It Says Here by Sean O'Brien

Author:Sean O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Canto VIII

Eighty years upstream from Hammersmith

On the edge of a nondescript field

That shades off into birch and hawthorn –

Never mind groves: this is barely a place –

There in the hummocks of winter-white grass

(I see what is not there or anywhere)

There lies a mouth forever opening

To discharge a stream of language wedded

To the slur and swallow of the water, in a tongue

As limpid as the speech of nightingales

And silent as the grave’s aphasia. Listen

And you almost hear it almost speak.

The fault is yours as much as any

Saturnine conjunction of the stars.

You leaned your back against that door

And fell straight down the cellar stairs

Into the pool of darkness standing there,

Illimitably patient in its cave.

And when you climbed back dripping to the light

You couldn’t spit it out, just what it was

That you imagined you were playing at.

Since when the daylight swells and wavers.

Dust-motes in a shaft of sunlight hang

Suspended like the chalk that never settles

In the glass you raise and raise until you choke,

That cannot quench your lack but deepens it

With every swallow. Drowned already.

Who are you to raise the dead, require

The truth of them or make lachrimae rerum

Run dry? Or like Procrustes fit them

To a history they could not know was taking place

There on the wireless, there on the bus,

There when a woman took time to powder her face

And arrive at a separate peace.

These people have a right to leave

The faintest outline on the air and die.

Turn a deaf corner and the buses blare

Beneath the flattened thunder of the flyover

And glasses rattle on the shelves of bar-rooms

Sleeping off the night before. The tide of murk

Descends into itself again. The houseboats settle,

Jury-rigged at the pontoons forever,

As figures from Ravilious emerge on deck

To water the chrysanthemums displayed

In fire-buckets on the cabin roofs

As if this were the prospect of the future –

Demi-pastoral in cardigans with jazz,

While round the corner bombsites flower

With fireweed and Britain falls to Churchill

In a peaceable Dunkirk from sheer exhaustion,

Though the numbers do not lie. That year

The Oxford boat will sink; the re-staged race

Sees Cambridge winning: there on bikes and balconies

Along the Mall the crowding phantoms of festivity

Have not stopped cheering and can see no reason

Not to live this afternoon forever.

Where are Juno and Joxer in this picture?

Not quite gone, though time in their world shortens

Like the odds. November comes and those

Who built the Skylon tear it down again,

A Festival – a past – abolished with a bonfire

Raining ash into the river like a war

In miniature, lest we recall

What might have been had England kept the faith

So many had professed in one another.

The play is done, the sets are struck, the hall

Has always staged this empty silence. Overnight

The words of Fry and Duncan cease to be

Anachronistic and instead were never here.

So too the lodger with a single suitcase

Leaves the room as bare as ever and the landing

With its smell of soup and death

Immutably indifferent. Gone under the river

To build a new tunnel, gone over the hill, gone home

To no fixed address. Not known, except

That I know, though I’m desperate to forget,

The awful

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