severe to them. I found her serious,
and since there was no other
for her I invented any history that pleased:
hair powder, mystic wills, Parma
violets dry on the tongue, big lozenges loose
in iconic tins, and the sampler’s
motto: Family is Furniture – charge to which I rose
in spite of myself, like a hair in thunder –
if I wasn’t hers, then whose?
The Paperweight
From Chambord-pink at the base, it clears
to where the upper curve reflects
a skull-cap of charcoal, giving the Earth’s atmosphere
in miniature: the sea, the air, then space.
Erupting from that wavy cocktail is a white flower
like a frozen whale-spout arrested mid-expulsion,
a filigree fuchsia trumpet, petals
peeling in a spray, bearing among them a bubble
shaped like a long inverted tear-drop, an airy utterance
trapped in the glass.
There’s no remembering now where it came from,
gift with no giver, a solid glass fruit
more ovoid than round, more plum than orange,
a novelty not for consumption
weighing as much as a pint of milk
compressed in the palm, all fingers braced to hold it
as it slows the hand
better than the papers for which it’s designed,
one end levelled off so it can stand
steady on my desk and keep my desk on the ground.
At eye level, gazing through its distances, I see
tall violet chrysanthemum gates
opening through interstellar emptiness
on boiling horizons, and a huge hand grasping
at the jewelled arrangement, five smudged knuckles
on which the weight sits like the purple stone
caught in brass claws on my mother’s cocktail ring,
too vivid, never worn, stuck in the dark
of its velvet box, over which I and my brother fought
bitterly, wanting her to will it to us.
I touch the weight to my forehead. Cold
safety glass in the car’s back seat:
coming home from a stay with family friends,
the arm-rest’s velveteen sofa down
and my forearms raked with effervescent pink
scores left by cats’ claws when cats don’t want picking up,
I saw petrol refineries ranged along the firth
at sunset puff their blinds of cloud
across a rosy sky doubled in the running
waters few salmon survive.
Knowing where one noxious cloud began
and the next faded was hard, I would say distressing;
likewise determining where pink turned grey
or vice versa made me carsick. It was the apprehension
of a difference also seamless,
too fine for the fingertips, like a sentence
you seem to have understood but can’t make sense of,
or something being done for you
without your permission, under the flag of helpfulness,
to which you can raise no legitimate objection.
I lift it higher, the weight, in my hand,
opening the iron gates of the zoo
where a pair of brass falcons in fretwork hoops
roost forever, and someone in summer
pointed out hippos half-sunk in muddy pools, sealed
as neoprene-impregnable as olives, all grey and rounded,
until they yawned and their muzzles unfolded
bluntly, padded, gammon-pink,
showing teeth as long and smooth as tent-pegs
hammered into the gums.
II
The Golden Age
In the golden age, we communed with gods.
A god could be hidden, barely contained,
inside the costumes of normal men.
Nothing was certain. How could you refuse
a beggar’s request or a gambler’s wager,
the bold advance of the boss’s only daughter,
without fear of causing offence to a god?
You would say yes. In the golden age,
whatever was offered, you would say yes.
Sulis
1.
When Sulis rose from the open ground
and entered Minerva, she mastered that shape
with such perfection she seemed to vanish
under history’s golden heel,
as if Minerva sank one foot in the fountain
and poured her rival off –
only to hear in her victory-moment
a worshipper offer verbatim the prayer
Sulis drew from his mouth before,
as lovers change loved ones more than words;
only to find her eyes in the mirror
swam with someone else’s tears.
2.
The gap between Senuna’s teeth,
which took a thick coin or the edge of a sword,
the slit between worlds, a problem
and a wish, gushed with water day and night
into the trampled midden she ruled:
Sulis’s mother, her predecessor,
recipient of plaques and the clasps of hoods,
songs and bones, the model of a lion,
who vanished after Sulis did.