Was a woman’s face in a glass. She ordered it like weather.
Here’s where the stepping leg of a pale princess
Would never gleam in the flank of a silver Merc,
No carpet lap at the tips of an angel’s dress
As that began its catwalk,
No head be turned or heart won, none have all the luck.
It had to open faster than today.
She scratched a deadline on the skin of earth.
They couldn’t meet it but they couldn’t say.
They swallowed back their breath.
The sun abruptly set in each unchewing mouth.
Here’s where the plans were laid, and here ignored,
Here they were changed, here lied about, here lost,
Here’s where they pulled the trick they could afford,
Here’s where they paid the cost,
Where a workman sang all day, baked in a wall to the waist,
When every shortcut snapped on the one night,
Caving and bulging floors like a bigger child
Had waded from the future for a fight,
And each thing was spilled,
Each dimly praying gap of air was found and filled.
The light went out on no one knows how few:
Interred, incinerated, a foot stuck out
Live from a ceiling waving in a shoe
As the auditorium set,
And the sun was down, the building up, the deadline met,
And no one goes there now except to nod.
At what you get when men take on the sun.
At what men do when told to by a god
Who’s gone, and wasn’t one.
How riches look in daylight when there are none.
The Sightseers
We sing, we lucky pirates, as we sail,
Overladen with our creaking cargo
Of eights and nines, and imagine chains of island
Zeroes up ahead. Some of us are ill, though,
And yelp and gibber of a rushing edge,
A foam of stars, the boatswain upside down
Who grins You told me so.
We draw to the rail,
Sleepless, and we wait and, sure enough,
Behind us like our chat against the breezes,
They stir and mutter, whom we call the Sightseers,
Who stay the length of a hundred of my heartbeats.
It passes quickly with them right behind us.
I count the beats, it’s how I’m brave enough
Not to cry out or vault the rail for terror –
I number them as years of my dim hundred
Soon to be gone: so I have them born to sunlight,
Burgeoning in that apple England, picked
Or fallen, then I think of them as upright,
Ideas and expectations trailing off
Across the years, and then I see them cold,
Unshockable and tired. And by the time I
Stumble in on the sixty-second heartbeat
Their eyes are red with secrets, and their heads
Are white with what has gone through an honest mind.
And then they don’t believe what they are seeing.
And then they are seeing nothing, and I believe
They walk on deck because they wake and sniff
Some empty space at every century’s end,
Like breath gone out, or the air of the first flowers
That ever filled their eyes, as if it’s starting –
They jolt from bed and hurry from their cabins
To see strange figures clutching at a rail.
We sing, we lucky pirates, as we sail.
From Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun
Fragments of an Investigative Documentary
I: Cine
Cine, sliver of history. A few minutes
finish you off in a blare of white, and the scutter
and scutter and sigh, then the lamp on and the smiling
that something, at least, is over.
Cine, chopper of Time, mercurial
slitter, century shadowing through our light:
London’s sepia scuttle, a toadstool whitens
Nevada. Colour – Zapruder.
Cine. A reel was found in a vault in a place
I happened on in the course of a search. This reel
was not – but is now – the object of that search
so it’s over. Which is how
poetry works, by the way. Like cine film
it yields to the bright. Like cine film it is either
print or nothing, like cine film that nothing
is sky. Like cine film
it’s made of people who run towards you and cry.
III: The Horses’ Mouths: Pyrois
Film me in silhouette. I insist. I’m not
Them prancing nags. Is that thing rolling? No?
Good. It better not be. What you got,
Rothmans? Gimme. What do you want to know?
The boy. The boy in the chariot? Oh no.
Some things I crack about, some things I don’t.
You learn the worst is never long ago.
We horses live our lives in the word won’t
Gimme the Bushmills. Woh that hit the spot.
The boy in the chariot. Hell. It makes no odds.
It happened. Why? This isn’t lit. Why not?
What was the story . . . somebody made him think
His father wasn’t his father? Right, so he snaps
And goes and gets his way. Dies in the drink.
Talking of which . . . No, you pedalling chaps
Think you’re as free as air though you’re made of earth.
You got to obey your whims like a whipped horse
Flies. That boy. He thought about his birth.
He wanted it again. He ran his course.
V: The Horses’ Mouths: Eous
How did you find me here?
This is my refuge from all human voices,
Their differences that shrivel into hisses
All indistinct, their faces
Merged to the infinite grains of a far shore
Licked by the dog sea.
Here on my noiseless meadow I ride alone,
Ride, ride myself with the wind on my spine
While the fuelled and roaring Sun
Mislays my name in the mess of his tyranny.
Talk to the others, friend.
Find the unkempt Pyrois; Aethon, vain
And cosseted by Man; then look for Phlegon
Anywhere the thin
Are all there is, and the wind is a hurled sand.
That’s his gesture. Mine?
Mine’s this solitude. I’ve a world to tell
But not this world. We switched your sky into Hell
And all for a human will,
Its pride, its point, its prick. It will come again.
How did I know it was him?
When we were torn through clouds and the East wind
I felt no weight on my back, heard no command,
And felt no pull, no hand,
No pilot. No escape now. Kingdom come.
Three images, that’s all.
One was his face, the boy, his face when he lost
The reins and then his footing – that was the last
We saw of him – he must
Presumably have gone in a fireball –
Another was how the Moon,
Seeing us hurtle by, reminded us all
Of the face of a mother beside a carousel,
Worrying herself ill
As her children wave, are gone, are back too soon
And another was afterwards.
I lay for a good forever somewhere in the woods.
The petrified seconds prayed, the hours wore hoods.
‘You gods,’ I said, ‘You gods.’
And those, I trusted,
those were my final words
To men. Instead, these are . . .
Forget Eous, leave me alone in my meadow,
Riding myself, racing my sisterly shadow
Into the shade, where sorrow
Wraps her and deserts me, drenched, here.
VI: The Horses’ Mouths: Aethon
One minute, love.
You’re looking at
The winner of
The 2:15,
3.38,
And 5 o’clock.
I haven’t time.
I race, I work.
Ask what you want
But ask it fast.
The time you spend
Is time I lose,
Is time we’ve lost.
Aethon never
Loses, friend,
You got that? Ever.
The chariot?
The idiot boy?
I don’t admit
And never shall
I lost that day.
He may have done.
He burned. So what?
His father’s son.
The countries burned,
The oceans steamed,
The stinking wind
It filled my eyes.
I never dreamed
Years afterwards
I’d humble all
These thoroughbreds
Day in day out,
Year after year,
Beyond all doubt
Beyond compare,
The sight they fear,
Aethon, pride
Of any course
You humans ride.
If all the gold
That lights this room
Was melted, rolled
And stretched for me,
I should in time
Reach Heaven’s gate
And there I’d not
Be made to wait
But rode by servants
Back to where
I rode the Heavens
Once, the Sun
Would part the air
For Aethon,
Fanfared, forgiven,
Aethon.
VIII: A Scientist Explains
Would he have suffered? That depends what you mean.
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
The fire went north.
The northern Plough,
Too hot to bear it,
Plunged below
The sea; the Snake,
Sluggish and cold,
Was scorched to fury;
Boötes, old
And slow, he too
Was stricken down,
He too was dragged or stricken down
When Phaeton flew.
Would he have suffered? Suffering’s hard to define.
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
He was afraid
Of heights and now
The world he knew
Was spread below
And churning. West
He’d never make,
The wounded East
Bled in his wake.
He didn’t know
The horses’ names,
He’d never thought to ask their names
And didn’t now.
Would he have suffered? Would he have suffered pain?
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
He bore the worst
Of Heaven, curved
With poison, Scorpio!
Wild, he swerved
And lost the reins
And lost the flight.
The chariot set
This world alight:
The woods and streams,
The crops and towns,
The nations perished in their towns
As in their dreams.
Would he have suffered? That depends what you mean.
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
Athos, Taurus,
Helicon,
Parnassus, Cynthus,
Babylon,
Ossa, Pindus,
Caucasus,
Olympus, Libya,
Ismarus,
Rhine and Rhone
And Nile and Tiber,
Nile and even promised Tiber?
Steam on stone.
Would he have suffered? Suffering’s hard to define.
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
The seas had shrunk
And all was sand,
They felt the scorch
In Netherland:
Nereus sweltered,
Neptune swore,
The Earth appealed
High Jupiter:
‘I may deserve
This doom, but spare
Your Heaven itself from fire, spare
What’s left to save!’
Would he have suffered? Would he have suffered pain?
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
Obviously
One shot alone,
One thunderball
From Heaven’s throne,
Divided boy
From flaming car,
Made fire of him
And falling star,
A star of him
That plunged and died
In the River Eridanus, died
Far far from home.
Would he have suffered? That depends what you mean.
Would he have suffered? Lady, let me explain.
Lady?
IX: Clymene’s Coda
Death was instantaneous.
Death is always instantaneous.
Loss was instantaneous.
Loss is always.
X: The Horses’ Mouths: Phlegon
Get on my back. You all do in the end.
You’ve come some way to go the way you came,
But shall do, all the same,
My doubly hopping friend,
At least you ride in peace, at least you ask my name.
Where are the other three? There’s no surprise.
Eous rippling aimlessly alone,
Pyrois wrecked, Aethon?
Neighing at blue skies,
As if his loss, our loss, was some grand race he’d won.
I work this zone. Don’t have to, but I do.
I do have to, and so would you. Look now,
The planters on the brow,
They falter, wondering who
Wants what of them and why. They’ll try to question you.
Be plain with them. It waters you with hope
That in this desert where the fire can’t die
Nor air reach to the sky,
Somehow they grow a crop
That doesn’t care it’s dead, that doesn’t know. Now stop,
Get off my back. Feel hotness on each sole
And howl. For this is not the word made flesh,
This is the word made ash,
This is the mouth made hole,
Here where the star fell, here where he got his wish.
The Wish
Alone in spoiling it, I said I wish
That I can wish for everything. They said
That’s cheating. You’ve one wish. I said that is
One wish. We sat against the paper shed.
Now, they had wished for peace on earth, for painted
Chocolate cities, flights to anywhere,
And one strange one to go with her – he pointed
To where she did her handstands on her hair,
Her pout flipped to a smile, as if the sky
Would grant what it amused itself to grant.
They pondered, troubled, hot with how and why,
Considering my case. When the bell went
Against my wish and that most amazing field
Began to be abandoned, as that girl
Was falling to her feet, and chocolate filled
The hands and crumbled happily, I was still
Wondering, as I was all afternoon,
If they would gr
ant my wish. When at last they would,
I found myself at my own gate, alone,
Unwishing, backwards, everything I could.
Someone at the Door
Men call it a war.
But all it ever is for us is
Someone at the door.
What men call this affair
Across the land alights on us as
Howling on a stair.
What men call duty-bound
Is teenage girls and tiny children
Blinking by a mound.
What men call civil strife
Is strangers in the weeds and a wan
Bride with a fruit-knife.
For men call it a war
But all it ever is for us is
Someone at the door.
The cry a man can hear
Is cut with skill upon a stone
Some forty yards from here.
The flag a man can wave
Will go nine times around whatever’s
Spooned into a grave.
And when a cannon booms
It starts the clocks that tick forever
In our living rooms.
For men call it a war.
But all it ever is for us is