Hell has a stricture called Al’s Bulge,
A block of
ferruginous-hued concrete;
At the gateway of this tottering
Pile is a huge chasm,
for unread books.
Abandoned by the tree spirit,
Berrigan walked
Straight in, me behind.
Packed into the dusty foyer,
New misery I see,
new hands on the whip:
Naked scholars
Stuck in two-way traffic,
Against us this side, with us that,
Like the ranks when Diana died,
As on one side they queued to sign,
On the other to escape the tide.
Here some queued to take out books,
Others to find them, crammed into
Paternosters, some going up, some down.
On both sides
Librarians in horn-rims
Flayed students fiercely,
Hell, how they made them bleed
In Freshers’
Week!
Struggling to move, my eyes lit on
One man; immediately I think
‘I recognise this one,’
And as I stop to make him out better,
Berrigan, my guide,
stops too.
The one with the weals tries to hide,
Lowering his swarthy face; but it’s no use,
‘Friend,’ I say,
‘Aren’t you he
who translated our Percy
Into the Conquistadors’ noble tongue?’
And he says, ‘I grudge telling you;
But your meaning forces me,
It brings me back to old tomes.
I was he who couldn’t get enough
Of the wives of friends;
Drawing the beef curtains,
As the smutty story says.
To cover my tracks
I kept
A hoover
in the trunk of my Rover;
Caught in flagrante
I’d dash out for
My equipment, make out I was
A rep.’
As he speaks
the Head Librarian,
A softly-spoken Scot,
hits him with a lash
saying, ‘Get going, you ogre!
Women aren’t meat here.’
In a few steps we reach
where the paternoster yawns
Below,
Letting the lashed
Go under, into the shit,
That seemed on tap from some sewer.
Rolling a joint, Berrigan points
Towards the
stairs,
‘See that haughty one,’ he says,
‘Like a goatherd down from the mountain,
Seeming to scorn any tears at pain?
He’s a dude whose skill with myth
Got him inside
many knickers.
He hitch-hiked to Lemnos once,
After the first-generation feminists
Had slaughtered their menfolk.
Here his gilded tongue
Tricked Hypsipyle, a young poetess,
And he left her all alone, pregnant.
And over there a little,
clawing off the shit,
The one in heels
With the pink leather suit
and all the lipstick,
Look closely at that woman’s face,
Under the stinking make-up,
that’s our Professor Emerita,
A hard-nosed Lacanian,
whether she’s
written more books
Or screwed more dons
Is a tough call.’