NICK LAIRD
Feel Free
In memory of CML
(1950–2017)
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the editors of Poetry, New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Poetry Review, Well Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, Bristol Festival of Ideas, Poem-a-Day, Looking at the Stars anthology, Reading the Future: New Writing from Ireland.
Many thanks to Alan Gillis, Vona Groarke, Zadie Smith, Don Paterson and Matthew Hollis.
Love and thanks to Z., and our children, Katherine and Harvey.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
i
Glitch
To the Woman at the United Airlines Check-in Desk at Newark
Fathers
The Good Son
Feel Free
Grenfell
Parenthesis
Silk Cut
Manners
Autocomplete
The Vehicle and the Tenor
ii
Parable of the Arrow
The Good Son
Coppa Italia
User
On Not Having Children
Watermelon Seed
La Méditerranée
Chronos
XY
The Cartoons
Team Me
Incantation
iii
Cinna the Poet
The Folding
New York ElastiCity
Getting Out the White Vote
The Good Son
Temple of Last Resort
Crunch
Horizontal Fall
Extra Life
To His Soul
Notes
About the Author
By the same author
Copyright
FEEL FREE
i
Glitch
More than ample, a deadfall of one metre eighty
to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet,
and crash the OS, tripping an automated shutdown
in this specific case and halting all external workings
of the heated, moist robot I currently inhabit.
I am out cold for some time, and when my eyes roll in
you’re there to help me over to our bed, as I explain
at length how taken I am with the place I’d been,
had been compelled to leave, airlifted out mid-gesture,
mid-sentence, risen of a sudden like a bubble
to the surface, a victim snatched and bundled out,
helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day, and all
particulars of my other life fled except the sense
that lasts for hours of being wanted somewhere else.
To the Woman at the United Airlines
Check-in Desk at Newark
Shonique, I am in time, and I know your fight
is hard: the fight is hard for everyone alive
and all those bodies in Departures
are naked under clothes and scarred –
that granted, even deeper scratches welt
and heal in days though still they smart
on contact, and I never really cared
for the terms I struck with earth,
more total war than limited skirmish.
I seethe, Shonique; I drink; I smoke weed
and seek relief from mental anguish;
the peopled life, car horns sounding down
on Houston. All three kinds of knowledge
fox me: outer, inner, pure mathematics –
but I understand your relatives are dying also
and I know the days are slow, the years fast,
that these are facts, however surprising.
Like you, I think the worst is yet to come;
plus, there’s time lifting everything in sight,
Shonique, pocketing orchids and mothers,
the little white pebbledashed bungalows –
you in your small corner and me in mine.
Let me be clear and accommodative, more like
water than ice; and raise my hands to show
I mean no harm, and that I’m stupid,
and malicious, and if I’m trying to be fearless
I know it gives me no right to act like this.
What’s understood is I’ll be filed beneath
The Pricks, and fair enough. Very seldom
do I note the world wears a single face
with endless variations, and even then,
Shonique, it tends to be a face like yours,
one particularly fine. Speaking of which,
your fluorescent orange lipsticked lip
curls up at me with such distaste I have to sit
down now on my case at the rush of shame I feel:
and also love; and of course lust, hate, remorse.
Fathers
We set a saucerful of water on the kitchen sill
and check it before breakfast for three days straight
until it’s all evaporated. I think it’s more like that.
But don’t you understand that Jesus lives in the sky?
I think the moon is blown out, and the trees plucked
off the birthday cake and put back with the batteries,
and all the country of you divided up into the tiniest
of slices. But what I’ve got is microwave popcorn
and this ability to whistle every number one single
from 1987 onwards. There’s no use getting all het
up: I give you a bed for your tiredness: I give you
some bread I have toasted and buttered: I give you
a stretch of the earth, baked hard, where we follow
the shiny beetle hauling the shield of himself into noon.
I can tuck a cloud under your chin. If it’s an advert
the product is love. If it’s an element, water. If it’s
not consistent, that’s part of its charm. If it’s a bomb,
it’s a beautiful dud, and I love you, she says, this much.
The Good Son
in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep
i
Remember me! demands the father’s ghost,
and the deconstructionists gloss
that last request as ‘Bring back my phallus’ –
re-member me, as it were – and even after
Hamlet Sr stage-whispers his Adieu!
he hesitates, and asks his son again –
Remember me – since he can’t help himself –
and Hamlet swears it on heaven and earth,
and is, by convention, meant there and then
to whip out his sword and avenge – but instead
he sits at the desk and unfastens his satchel
and takes out a pad and a quill to begin
getting it down in all its squalid detail,
which the Elizabethans deem a scandal.
ii
But we did. We paid upfront and understood
that all accounts would soon be met
and every tab discharged in full.
Every loss incurred a debt
and hard to get the registers to balance.
This side of Cookstown Gospel Hall attests
in foot-long gothic font –
For the Wages of Sin is Death …
and a few yards round the corner,
nailed up in Monrush to a telegraph pole,
unfaded in its crude red,
white and blue lettering on plywood –
Murder in Texas gets the electric chair.
In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.
iii
The rigour functioni
ng in Sophocles as justice
we cannot retrofit with peace:
our animal language inadequate
to state in this state the state of the state.
Hard to think some companies
were simply unafraid
to leave aside
the long soliloquies:
natural, simple, affecting
Garrick had the whole fifth act rewritten
so when Claudius orders Hamlet
to set sail for England, his reaction
is to draw his blade, and let him have it.
I mean that Hamlet stabs him.
Feel Free
i
To deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface
with Earth. I like to do this in a number of ways.
I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,
the weight of my person refigured, and I like to hang
above the ground, thus; snorkelling, hammocks, alcohol.
I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy
and to that end I set aside a day a week, Shabbat,
to not act. Having ceded independence to the sunset
I will not be shaving, illuminating rooms or raising
the temperature of food. If occasionally I like to feel
the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural
tension, I walk off a Sunday through the high fields
of blanket bog, saxifrage, a few thin belted Galloways,
rounding Lough Mallon to stand by the form of beauty
upheld in a scrubby acre at Creggandevsky, where I do
duck and enter under a capstone mapped by rival empires
of yellow feather-moss and powdery white lichen: I like
then to stop, crouched, and press my back on a housing
of actual rock, coldness which lives for a while on the skin.
And I like when I give you the nightfeed, Harvey, how you’re
concentrating on it: fists clenched, eyes shut, like this is bliss.
ii
I like a steady disruption. I like it when the solid mantle turns
to shingle and water rushes up it over and over, in love.
My white-noise machine from Argos is set to Crashing Wave
but I’m not averse to the presence of numerous and minute
quanta moving very fast in unison; occasions when a light
wind undulates the ears of wheat, or a hessian sack of pearl
barley seed is sliced with a pocket knife and pours. I like
the way it sounds pattering on stone. I like how the starlings
over Monti cohere and separate their bodies into one cyclonic
symphony, and I like that the hawk of the mind catches at
their purse, pulse, caul, arc. I like the excitation passing as
as a shadow-ripple back and how the bag is snatched, rolls
slack; straight; falciform; mouthing; bulbing; a pumping
heart. I like to interface with millions of coloured pixels
depicting attractive people procreating on a screen itself
dependent on rare metals mined by mud-grey children
who trudge up bamboo scaffolding above a greyish-red lake
of belching mud. I like how the furnace burning earth instils
in me reflexive gestures of timidity, self-pity and deference
as I walk across the kinder surfaces, grass, say, or sand,
unable ever to meet with my eyes the gaze of the sun.
iii
I can imagine that my first and fifth marriages will be
to the same human, a woman, the first marriage working
well enough that we decide to try again as soon as it’s,
you know, mutually convenient. I can see that. I like the fact
we’re ‘supercooled starmatter’, even if I can’t envisage you
as anything other than warm and bleating. The thing is
I can be persuaded fairly easily to initiate immune responses
by the fake safety signals of national anthems, cleavage, family
photographs, country lanes, large-eyed mammals, fireworks,
the King James Bible, Nina Simone singing ‘The Twelfth of Never’,
cave paintings, coffins, dolphins, dolmens. But I like it also
when the fat impasto of the canvas gets slashed by a tourist
with a claw hammer, and a glimpse is caught of what you couldn’t
some little thing including this long glance across the escalators
or how you know the song before you switch the station on.
When a photon of light meets a half-silvered mirror and splits
one meets the superposition of two, being twinned: and this repeats.
Tickling your back, Katherine, to get you to sleep, I like to lie here
with my eyes closed and think about my schoolfriends’ houses before
choosing one to walk through slowly, room by sunlit room.
Grenfell
i.m.
Please rate your experience of your experience.
Overall, would you say you’re pleased; mostly
pleased; neutral; displeased; or not pleased at all?
Would you recommend our business to a friend?
Would you say this evening light falls against
the tower in a manner conducive to your happiness
or not that at all? Would you say all members
of the union are rotten with despair? Priced in
hours, how far from there do you think we are?
If you can, please provide a detailed description
of the structure you were born in, the early drafts,
the texture, the facilities of selves who go about
their day in you, and if indicating age and race
and gender, a sexual preference, a religion,
educational attainment and household income,
I think we know each other well enough by now
to take it that we understand those purely as
contingent states, one’s desires being mappable
on strangers, always. All the bodies are bodies
of water, regardless of terms and conditions,
of energy ordered to what is the matter.
Please rate your last real day on a scale of one
to ten where one is utter dullsville and ten
adjusts the contrast setting permanently upwards.
How satisfied are you with customer support?
Please evaluate the final minutes for how one
might account for it. Any additional comments
should be left in the space at the foot of this page
and all of the following pages.
Parenthesis
I lie here like the closing bracket on the ledger of the mattress.
Asleep between us the children are hyphens – one hyphen, one underscore –
and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight that
what I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet snoring.
Asleep between us, the children, our hyphens (one hyphen, one underscore),
know love is a paragraph lacking an ending and typeset by hand in italics.
What I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet snoring
and it’s alright to collapse like that, like a marquee gone into its final sigh.
No love is a paragraph lacking an ending and typeset by hand in italics.
It is an ellipsis of three drops of Night Nurse that leaves the pillow sticky
and it’s alright to collapse like that, like a marquee gone into its final sigh,
like my mother in the hard return of a long death and the stanza break.
It is an ellipsis of three drops of Night Nurse that leaves the pillow sticky.
I lie here like the closing bracket on
the ledger of the mattress,
like my mother in the hard return of a long death and the stanza break,
and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight, that.
Silk Cut
Iwas five and stood beside my dad
at a junction somewhere in Dublin
when I slipped my hand in his
and met the red end of a cigarette
but now our hearts are broken
we walk down to the Braeside
where we can get a proper pint
and his voice tears up a bit
about the emptiness in the house
and we are going home, waiting
at the turn for the traffic, when I find
I have to stop my hand from taking his
Manners
I am interested in the possibility of reasonable conduct.
Reasonable conduct is part of the ordinary course of things.
Also violence, though one must resist this. Death is only life
at one remove, hanging from a metal hook, wrapped around
with tissue paper and a forty long and waves of sound
and waves of light and graduating waves. The small engines