there’s no Eden anyway
They create a machine for vanishing
in the little room he tries to keep tidy
on the side of the house that doesn’t face the morning,
and so his speech grows quiet.
“No one” he says
but the rest is muffled
“no one”—
while outside there is so much city noise,
and by the way what are these distant engines thundering overhead,
are spy-planes flying sorties in a war?
Their monotone holds too long
doesn’t just die out
it’s a passage in the phase of what was hidden becoming visible
it’s a signal,
and it’s no use asking when it started,
was it always emerging?
The task is to recognise the violence in the air.
Back inside, silence is coming
and I wish I knew whether the timeline truly was theirs to control
or if instead it carried on
against their will,
but more than anything I hope that in the silence
someone was waiting
ANECDOTE
He has scars on his fingers,
this so-called scholar
who tells me there are many ways into the highlands
depending on who travels and why, and
if you can’t go on foot you can get there in dreams
or so he says,
and his dark eyes are clouded.
Thrill-seekers make the journey
runaway lovers fleeing vengeance
soldiers and burnt-out mystics
escapers and lost souls
misfits of every kind,
but also pilgrims of a different type.
The highlands are unfathomably deep and full of wonders
he says, spreading out his hands.
Far down one special path is a barn with stained work benches in it,
the ground is slippery there
and from wall hooks hang
what look like garlands of brown spiders
but are not.
More people than you might suppose seek such a place.
LEAVE HIM ALONE
Pay no attention to the story that he was left in the dirt of the desert.
No,
it was higher up,
in the humid and sloping woods—
branches crystallise the sunshine there.
It was in this shaded place that he was left,
the predestined child
who lies so strangely quiet in the patchwork light.
No cry of pain
no call for rescue,
does he almost know what lies ahead:
the horror and hardship?
For he will be found,
someone is foraging nearby who will stumble here soon.
It is like a labyrinth where he is going,
a walled-in world quite unlike
this green and rustling shelter
where sometimes there is the crack of a stem
and always the camouflage net of light
broken up in fragments,
while the child in the brief peace and needing no company
waits in the home of the mountain god
OUTSIDE
View of the aimless lonely game
of a schoolboy who is early awake
and goes outside to throw a tennis ball
against a cooking-apple tree
and guess the angle of the bounce off the bark.
It isn’t very noisy play
if it can even be called play
but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours
and if so do they make no complaint
because they understand him being there like that,
on his own,
making something out of nothing,
and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?
Long afterwards all this comes back –
the pity and the waste of time – when,
at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to,
a woman practicing what they call prophecy there
places hands on him
breathes
closes her eyes
and says
I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard, but terribly lost:
it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight
it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon...
no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold
and worst of all there is no fruit.
OMEN
Perhaps an envoy came from the other world or from the depths of the earth
(translation from an old play)
The way sacred things were eclipsed in ancient theatre –
as when a dead man’s daughters are told by a stranger
only after the event
how their father’s last companion solemnly shielded his eyes
so as not to see what it wasn’t right to see
– this speaks to him of what is happening now:
there are new noises in the night
far-off cries and squabbling in the early hours
agitated voices in the half-light,
and for months the city has seemed so dismal and endangered
brittle with unease and denial
and the remorse of a gambler’s mistake.
He sees people swaying as they walk
their faces too taut or too empty,
who appear to him like funeral marchers dressed in eerie bright colours
where they should be wearing black.
He remembers the lockdowns
when he had been so sick with cancer he nearly died
but he was less afraid,
it felt safe then as he walked for miles down deserted streets
crossed the river over London Bridge
then doubled back over Southwark Bridge,
and his athlete’s watch with its orange strap
measured the distance and his speed
and let him control the music player
to listen again to songs he loved when he was young
THE DAREDEVIL
He had just one friend
one clever friend who had steered him away from danger before;
more than one pair of eyes looked at him with malice
sensed his weakness.
His love was his hope and his coat and his fiction,
in this black hour his honour was his weakness.
He was losing his grip
he was heading for disaster.
In his dread and sorrow he dreamed he was a tropical steamship captain
an old man captain with a sailor’s beard
a skilled navigator finding secret routes out of
every archipelago.
In the dream it is one of these hidden channels:
you move through it like a minefield.
The banks are overgrown, strange trees emerge everywhere
a shroud for the ship
a green and choking garment
a death coat
drowning out the light
drowning even this little splinter of sea.
THINK POSITIVE
Attacks from the outside are different from attacks on the inside.
At least the outside ones can be seen
even if there’s no time to evade,
but the inside kind is basically poison
something bad (very bad) in the bloodstream.
You ask what’s wrong
you know something’s wrong
then you’re tired (very tired)
and you need to find a nest.
This faded Boy Wonder has turned forty.
He remembers a love affair and other simpler sufferings,
he has always worn his uniform (a golden fleece)
but now it sticks and stings.
He thinks his strength is being stolen.
He’s just a bag of nerves
he imagines himself nameless and alone
...is this his vertigo or his vision?
He remembers the old ovations,
pictures the ovations to come.
He must get back,
he would rather go on even a dreary commuter train than become
a forgotten exile longing for reprieve:
in the mirror he practices cold business eyes
ERSATZ
He wants to believe his horror theory of an underground world
unleashing monsters,
that way the nightmare is like a nightmare and not...
well he doesn’t know what.
He wants to understand what it really is.
He feels like an alien where once he felt at home,
close to the soil and the past,
in this house of so many years,
among his books and things.
He sees
or thinks he sees
faces changing.
At night he watches soldiers beautiful as archangels
but sickly-seeming, drugged
or like living masks.
Perhaps it’s all a hospital now.
Still he walks, searches.
One day he cries out:
I can’t even find the words
but I sense something moving,
some force or factor
some figure
behind the curtain of whatever this new stage-show actually is,
changing the faces and the costumes,
working so that there is only make-up and costumes
and not even ghosts like me any more.
A rotten smell comes from upstairs
but nothing is dying there,
the odour has no source in the walls
or under the floorboards.
It is fake and also real
because now there is a physics of hallucination
and a law
EDNA’S LECTURE
Edna writing her lecture
keeps thinking of her colleagues at the Institute
and especially the ones she calls the girls,
who look up to her.
When she stands in front of them she will dress smartly
and the outfit’s dowdy mirror will help her theories hit home,
even though they are actually bizarre!
There are roses in the corner of her eye
that need pruning with her shears
but she has to focus,
the lecture won’t write itself.
Her ambitious mind assists her,
she lets it fly telescopically out of the rose garden
into the specialist soul system
she has made her own area.
After all these years her son is still at the back of her mind.
Yes it is true that she cared more than anything about her career
and colleagues to look up to her...
and he was so serious
so severe
his eyes looked straight past her
he didn’t seem to trust her
even though a mother deserves to be trusted.
NITWITS
There are sometimes five sometimes four
sometimes three of these truant boys,
you could call them urchins I suppose,
they have a touch of goblin about them
maybe they even frighten you.
They huddle together in their private games
they see the world as though with a single pair of eyes
and with it they notice things that others, hurrying along, overlook.
Perhaps he was a teacher once
this man who shuffles past every day or every other day
pensive pondering.
To them he seems sad,
they call it sadness because they have no other name for what they think it is.
They are only boys, urchins even, after all.
They are going to stop him one day
with a riddle they thought up in the huddle, which goes like this
what is it that we lose when we catch but keep when we miss?
There are still boys like them now
REWINDER
How sad it is if fantasy and memory
start to take each other’s place,
like screen dreams or rear projections
phantom fictions of long ago
memorials to what never happened, what could have been, life not lived
the past as a counterfeit not even believed by its forger
non-experience mourned
missed opportunities transformed into ghost memories
…until some cybernetic revolution
finally cancels out the loneliness
and grief
on the outskirts, in the old shadows
so that real and virtual are the same.
*
The night and the city are beautiful and empty
the sadness and the years have been left behind
no one speaks now of obligation
the line is
broken
and there are no ties
unworldised, you are far away
you aren’t there
you can go anywhere
and your pain out there in the dark
is a measure of the cost not only of having left
but also of
going back
SOMETHING
Letting loneliness speak doesn’t just come like someone speaking something in an ordinary way
maybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood
Something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious – something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level, and it would be an act of great importance, great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier,
not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness,
but I’m not even saying it’s possible.
It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist, of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated like that.
It’s about finding or stumbling upon mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time. Perhaps in such a way one person can remember and make sense of the unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else.
And it’s too late
but still it’s something.
...this beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset
this darkening outside the windows