door. Shadowed glass. If it does so, under the pressure
of necessity, there is not one element of its nature
to which violence is not done.
Temple of Last Resort
I wanted the real God to turn up and say
I was just kidding.
About everything.
I was just kidding.
That guy’s my idiot brother.
Ignore him. He’s an asshole.
Crunch
It’s clear that Schwarzenegger was the acceptable exploration of the Nazis
and the red embroidered velvet book is chained up to the lectern but
you insist that human skin contains so many receptors for gentle pressure,
deep pressure, sustained pressure, follicle bending and minute vibration
that all the edges will get rounded down eventually and no one ignorant
of history ever re-enter. I say if you miss the actual earth you should sink
your fingers in the soil of the rabbit foot fern I keep on my desk and water
almost never from my thermos of black tea. You say Nevada palominos
at a gallop hundreds strong draw the same subsiding trail of pinkish dust
across the monotheistic desert as when the Christians took back Spain
or Dylan went electric, and I say saying everything at once is not the same
as saying nothing. Lightning is a brief but necessary corrective to the system’s
electrical imbalance, though you say the sirens are becoming more frequent
and the air outside itches your eyes and causes them to weep a gluey substance
in the night. I say it’s an area of low pressure. You say it’s a feature not a bug.
I say maybe some species can be successfully domesticated and some just can’t.
Deer, for instance, prove remarkably resistant. I turn the sound down and listen.
This morning I was taken with an origin myth where the giant vomits up the earth
only after great pain in his stomach. The golden plover with its two-note song
is the prime glossator of our time – left, right, black, white – though in real life
the Zermelo set neutrinos pass through does include you. You are really very busy
with your multi-volume study of the strictly curtailed – Dunwich, Minoa, Tunguska,
Chernobyl. I say the lizard also spat the sun back out though no, I don’t believe
the Hopi chose the desert so they’d never have to not pray for rain. I agree it is
insane. I recommend the moment Pliny held a naked flame against an amber bead
and smelt the tang of pine, and knew it to be resin not a teardrop wept by Neptune.
You ask if the word (peoples) is grammatically correct? I say all the signs conspire
to suggest that an inflection point is coming. You claim nothing fucks you like time.
I say just because I’m shouting doesn’t make me wrong. You think we need to call
someone. I say I stayed with a warlord in Split who had the given name of Dragon
and a perfectly serviceable coffee table constructed from four upstanding shell
casings and a square pane of tempered glass. I say poetry is weather for the mind
not an umbrella. I say take Star of Bethlehem for shock, mustard seed for the deep
gloom occasioned for no earthly reason. You’d like to see me alphabetised into
my rightful places and the files archived. I’d have you used in combinations of
the adjectives and verbs and nouns I’m certain you deserve. You say drought it was
that first gifted us the arch, aqueducts with strict declivities of inches to the mile
but I say Byzantium was nothing but expansionist slavers and ingenious trash
and the vaulted roof of Wells cathedral leaves me as impressively empty. You say
the thing with leaving is you have to go somewhere. I am well aware my semen is
when I cough I cough up all this black stuff. You say it is invisible from space.
I ask have you noticed in the grace of Duncan Edwards an anonymity of style
true to both his kind and his kind of generation? You say the children are listening.
We keep on glimpsing the doe and her fawn at the edge of the clearing at dawn,
and for thousands of years. I say it’s not so much cricket that’s a metaphor for life
but the other way round. I say my father says the one time he saw his own father cry
was after the Munich Air Disaster. You say of Pangu, when he died, that his voice
became the thunder and his flesh became the earth, his hair the trees, his sweat
the rain, his bones the rocks and monuments, and in the end the rest of us were left
as little glossy insects to graze upon his body. I say we need to keep each other close
and whisper. You say one must be heavy as an engine not a rock. I say the working
parts operate at such a pitch they’re silent – and at this point in the argument you make
a kind of grunt.
Horizontal Fall
Once in the suburbs outside Providence
an abundant week-old snow compounded
to a single sheet of large gardens and scant
woods and there –
three deer bounding suddenly alongside –
and once in extended eye contact when
Opposite shouldered off her jacket
and opened up on tiptoe the overhead locker –
and now on the elevated line through Harlem,
the cold shallows of its bright streets beneath
and the lights in the whole train shutting off
suddenly, all the lights shutting off suddenly,
serpentine brakes roused then ended in a creak
and silence –
and the assorted breathing bodies
about to start incorporating
coats and bags and phones – but something in us
wanting to remain sitting there at large
and almost unelaborated in the dark carriage
Extra Life
Press esc and wait. White
light. Five tender reports.
You are in a new room
and Father has gone missing.
Mother suffers but does nothing,
watches television, weeps.
Your avatar is – it doesn’t matter.
Basil, Fatou, Ahmed,
do you choose country A or B?
A is cheaper but more risky;
the living conditions are poor,
the onward journey by sea.
If you choose B you have a chance
of reaching C by land
but now the trafficker demands
the fee up front, in cash,
Click here if you sleep for a week
in a concrete shaft and then go
back and ask. Click here to beg.
Get on a truck for a hundred hours.
The desert is a thousand miles.
The stars are numberless and very
close. Sleep in fits and starts. Sleep
sitting up. Take it in turns to sleep.
Click here if you get robbed.
Click here if you get raped.
Click here if you get caught.
Click here if you’re sent back
or held for an indefinite term
in a ‘processing facility’.
Press esc and wait. White
light. Your character appears.
Click here to hop the fence
and merge with the foot passengers.
As you dock, click to watch
the iron maw descend on scores
of border agents, waiting.
Click to turn the keys left
in the ignition, and ride the Harley
off the ramp and into Dover,
and park it by the cop shop,
and inside hand the keys across,
saying, ‘This is not my motor bike.’
Click to shiver through the night
on a mattress of catalogues
and pallets by the bottle bins
in the carpark of the Argos
on Cricklewood Broadway.
Press esc and wait. White light.
Track the acrobatic Sub-Saharan
dodging through the gridlocked
traffic. Click here to crowbar
open the articulated truck
and board it. Press esc and wait.
White light. Watch the boat inflate.
Click twice to make it float.
Click to lift your kids in. Click
to lift your wife. The sea is level
as a puddle until backwash
from the tanker hits and panic
tips you in. Down you go and further
so the vice of water tightens
till your chest and spine will surely
snap. Click here to save.
Click to bring your children
back. Click to kiss them
on their lips. Click to resurrect
your wife and pick
the seaweed from her hair.
To His Soul
Old ghost, my one guest,
heckler, cajoler, soft-soaper
drifting like smoke down
the windowless corridor,
the jailer is shaking his keys out,
and you will soon depart for
lodgings that lack colour
and where no one will know
how to take your jokes.
After Hadrian
Notes
‘Autocomplete’ repurposes a couple of lines from the note-
books of Geoffrey Madan.
‘Incantation’ includes lines by Frank O’Hara, Hart Crane
and Kurt Vonnegut.
About the Author
Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and former lawyer. His poetry collections are To A Fault, On Purpose and Go Giants. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he co-edited the anthology The Zoo of the New with Don Paterson, and is currently a Writer-in-Residence at New York University.
By the same author
poetry
TO A FAULT
ON PURPOSE
GO GIANTS
prose
UTTERLY MONKEY
GLOVER’S MISTAKE
MODERN GODS
as editor
THE ZOO OF THE NEW
(with Don Paterson)
Copyright
First published in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Nick Laird, 2018
The right of Nick Laird to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34174–0