Hello. Is this thing on? Turn it off. I have nothing to tell you.
None of these poems are the kind of thing I would ever choose to write. Some of them are the kind of thing I like to read. Sometimes I think that’s better, sometimes I think it’s worse.
I read poetry every day, but I write poems very rarely, and when I do, I usually pay no attention to what I’m doing because I’m too busy writing. Anything I could tell you about how my writing process works would, therefore, be a lie, an attempt to come up with something plausible-sounding after the fact. Anything I say about how the writing process should work would be twice as dishonest. It’d be like emptying my pockets, blinking in confusion, and then immediately launching into a lecture on why these objects – two buttons, 35p, some lint – are the essential equipment that well-prepared travellers should always carry around with them.
With that in mind, here are six of the lies I tell myself I believe about writing:
One. A good poem is about two and a half things. Editing is figuring out what they are.
Two. A truthful poem communicates a feeling as truthfully as possible. Setting out the events that inspired that feeling isn’t always a good way to do this. If I write a poem set in 23rd-century Reykjavík which makes the reader feel exactly how I and/or my friend Z felt at 3pm last Tuesday in Leeds, it will be a more truthful poem than one describing that day in Leeds which makes the reader feel nothing at all.
Three. I don’t write poems. I write them down. If the author of these poems plagiarises from my life, that remains our guilty secret.
Four. If a poem wants to be a circle of text in block capitals, because that’s the best way to communicate its particular feeling, then who am I to get in the way? I admire writers who restrict themselves to a single form – writing all their poems in ballad metre, or all their poems in free verse – and who find freedom and flexibility within that constraint, like an artist who devotes their life to working in charcoal. I admire them, because I could never be one. I want to be allowed to play with all the different colours. If I write three poems in the same style, I get twitchy.
Five. It may be that all my poems are in the same style, and I’m just too close to them to notice. The same may be true of all the poems in this book.
Six. Your words are never entirely your own, nor mine mine. Believing this means I never feel lonely.
*
What is that? Something honeylike that makes me lean in closer,
a tag in Latin dangling from its neck below the bloom.
Every flower has a stamen – do I mean a stigma? –
at its heart to lure the needle-bearing honeybee
doing its rounds from bed to bed, fretting like a doctor,
looping its indecipherable cursive in the air.
The poster campaign tells us we must work to fight the stigma
over mental health but they don’t mean that. Health, I mean.
Nobody is angry or ashamed of being healthy.
The rich sea air, my guidebook says, and rising temperatures
mean semi-hardy plants that elsewhere just can’t hack the weather
survive the whole year round outside here, kept alive by Ventnor.
All my friends are sick. I love them and I’m scared.
Z is sick. I mean, she’s ill. An ill wind; boding ill.
The body bodes the way a broken bone can sense the storm,
her every joint an advert for the coming inner weather.
I want to help but I just play with words. Seeking shelter
from the rain that all at once is everywhere and on me,
I turn a corner past the greenhouse, find the blue pagoda.
In it, you are reading this. Hello. Can I sit down?
This is the closest I will ever come to being honest.
Look at the pretty flowers. People died where we are sitting.
Everyone my age is sick. I’ve never slept beside
someone who didn’t need pills to separate the day from night.
Some of them have disappeared. Some wear the stigmata
on the lower inner arm that marks the almost-martyr.
Variegated, reads the metal tag. Perennial.
The sky is bleeding white, squeezed dry above the blue pagoda
but the rain keeps coming. That was the other thing. It’s why
they made the garden here, after they knocked the old place down.
In a room beside the mushroom house, a TV set repeats
three minutes of a video from 1969:
the BBC had sent a helicopter like a humming
bee to hover near the empty sanatorium,
not yet collapsed. A tracking shot. There’s just so much of it,
window after window and a unseen voice explaining
how the lungs would fill with what was held in drops of water.
I’d like to bring them here, my friends, tell them everything
they lie in bed and think of doesn’t matter for a while,
that it can wait until they’ve got their breath back in this shelter
we have made from words. The guidebook mentions that the doctor
who founded Ventnor’s institute for sickness of the chest
died here, tuberculosis. Yes, despite the warm sea air
and honey in hot water. Is it me or is it getting
darker? Now it’s late and I can hardly see the flowers.
Close your eyes and sit with me for just a little longer.
We’ll talk about our friends, about the flower and its stigma
till this rain dies down. The guidebook says he tried, the doctor.
The guidebook says so many things, but we can’t hear it over
the water falling everywhere and on the blue pagoda.
Peccable timing had me caught red-handed.
You gasped and shuddered, reached for the lead piping,
the candlestick, the rope, whatever came
to hand. When it was done, this perfect game,
we found ourselves fastidiously wiping
away the fingerprints we’d somehow branded
painlessly across our backs in blood.
Your blood, Miss Scarlet. Ask Professor Plum
(making reference to the periodic)
how something elemental as this trick
of moonlight, nature’s rulebook, could become
taboo, or seen as anything but good.
No one sleeps. Matt living with his parents
again and two days sober, almost. Jackie
taking pictures of the moon
that wakes above the thumbtacked desk
she rests her cheek on when
she inks her picture-books
of pyramids or shapes her careful lines
of coke. It’s almost dawn as Zoe starts
another chapter of the niche
erotica she ghosts for seven
cents a word, awake
as us. You look awake.
I look like something you might like to sleep through.
Richard is awake because the man
he loves is on a bed on wheels
and never sleeps or wakes. It’s not
what any of us wanted.
Hum it. It will do.
after Edith Rimmington
The diving helmet is a perfect fit.
If anyone could make it work, then it
had to be you, despite the length of this
(tell me the tactful word, Edith – proboscis?)
this seabird’s beak, projecting from the hull
of your salt-white and pecked-clean seabird skull.
I dreamt this figurehead became your head,
a plaguemask for the drowning and the dead.
I like this one, you said. You like the dark
and birds in galleries and bones in galleys.
British Surrealism, a Noah’s Ark
of you-like animals. I kept a tally:
three skeletons on that wall over there
are you. Six cats. The feathered blue giraffe
is you. Those crows. The goose with lilac hair.
I almost said, I like your soul, your laugh,
a flood of gush. I would have tried to tell you,
but leaning on the pictureframe, I slipped
into its silent world, where words like soul
sound too sincere, or else too counterfeit;
curse words, old oaths to summon up a deluge,
finding only one of us equipped.
You’re snug and dry inside your soundproof bowl.
The diving helmet is a perfect fit.
Caligari. Even if
I’d seen the film
– no one there had,
except for you, handsome but shy,
and The Hulk explaining Prynne
in the kitchen doorway to a cornered Harley Quinn –
your darkened sockets felt-tipped into
diamond points,
haunted look
and turtleneck would always add
up to nobody’s first guess.
Edward Scissorhands without the scissors? Unless
I’d lied and yelled Great costume! Yes
I’d recognise
you anywhere
we never would have met. We slept
together once, or almost slept.
All night I watched your broken, unplugged TV set
paint shadows longer than the walls
until you cracked
the blind. Your eyes
and clanging headache had you running
straight to the bathroom cabinet.
Charivari comes from karebaria,
Greek for migraine, ‘heavy head’.
It’s a parade
of noise and hate,
rough music, metal banging metal,
a chorus raised to shame a real
or imaginary figure of disgrace.
When the angry townsfolk chase
the dark-eyed man,
he runs until
his heart gives out. The final reel
reveals it’s all a dream, the face
belongs to someone else. I still don’t know his name.
It’d always be late. High on Red Bull and Blue Planet,
Attenborough levelling her mind, she’d call
up again, still up at four in the morning,
not tearful, just earnest and wired, calling
for no reason, no better reason than to share
her latest newly memorised litany of names.
Lophius, or monkfish, or fishing frog, or
sea devil. Revision. Of course she was fine.
One time, she told me that she empathised
with its teeth. The teeth will become temporarily
depressed, so as to offer no impediment
to an object gliding towards the gut.
God knows why I’d pick up. Pity, or pride
in my own selfless patience? She the seashell
held to my ear, I’d listen then half-listen
like the line I pictured in the air between us;
neutral, intermittent, static. Cagey about being,
but reluctantly talked into it, the body,
given time and a stable bed, will change
and blend with its surroundings.
Given time, I thought she’d learn to fit
in, tone down the strangeness,
or even occasionally sleep, to call
someone else, anyone – Samaritans, Nightline,
the talking clock… standard network rate. Your call
is a low, keening sound. Your call
is inaudible to divers. Your call
is inaudible to all the undrowned.
A glass harmonica is not a real harmonica
and only half glass, full
of nothing
to the wetted brim,
each chime
the gift
of half a drop of water which, in this weird aria,
is for a moment thicker
than blood.
Lammermoor,
this stammered
l’amour
is not the melody I used to sing.
Lucia,
for years I was running
the taps till everything ran clear and cold,
running a finger round the rim
of every line, listening
for the right ring.
The tune I played was crystalline, controlled.
It was a lifeless thing.
The living key
is the one you sing,
the note that’s true.
Benjamin Franklin,
nine years before inventing
the glass harmonica,
unearthed it too.
It calls for risk, a little luck,
a blinding light. It is
the iron and the tether
and the thing in flight above.
The right key, reader, is
that word you’re thinking of,
and it will let you play
with lightning.
like pigeons do. We follow
the pull of sockets deep
in our thick, wet heads,
our sodden radar: warm,
warmer, colder, warm.
The yearn, that sub- or ultra-
sonic wumph from tail
to beak to gut that hits
whenever we face due you
or you-by-near-enough.
The clunk, that eight- or cue-ball
of solid yes dropped snug
into the centre pocket
behind our eyes: love.
Recognised, we follow
what recognises us
by the usward trail it lays:
breadcrumb, breadcrumbs, dust.
Guided, or strung along, amazed,
stumbling home. Tug, tug.
Greg, gently mashing the keys of a Steinway.
Or Greg, brow furrowed, struggling to grasp
a toothbrush, album, cup. Now Greg in bed:
listen for the unconsolable clop
that comes each night before his hopeless prayers.
Unhappy Greg, remembering the touch
of things, of people. Of his mother’s face.
Has he not suffered? Has he not served his time?
Then we shall help him. Slowly lift your arms
into this poem, into Greg’s small room,
into his sleeping body. Take his hooves
and wear them. Look, it’s not so bad.
Try to come to terms with them, the hooves.
The uncompromising fact of them, unfeeling
as woodwork. Four uncrackable lumps
of keratin; hard, staccato, blunt.
I had them for a moment. Greg had them
for three stanzas. Reader, you will keep them
until the day when, thumbless, you remaster
the knack of how to turn a page.
Between our double shifts, we meditate
on the ancient virtues: Scripto, Eudaimonia,
Zippo. The carbon-copy form of the good.
Impassioned and impassive, passi sumus,
we know exactly what it means to wait,
to spend the empty-handed Sundays bleeding
radiators, yearning for the Flood
or a lighter kind of fluid to consume us.
Watch us, on our knees and silent, feeding
carpenter ants beneath the flatshare’s floorboards.
Rich with potential, gleaming with pneumonia,
letterboxes empty, doors on the latch,
we’re sparking up on petrol station forecourts,
praying for something to catch.
Old Scots, from ‘Lost Folk Songs of Troon, Vol. O’
My smooth brook knows
no storm-blown sky,
no flood to drown,
nor drooth to dry,
no owl to hoot,
nor flock to throng.
On old Wych Brook
look not too long.
No goby swoops,
try not thy hook;
worms only rot
on old Wych Brook.
From Wych Brook’s slop
grow rocks of gold.
My worldly goods,
soon took, soon sold.
Row north, my son,
by soft moonglow,
to cold Wych Brook,
by frost, by snow.
Go soon, my son,
by strong wood prow.
Don’t stop, nor stoop
to mop my brow.
To go’s to know
Wych Brook’s own cost:
blood, my son,
my fool, my loss.
My fan is utterly devoted and the only one I have, though whether this is proof of my success or failure is a point on which we disagree. My fan gives me a lavish gift each time we meet, or did, at least, the only time we
met,
under a railway arch in South-East London, where they handed me a scarf of such
untarnishable beauty that I knew I’d never take it off, so I have never tried it on. My fan curates (or ‘edits’) a small magazine – I don’t recall
the name – which published my translations of my subtle early poems into the style
of my more plangent and meticulously detailed later poems, in its first and as yet only issue, underneath a sonnet by a soap actor from Wales.
My fan is disapproved of by my current lover, who distrusts all fans in general,
understandably, given their years of working as a junior literary agent opening parcels sent by fans of X, such as the six-by-eight-foot black and
white
painting of Letchworth as seen from the sky which came for X while they were living in
a ten-by-twelve-foot caravan and now is hanging on our bedroom wall.
My fan
writes little poems of their own. They’re just the kind of poems they would
write, or so
I gather, never having read them. If my fan should read this poem, and
they will,
they will around this line begin to feel an itch of disappointment, and a
faint
suspicion that this poem’s ‘flaws’ are all, in fact, devices calibrated to provoke that feeling in them, and in them alone, a kind of metrical deterrent, not unlike the shrill, inaudible alarm that wards off dogs and adolescents, a faint suspicion which will drag its heels towards a dim awareness that,
despite
its tenderness and charm, this is an act of violence – and will love it all the
same.
from THE RAKE
The Rake offers an apology
Darling, let me lay it at your feet,
blinking and soft, a helpless little wolfcub
huddled inside a gingham picnic-basket
on a cold night, on your doorstep, the fog
a clean slate, no sign of the coming flurry,
the never-ending blizzard. Do not worry.
Though it may break things, let it be your dog.
Snowed in, you’ll feed it steak tartare and brisket,
its licked-clean bowl the colour of false love,
of the ice outside the window, of its teeth.
*
TRISTRAM FANE SAUNDERS, twenty-seven, lives in London and works as a journalist. He writes very few poems. His pamphlet Woodsong, inspired by The Madness of Suibhne, is published by Smith/Doorstop. He is the editor of Edna St Vincent Millay: Poems and Satires, forthcoming from Carcanet in September 2021.