It’s said that in the first offices of Amazon’s PN13 team, the department responsible for ‘personalisation’ (that is, the algorithmic use of your data to generate higher sales), there was a sign that read: ‘People forget that John Henry died in the end’. Of course, we don’t. Zora Neale Hurston’s version in Polk County has the steel-driving man’s death and its mourning as the ballad’s reason for being sung.
John Henry’s story – real or mythic; real, then mythic – and the arrival of the ‘big machines’ in his place, would not have gotten very far without his death. Without it, perhaps, the machines really would have won. I love the camp menace of that Amazon sign (real or mythic), the easy intensity with which it announces the irrelevance of storytelling and the irony of a reminder that people forget. It has worked for me as a challenge and a model – to address real dangers with that same tone.
If the poems here register a recurrent concern, it will be an interest in what loss, guilt and depersonalisation have to do with each other. Poems that I read again and again often bring together, in tense contrast, the senses of estrangement and attachment which can suddenly form in moments of loss. They don’t resolve and they don’t settle. There is only what O’Hara had down as ‘the dead hunting / and the alive, ahunted’ – the slip of ‘haunted’ into a more menacing, vital rush of action.
The story of John Henry at Amazon HQ tells me something about the dangers of forgetting or, worse, remembering badly. ‘We are all in danger’, as Pasolini had it – in danger of being misunderstood and misnamed, with language as misleader-inchief.
*
I like poems that start with a bird stuck in a chimneybreast
or even better in a living room
where everyone’s screaming and there’s purple shit
everywhere and mum acknowledges the problem,
ideally
with an old-school touch of humour:
‘And who invited you?’
and I like paintings that start with Anne Bancroft’s eyes
on John the Baptist – said eyes should be
aware of this miracle – or failing that
appalled by the mix-up and desperate
to get out of the wilderness
and back to a cigarette in Central Park
and where there’s blood
it should have something to do with revenge
for elocution lessons.
Dance I don’t know anything about but in my opinion the best ones start
by taking someone’s hand
and then realise this hand is not their sister’s hand
but go on holding it anyway because embarrassment
is for adults and if they’re lucky
they’ll make a new friend
and then their sister will buy them something irreplaceable
so that they don’t tell the adults.
The songs I like, I like because they start by locking themselves out of
their flat by accident
and so after trying to climb the fire-escape,
then arguing with the neighbour who has always hated their relaxed
approach to parenting appointments
and basic peacetime security measures,
have to spend hours and hours
walking the block, kicking imaginary cans,
before remembering an old two-timing lover
who has a spare key and going round theirs just as it gets dark.
I like plays that start three minutes late, right after
we find the seats, our cheeks still flushing.
Movies, I like the ones that start with a body
in a swimming pool, the fedora still on,
that’s good – or better yet a montage of bodies in swimming pools
from different eras (some with extremely elaborate Persian tiling),
or else I like the ones that simply start
with someone walking through an airport, someone who looks like they
could say
‘I love you’ for ninety minutes straight
and you wouldn’t get too bored,
more incredibly they wouldn’t either,
or when not possible then I like the ones that start the way Lina Wertmüller
makes them start since she can start a movie smoother than
the world can turn. I can’t stand movies that start
with someone sitting down to write a novel, and vice versa,
though more vice than versa.
I like novels that start with an insincere apology for being late –
they were ‘leaving to come and join you
but then remembered the market was on
and took a detour’ kind of thing and you didn’t even know
there was a market in this town but now
here they are with exceptional dates as proof,
and also hoarse and smug from an afternoon of haggling for the hell of it,
something that doesn’t appeal one bit
but you’d be happy to have seen.
Books – books most generally speaking should start with déjà vu.
And days well I like days that start anywhichway
but if I had to chose
I’d start with appearances –
so no rain, locusts, cloches, frogs, etc. does this look good to you?
this also rules out meek days,
days that have been bullied by their season –
we want an intrepid cloud in June and a November rainbow that starts out of
sight
and in keeping with the dream
I just finished is shaggy and downmarket and has a stroke of burgundy
and ends goodness knows where
The photographer resists the undertow.
His hands speak for him. They keep time
with his thought.
I can stand beside him there in the lowering
sun, as the trees begin to lean on tomorrow,
unnoticed by them.
I am quiet, I’ve counted chattel in the past,
then cleaned up neighbourhoods and not once
been seen at all.
There’s a little talk of fore- and backgrounds,
not worth the writing down, before the shot is taken
and whiteness frames
everything with an equal lack, the world bled dry
of colour. We all cheer. It is fun and games
and night again.
We can well imagine how the loaded image
stales too soon and goes bad in the memory.
What do you get?
An honest souvenir: a gentle, documented look.
You pass the time in it gladly, as if sleeping a decade
after the massacres end.
She carried you all
the way from home, Sundays too,
with a high fever.
In your hot ears she
sang neutrally of strong men
who will not look back.
Outside metaphors
burned – a whole town on its knees
to ask for prayers.
Her song was in this
but also out of danger;
a fire seen from space,
a black collecting
what its owed, raising questions
after dried answers.
She has left us here
some beginnings to choose from
or to leave behind.
admittedly, this was a man who knew the names of fifteen
different axes – felling,
hatchet, hafted, splitting, tomahawk, crash, hewing, adze,
flensing, mattock, pick,
bearded, broad, labrys – I cut him off, ‘What’s your favourite
seed?’ Then, him:
nothing would be grown anymore, the cutting times had
never even paused,
this was the downward swing, the weight would do the work,
your hands
were academic, and, would I excuse him, he had other
customers waiting. I planted
nothing that year because I couldn’t find the exit; the logs
stacked up like debt.
in anticipation he turned on all the lamps
& out went all the overhead lighting
this made his body both covert & lambent
like the balloons used to convey dispatches
over the heads of royalists besieging
paris in 1871 which were both covert
& lambent since the firelight of the camps
surrounding the city struck their white
ribbons as they passed by he was exactly
like that but with a glass of wine & extremely
limited knowledge of the siege of paris
in 1871 which was fine by him how odd he
thought nakedness is so odd
Not wishing to exaggerate, the car alarm
stops eventually. That neglectful calm
is back. It is my favourite time of day,
when our walk says nothing so exactly,
the new strains to anchor, cargo’s sent
upstream and neither are then dreamt on.
For the love of this, let our looks
in sleep be but always raised
and gutted like a statue’s gaze.
Reading by the candle of life
we complete his ledgers
John Berger
It was just evening
on a coastal path
in the country where
you found a home
to live through.
The view was what
you’d notice in it:
vines, roots, dirt,
stories, touchable
and tended to.
I could have met
you at the turn
talking of love
with a labourer.
I would have known
you, secretary, by
that ‘I don’t know
but I imagine so.’
Your doubts held
hope like January.
You might have
stopped to voice
the soil’s unheard
work, draw its
fruits beneath
a borderless blue
and listen as if life
depended on it
(far oftener than not,
it does, you knew).
The powers that were announce the end of power.
It was an afternoon of criminal celebration
with levels of sweat, proficient theft and dance not seen since the
descent of power.
People of the town debunked into sand-track streets
from their cabanas
to make together love, eye-contact, and excuses.
We were told: it is like the sixties – without teeth
or clothes.
The mayor revealed he was losing his mind: ‘I am
losing my mind!’ he explained over intercom,
so everyone hurried to provide him with sympathy blankets and
confiscate his golf clubs.
They established a university, which was a place with
clean drinking water,
and it was named after power. It was the best time to be alive;
even the dead signed a petition with words to that effect.
We did not know
it would leave us
here. Our sun sits
bored as a dog
at noon, gnawing
the dirt.
No stir, no. From
here, the earth may
as well be flat –
this eye its centre,
this needled head
its lode,
all horizons
drop down and off.
I’m not yet a
parvenu; I
am still searching
the heat
which stops here not
much further than
the reach of my
arm – dislocated,
artless wing
beating
off this young light,
caught by the sun,
that attrition
of seen things, which
comes home safe
and sound.
Our words are the children of many people.
Giorgos Seferis
I will never see your ocean,
those queryings you laid on it
might by now have floated out
to a port of grey mangrove
with a clear-eyed fisherman
hidden in its thicket’s stretch.
That is: a dream from a city,
where your sounds break in
like a wave shoaled up to begin
after Eugenio Montale
Spring: the reed lets go
its longest red leaves.
The path of a dry creek
fills with dragonflies;
the dog schleps home,
a winning in his gob.
Today I couldn’t recognise this place,
but there where the heat rises
and the clouds tilt, your eyes,
by now distant, seem only
two points of light
and time comes on.
from a Hebrew prayer
If nothing is ahead
but our ready lips,
recall how pain
sounds a way out,
the bravery of it:
its blind beginning.
How he said
to the child:
‘Take fire to the altar,
place incense and run
to the people. Forgive.’
How he stood
between those gone
and the living
until it ended
and he returned.
I am about to feel if only the past were simpler – after all, it’s as finished as a
hand held up in surrender, but then there is its body
dragged from the wrist, down to a shoulder lent on the border that admits
no light every etch is giving me a new no way out
but happily this lamb is out leading the slaughter. In another summer,
narration drowns itself in an untellable tub – here’s the proof,
in our summer, a hot & fresh heaven, that every eye’s a wager for humanity
& knowing sleep like we do is trust in the world-
as-will-be. I feel about the instincts of the fox, grope for a sympathetic fang
to pull me up – because there’s good news outside, for once
we’re able to mend our cynicism & make it new but inside the animals are
straight-faced, they want food not hope, the funny side
is one big wound, it turns your stomach. You’ve got some pity stuck between
your teeth.
I’m not qualified for this kind of honesty, that’s the truth. Demonstrate with a thrust of humour like a frog on a highway. But as a child, we all felt it – no? How I wish to try harder to come in a room like a man looking to buy a room but what if mum saw and joking aside we had to share the self-image forever? ‘It’s something to write home about,’ adds the dealer in what has been established as his third language. This was a thing to say to a me running from every crumb of home, but since his accent took naivety to task and since he wasn’t to know about the family putsch at the funeral and since, moreover, I felt suddenly at ease amidst the flat’s bare hostility, I began admiring the skirting boards. ‘You are admiring the skirting boards,’ he says. I blush, embarrassed at having been seen admiring the skirting boards. They are scuffed, not admirable, the scuffs are gorgeous browns; the edge is hardy.
What is it about a pool in the Bay Area?
First, that I’ve never seen one and neither, as far as I know,
have you or Dimitris Yeros. Maybe it’s existence
‘as a matter
Hannah Black
of degree’ – just so: a dive into that cool from that heat
even with my clothes on plus 8000 miles to make up,
is too happy to leave untouched. Or else it’s the ‘Where had I
passed the night?’ of getting up, hard
Tommaso Giartosio
and surrounded by smoke
which rises on the highway out of shot
and tired of most years
becoming good graves
to be attended when we need them,
and a dive, a real dive –
or I would be the swimmer on their way from home –
all the ways to the other coast, cracking the surface,
manic as my father’s last eyes, until I am a weed
at your feet, netted and hung to dry by chance
in the too much sun. The whole neighbourhood,
in Atlantean style, flopping commentary, stood over mocktails,
asking: ‘Was he beautiful or not
beautiful? and what was the secret of form
or expression
which gave the dynamic quality to his stroke?’
George Eliot
there is a danger that even you wouldn’t recognise me,
so careered and concluded. And that is part of it – a risk
in the offing – With His Thoughts On escape
into others. But simply look at it: we can’t do the day
without the make-believe, the dry land of burnt crops of future histories
under us and the skies in various states of undress
and water ready to be broken, distressed,
if I’m allowed
the violence of that image.
*
HAL COASE is a playwright and poet. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in 2018. His pamphlet Laytime was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in the same year. In 2019 he received a grant from Arts Council England to support the development of a first collection. His plays, published by Oberon Books, have been performed at the Camden People’s Theatre, the Pleasance Theatre and the Arcola. He lives in Bologna, Italy.