the green of her husband’s and her daughter’s
disfigured corpse-forms and thought-storms
being lifted up and down as dazed as plankton
it’s fine she thought as long as I keep smiling
not mentioning the blood on my nails then nothing
will pass my weakness out between these pointed teeth-posts
not even the murdered one with his last breath
not even necessity will sniff me out
or will she
Purpled mind
why go on circling
There is a channel where an old sea-god swims
on translucent wings
five miles down in deep unflowered
midnight where it snows and heaps up salt
this goblin-god with ghost-grace frictionlessly
moves
or hangs like a pickled heart in the sea-jar
nothing I say sinks down that far
worn-out god can you hear this
look up please from the interstellar hangings
of your under-the-horizon house
there is blood on the tiles
the husband has died struck by his own wife
as he stood naked in the bath
can you hear this
No
not
me
A tired man clinging to a stony out-jut
after a three-hour storm after a ten-year war
clinging to that final handhold thinking
god can you hear this
no
not
me
there he sways under the switched-off swinging bulb of the moon
his ship has gone and he is the last man
lashed to the last upright in the roaringnothing thinking
now I really am somebody women are going to love
this quirk I have of outlasting war cloud sickness everything
even water ha! little does he know
what a willpower even now at a hundred miles an hour
is rushing towards his boast with the same wide-open mouth
ready to out-character him and fill his gaping laughter
with salt water now that his handhold
breaks away in his hands and his head drops into the sea
Why is my mind this untranslatable colour of scratchiness and indecision
as of twilight turning into a night accused of corpses
my answer is a swift one a goddess a hundred-mile-an-hour readiness
flying alongside me and I ask you
who would willingly travel over so much water
like a permanent rain-cloud crizzling the sea
so that the waves grow nervous covering up their crimes
but truth will always out and so will
falsehood
That goddess pierced by clear-sightedness
falling out of the air as winged and sudden as luck
like flicking a light-switch
flash
in the dark of these words she stood here
just a minute ago dead but alive in man’s clothes saying
stranger weeping without stopping
cutting off the conversations of those who have a right to be frivolous
it is human to have a name but you seem unsolid somehow
almost too porous to be human I would say
some terrible repetition has eaten into you
as water eats into metal this is what happens
whenever love is mentioned your whole heart liquefies
and the character of water stares out through your eyes
it’s as if you were a woman maybe her mind wanders
but it’s clear her flesh is damaged in some way
as she drops to her knees and cries and so begins
the simple mineral monologue of
water
Who is it saying these things is it only the tide
passing like a rumour over the sea-floor or
who is it keeps silent
when somebody’s ring on nobody’s hand
sinks like an eye into darkness
and the wind drops
and the water roars itself speechless
who is it speaking she said
my friend
who is it watching me behind your eyelids
Please he said will you please let me sleep
fidgeting under his quilt with one foot touching the floor
you know full well he said this is only the water
talking to us in the voice of amnesia
sometimes with scraping anxious steps
turning over the stones and sometimes
howling the same question over and over
and on his rock that poet shuffles about light-sleeping
every so often answering back
who is it
but for all this for maybe a thousand years
it’s been the same answer to the same question
no-one
and on the roof the caretaker scarcely blinks
staring at the sea-sky wondering which way up
he is nailed to the night in case your husband
dressed in his fate but as yet
unmurdered
suddenly appears
But for all this for maybe a thousand years
it’s been the same answer to the same question
nothing
Into which a star a whole unsynchronised solar system
throwing out light like a splash of yellow paint across the night
or else a burning angel falling out of heaven
with briefcase open and his charred documents
drifting about his head descending
from floor to floor he looks liquefied
like a towering sea-plume and finally his feet
which seem to have no difficulty with water
touch down on the horizon without friction
as a seagull sleighs down waves
and wets its stiff wings in the horrible sea-hollows
looking for fish so he swerves and stalls
and finds a woman sitting very still and cold
and wizened with permanent headache on her island
one hand like the shadow of an aeroplane
barely moving over her own blue surface
waves him away she says I know
I know
and the little breezes of her speeches smell like parsley
You are a messenger and you’ve come to remove my lover
who is tired of this hotel life you’ll find him
sitting on the dunes in tears as always
staring at the sea’s round eye of course
Fate has its needle in him nothing can stop him draining away
there seem to be two worlds one is water’s
which always finds its level one is love’s which doesn’t
but is wide a wide field of horrible upheavals
there are gleams mists gusts is he hoping to float himself
on that never-ending to and fro
where the mind no longer belongs to the mind
and a man’s shout boomerangs in the wind
the light has no ceiling there are human hands
stuck in the sand like kelp-stalks
and huge cathedrals of waves
a single
moth
struggles under wet sails
but everything warm or weighted always
falls
So she shrieks and flies up laughing and loud-speakering
and turns and dives unable to be anything for long
and the black wave covers her
NOBODY was commissioned by Bernard Jacobson to accompany the watercolours of William Tillyer and was first published by 21 Publishing in 2018 as an art book, edited by Paul Keegan and typeset by Kevin Mount. The poem is designed to be mobile and so it has been rewritten for Jonathan Cape, edited by Robin Robertson and reset by Kevin Mount. I am very grateful to all those me
ntioned and also to Anna Webber and Seren Adams.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
poetry
The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile
Dart
Woods etc.
A Sleepwalk on the Severn
Weeds and Wild Flowers
Memorial
Falling Awake
editor
The Thunder Matters: 101 Poems for the Planet
Thomas Wyatt: Selected Poems
Copyright © 2019 by Alice Oswald
First American Edition 2020
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830
Jacket design by Jared Oriel
Jacket photograph: Joshua Daniel / Shutterstock
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Oswald, Alice, 1966– author. | Homer. Odyssey.
Title: Nobody : a hymn to the sea / Alice Oswald.
Description: First American edition. | New York, N.Y. :
W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053431 |
ISBN 9781324005605 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781324005612 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Homer—Adaptations. |
Odysseus, King of Ithaca (Mythological character)—Poetry. |
Epic poetry, Greek—Adaptations. | LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PR6065.S98 N63 2020 | DDC 821/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053431
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