Pre-face: What makes poetry the most liberating of the literary arts is, you can do anything you want, without reason, though ideally with some rhythm or even, god forbid, some rhyme. I spent an eerily balmy September weekend walking the streets of London and, inspired by some works at the Tate Modern – a vast industrial cavern undone, redone and made free to the public by the Labor party – I was moved to scribble down my impressions of a city I’d theretofore not much known, in a style fast and loose, in a language broken, undone and half re-done. With the old musicality of British English fresh in my ears, the brutal, filthy history of empire alight in my mind and the spoils of extractive capital shamelessly on display before my eyes, the spirit of that ancient city stirred me to set down this batch of cheeky little poems. Enjoy.
Undone
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
– T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
i. [first complaint: the earth can’t leave us]
O oracle bone
tell me why
you land upon
this map the way
you do, dropping
soft & warm
from my hand to sow
a seed of time a star
a future farm a glimpse
of future harm upon
the land, o tell me
why you fly fleet and
fast as flights of skylarks
reverse across the sky
reverent to escape the
morning’s pull the call
the pall of revery the
ape of time aloft & fine &
feather’d to explain
this urgency of growth
of grief of grip of gripe
ii. [overherd in the pub]
crushed btwn
cobblestones
a beach of stars
grains infin
itesimal in count
in quiet contra
diction to the
sheer amount
of human flesh
pressed beneath
the boot of the
Lord Mayor, his
Excellency, you
see
iii. [ritual bloodletting]
the scarification of copper
of coffee of cacao
embittered in the burning now
in the hills of samarkhand
a tormented teaboy sleeps
beneath a silver moon
the bronze axe weeps
iv. [advertisement]
gentle men
eat baked eel pie
while war planes
plough the naked sky
v. [the modern sickness]
the Hubble confirmed hell
a heaven firmed, well-formed
too narrow for civilized
subject to ordination
too ripe for coronation
such savage swell so long unwell
vi. [the tower]
nature’s
nature
is not
to hide
but bide
her time
& soon
or later
condemn
you for
your latent
crime
vii. [on the banks]
thro London’s undone charter’d streets
doth flo a rip a gap
a scrap a screw
the shard a blacken’d land
thro money’d hackney’d
hackled shackled shack’d & hack’d
hallucinations in the hand the howl
& glo of grip and gripe and gro
thro London’s financ’d barter’d beasts
doth gro a slip a slap
an oozing goo of lard
a burnéd bacon’d band
of animalia, slaughter’d
stretch’d and stranded on the strand
viii. [the SS Belfast at berth]
flag of no color
stripped of shape
a square, a scape
o oracle’d bone drop
from my hand
o tattered map
o undone land
so slap the future face
go easy, chosen race
the sleep, the slip, the sliver
of a ship astride
the stiffened upper lip
the heavy hand
the strangled tide
the lazy river
of the dammed
ix. [view from the bridge]
beneath a silver moon
again
a bronze axe weeps
and then
x. [class, sick]
twas labor gave
freedom to feel
to seum
the capital to wheel
& deal to want
to care, to free um
twas labor gave
the right to fight
to curate this museum
xi. [stiff upper lip again]
how many times
can a man look up
and lift treasures
from the sea
how many times
must a man sit down
and pretend that he just
doesn’t pee
xii. [epitaph for a Mohegan sachem]
in a quiet churchyard a simple stone
of a man who would protect his home
he’d traveled from across the sea
to beg the queen on bended knee
said the queen with royal grace
you’re a credit to your race
but I will not parlay with you
no more than with a filthy jew
the poor brave soul died far from home
he’s buried now beneath this stone
xiii. [under the arch]
deep, o deep in the rosc
a roman nose rose
underground found
an amphetamine a
slaughterground where
brits baited bear
where picts pitted
pair of icts with
matted hair against
a gaulish neverwhere
the city’s tumulus
accumulates a cloud
a shroud of puring
rain, the city’s ancient pain
is mainly on the tarmac
a roman gherkin
cobbled in its manse
under belabor’d sewers
seems to dance like
corncrakes grill’d on skewers
the stench of happenstance
a rose undone by thorns
a died carnation
a thistle shorn of horns
benighted in its bower
the london of this hour
an archeology of loss
an albatross of curses
unblessed by money’d bosses
unshackl’d from the tower
deep, o deep in the rosc
xiv. [adventurer be shamelessly undone]
in the ticky tacky morning
some broken bridge
curv’d or the broken thames
or the headless horse or
the ancient names
or the heedless cross
or the roman ruin
wherefore the road to
the reigning rage wherefore
the act on the bottl’d stage
the river rose the line of fire
the tickl’d age the pickl’d page
in the sickly morn the city’s born
again amid the screaming choir
the angels lost the beast desire
The Watering Hole :: Jeff Conant 