Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


VII

The voice paused; and when it resumed
it had softened, and I heard the smile in it.

Donno, I can't keep this bullshit up.
I left this message planted in your head
like a letter in a book you wouldn't find
till I was long gone. Look — do this for me:
just plot a course between the Orphic oak
and fuck 'em all if they can't take a joke
and stick to it. Avoid the fancy lies
by which you would betray me worse than looking 
the jerk that you're obliged to now and then.
A shame unfelt is no shame, so a man's
can't outlive him. Not that I ever worried.
Take that ancient evening, long before
my present existential disadvantage,
in Earl's Court Square with Maddy, you and Eva,
when I found those giant barcodes on the floor
and did my drunken hopscotch up and down them
while the artist watched in ashen disbelief...
Oh, I was always first to jump; but just because
I never got it with the gravity.
I loved the living but I hated life.
I got sick of trying to make them all forgive me
when no one found a thing to be forgiven,
sick of my knee-jerk apologies
to every lampstand that I blundered into.
Just remember these three things for me:
always take a spoon — it might rain soup;
it's as strange to be here once as to return;
and there's nothing at all between the snow and the
roses.
And don't let them misread those poems of mine
as the jeux d'esprit I had to dress them as
to get them past myself. And don't let pass
talk of my saintliness, or those attempts
to praise my average musicianship
beyond its own ambitions: music for dancers.
All I wanted was to keep the drum
so tight it was lost under their feet,
the downbeat I'd invisibly increased,
my silent augmentation of the One —
the cup I'd filled brimful...then even above the brim!
Nor you or I could read that line aloud
and still keep it together. But that's my point:
what kind of twisted ape ends up believing
the rushlight of his little human art
truer than the great sun on his back?
I knew the game was up for me the day
I stood before my father's corpse and thought
If I can't get a poem out of this...
Did you think any differently with mine?

He went on with his speech, but soon the eye
had turned on him once more, and I'd no wish
to hear him take that tone with me again.
I closed my mouth and put out its dark light.
I put down Michael's skull and held my own.

Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


VI

For one whole year, when I lay down, the eye
looked through my mind uninterruptedly
and I knew a peace like nothing breathing should.
I was the no one that I was in the dark womb.
One night when I was lying in meditation
the I-Am-That-I-Am-Not spoke to me
in silence from its black and ashless blaze
in the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet.
It had lost his lightness and his gentleness
and took on that plain cadence he would use
when he read out from the Iliad or the Táin.

Your eye is no eye but an exit wound.
Mind has fired through you into the world
the way a hired thug might unload his gun
through the silk-lined pocket of his overcoat.
And even yet the dying world maintains
its air of near-hysteric unconcern
like a stateroom on a doomed ship, every
table, chair and trinket nailed in place
against the rising storm of its unbeing.
If only you had known the storm was you.

Once this place was wholly free of you.
Before life there was futureless event
and as the gases cooled and thinned and gathered
time had nothing to regret its passing
and everywhere lay lightly upon space
as daylight in the world's manifest.
Then matter somehow wrenched itself around
to see — or rather just in time to miss —
the infinite laws collapse, and there behold
the perfect niche that had been carved for it.

It made an eye to look at its fine home,
but there, within its home, it saw its death;
and so it made a self to look at death,
and then within the self it saw its death;
and so it made a soul to look at self,
but then within the soul it saw its death;
and so it made a god to look at soul,
and god could not see death within the soul
for god was death. In making death its god
the eye had lost its home in finding it.
We find this everywhere the eye appears.
Were there design, this would have been the flaw.

Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


V

We come from nothing and return to it.
It lends us out to time, and when we lie
in silent contemplation of the void
they say we feel it contemplating us.
This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.
We are ourselves the void in contemplation.
We are its only nerve and hand and eye.
There is something vast and distant and enthroned
with which you are one and continuous,
staring through your mind, staring and staring
like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant
with neither love nor hate nor apathy
as we have no human name for its regard.
Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes
as it plays across the objects of the earth
or such icons of them as your mind has forged.
The book in sunlight or the tree in rain
bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs.
But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,
the tree will rise untethered to its station
between earth and heaven, the open book
turn runic and unreadable again,
and if a word then rises to our lips
we speak it on behalf of everything.

Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


IV

Zurbarán knew he could guarantee
at least one fainting fit at the unveiling
if he arranged the torch- or window-light
to echo what he'd painted in the frame.
This way, to those who first beheld the saint,
the light that fell on him seemed literal.
In the same way I might have you read these words 
on a black moon, in a forest after midnight,
a thousand miles from anywhere your plea
for hearth and water might be understood
and have you strike one match, and then another —
not to light these rooms, or to augment
what little light they shed upon themselves
but to see the kind of dark I laid between them.

Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


III

(Or to put it otherwise: consider this
pinwheel of white linen, at its heart
a hollow, in the hollow a small hole.
We cannot say or see whether the hole
passes through the cloth, or if the cloth
darkens itself — by which I mean gives rise
to it, the black star at its heart,
and hosts it as a mere emergent trait
of its own intricate infolded structure.
Either way, towards the framing edge
something else is calling into question
the linen's own materiality
and the folds depicted are impossible.)

                               after Alison Watt: 'Breath'

Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


II

Zurbarán's St Francis in Meditation
is west-lit, hooded, kneeling, tight in his frame;
his hands are joined, both in supplication
and to clasp the old skull to his breast.
This he is at pains to hold along
the knit-line of the parietal bone
the better, I would say, to feel the teeth 
of the upper jaw gnaw into his sternum.
His face is tilted upward, heavenwards,
while the skull, in turn beholds his upturned face.
I would say that Francis' eyes are closed
but this is guesswork, since they are occluded
wholly by the shadow of his cowl,
for which we read the larger dark he claims
beyond the local evening of his cell.
But I would say the fetish-point, the punctum,
is not the skull, the white cup of his hands
or the frayed hole in the elbow of his robe,
but the tiny batwing of his open mouth
and its vowel, the ah of revelation, grief
or agony, but in this case I would say
there is something in the care of its depiction
to prove that we arrest the saint mid-speech.
I would say something had passed between
the man and his interrogated night.
I would say his words are not his words.
I would say the skull is working him.

Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


I

The night's surveillance. Its heavy breathing
even in the day it hides behind.
Enough is enough for anyone, and so
you crossed your brilliant room, threw up the shade
to catch the night pressed hard against the glass,
threw up the sash and looked it in the eye.
Yet it did not stare you out of your own mind
or roll into the room like a black fog,
but sat there at the sill's edge, patiently,
like a priest into whose hearing you confessed
every earthly thing that tortured you.
While you spoke, it reached into the room
switching off the mirrors in their frames
and undeveloping your photographs;
it gently drew a knife across the threads
that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept;
it slipped into a thousand murmuring books
and laid a black leaf next to every white;
it turned your desk-lamp off, then lower still.
Soon there was nothing in that soundless dark
but, afloat on nothing, one white cup
which somehow had escaped your inventory.
The night bent down, and as a final kindness
placed it in your hands so you'd remember
to halt and stoop and drink when the time came
in that river whose name was now beyond you 
as was, you found indifferently, your own.

A Coal Fire in Winter
Thomas McGrath

Something old and tyrannical burning there.

(Not like a wood fire which is only

The end of a summer, or a life)

But something of darkness:   heat

From the time before there was fire.

And I have come here

To warm that blackness into forms of light,

To set free a captive prince

From the sunken kingdom of the father coal.

A warming company of the cold-blooded –

These carbon serpents of bituminous gardens,

These inflammable tunnels of dead song from the black pit,

This sparkling end of the great beasts, these blazing

Stone flowers diamond fire incandescent fruit.

And out of all that death, now,

At midnight, my love and I are riding

Down the old high roads of inexhaustible light.

The Wreck
Don Paterson


But what lovers we were, what lovers,
even when it was all over —

the deadweight, bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang

like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port

and watched our unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;

the candlelight strange on our faces
like the tiny silent blazes

and coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs

into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,

gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down

to mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back

to back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.

Solitude: The Tower
Henri Cole


Long ago, I lived at the foot of the mountains
where my parents lived when they were young.
Nearby, there was a daffodil farm, which I bicycled past
each day on my way to the supermarket.
Occasionally, there were earthquakes, but no one noticed.
At my desk, words and phrases grew only slowly,
like the embedded or basal portion of a hair,
tooth, nail, or nerve. As I looked at the empty page—
seeing into love, seeing into suffering,
seeing into madness—my head ached so,
dear reader, emotions toppling me in one
direction, then another, but writing this now,
sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought,
I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.

February
Margaret Atwood


Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles 
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too, 
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches on the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing 
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I thing dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Sunflower
Henri Cole


When Mother and I first had the do-not-
resuscitate conversation, she lifted her head,
like a drooped sunflower, and said,
"Those dying always want to stay."
Months later, on the kitchen table,
Mars red gladiolus salg Ode to Joy,
and we listened. House flies swooped and veered
around us, like the Holy Spirit. "Nature
is always expressing something human,"
Mother commented, her mouth twisting,
as I plucked whiskers from around it.
"Yes, no, please." Tenderness was not yet dust.
Mother sat up, rubbed her eyes drowsily, her breaths
like breakers, the living man the beach.

Waking with Russell
Don Paterson


Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

Lightenings viii
Seamus Heaney


The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Sandpiper
Elizabeth Bishop



The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher and lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Bats
Henri Cole


Each night they come back, chasing one another
among the fronds after gorging on papayas,
to drink from the swimming pool. With my sleep-
stiffened bones, I like to watch them, careening 
into the bright pool lights, spattering the walls with pulp
and guano, like graffiti artists. Sometimes, when they meet,
they hit one another's furred wings—Love thy neighbor
like thyself—and then soar off again to drink
more bleached water. Sometimes, it seems as if
they are watching me, like a Styrofoam head
with a wig on it. "The patient reports that he has 
been lonely all his life," one screams to the other.
I can hardly stand it and put my face in my hands,
as they dive to-and-fro through all their happiness.

Rain
Don Paterson


I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined in the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold 
on a starlit gutter, running gold 
with the neon drugstore sign
and I'd read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain's own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

The End
Emily Berry


I believed death was a flat plain spectacular endlessly

Can you distort my voice when I say this?

My scared ghost peeling off me

Distortion, she says, as if she has just made it up

And then she is quoting a line from a poem

Or is it a whole poem, I wish I could remember

My voice opens and calls you in

I don't know if you can hear me

I said, I carry inside me the trace of a threat that I cannot discharge

I said, I want to ask you things you can't ask a person who doesn't exist

She said, Why can't you ask them

If we can't have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have?

She said, Why can't you have everything

Well, you know, when you're looking for a person, sometimes they appear

And a light goes on and off in the opposite window, twice

Yes, you say, that was a sign

Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead

Listen. I don't know who you are but you remind me of —

I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice, I tell her

So people don't know it's me

They know what they know, she said

I told a story about my shame

It got cold when the air touched it

Then it got hot, throbbed, wept, attracted fragments with which it eventually glittered

Till I couldn't stop looking at it

Exactly, she says

And then she is quoting a line from a poem, I don't know which one

In my dream she reached out to touch me as if to say, It's all right

How I began to believe in something

Are you there?

The wind called to the trees

And then it happened

And they said, How do you feel?

And I said, Like a fountain

Night falls from my neck like silver arrows

Very gently

Away
Henri Cole


If I close my eyes, I see you again in front of me,
like light attracting light to itself. I'm standing
in the lake, forming a whirlpool with my arms,
letting the force of atonement pull me into its center
until I cannot any longer hang onto my observations
or any sense of myself, like dust and hydrogen clouds
getting all excited while creating new stars to light
the backyard. How poignantly emptiness cries out
to be filled. 
                   But writing this now, my hand is warm.
The character I call Myself isn't lustful, heavy,
melancholic. It's as if emotions are no longer bodied.
Eros isn't ripping through darkness. It's as if I'm
a boy again, observing the births of two baby lambs.
The world has just come into existence.

An Elliptical Stylus
Don Paterson


My uncle was beaming: 'Aye, yer elliptical stylus —
fairly brings out a' the wee details.'
Balanced at a fraction of an ounce
the fat cartridge sank down like a feather;
music billowed into three dimensions
as if we could have walked between the players.

My dad, who could appreciate the difference,
went to Largs to buy an elliptical stylus
for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable.
We had the guy in stitches: 'You can't...
Er...you'll have to upgrade your equipment.'
Still smirking, he sent us from the shop
with a box of needles, thick as carpet-tacks,
the only sort they made to fit our model.

(Supposing I'd been his son: let's eavesdrop
on 'Fidelities', the poem I'm writing now:
The day my father died, he showed me how
he'd prime the deck for optimum performance:
it's that lesson I recall — how he'd refine
the arm's weight, to leave the stylus balanced
somewhere between ellipsis and precision,
as I gently lower the sharp nip to the line
and wait for it to pick up the vibration
till it moves across the page, like a cardiograph...)

We drove back slowly, as if we had a puncture;
my dad trying not to blink, and that man's laugh
stuck in my head, which is where the story sticks,
and any attempt to cauterize this fable
with something axiomatic on the nature
of articulacy and inheritance,
since he can well afford to make his own
excuses, you your own interpretation.
But if you still insist on resonance —
I'd swing for him, and every other cunt
happy to let my father know his station,
which probably includes yourself. To be blunt.

Praises
Thomas McGrath

The vegetables please us with their modes and virtues.

                                                                                  The demure heart

Of the lettuce inside its circular court, baroque ear

Of quiet under its rustling house of lace, pleases

Us.

      And the bold strength of the celery, its green Hispanic

¡Shout! its exclamatory confetti.

                                                  And the analogue that is Onion:

Ptolemaic astronomy and tearful allegory, the Platonic circles

Of His inexhaustible soul!

                                       O and the straightforwardness

In the labyrinth of Cabbage, the infallible rectitude of Homegrown Mushroom

Under its cone of silence like a papal hat —

                                                                  All these

Please us.

                And the syllabus of the corn,

                                                            that wampum,

                                                                                   its golden

Roads leading out of the wigwams of its silky and youthful smoke;

The nobility of the dill, cool in its silences and cathedrals;

Tomatoes five-alarm fires in their musky barrios, peas

Asleep in their cartridge clips,

                                              beetsblood,

                                                                colonies of the imperial

Cauliflower, and the buddha-like seeds of the pepper

Turning their prayerwheels in the green gloom of their caves.

All these we praise: they please us all ways: these smallest virtues.

All these earth-given: 

                                 and the heaven-hung fruit also...

                                                                                    As instance

Banana which continually makes angelic ears out of sour

Purses, or the winy abacus of the holy grape on its cross

Of alcohol, or the peach with its fur like a young girl's —

All these we praise: the winter in the flesh of the apple, and the sun

Domesticated under the orange's rind.

                                                          We praise

By the skin of our teeth, Persimmon, and Pawpaw's constant

Affair with gravity, and the proletariat of the pomegranate

Inside its leathery city.

                                   And let us praise all these

As they please us: skin, flesh, flower, and the flowering

Bones of their seeds: from which come orchards: bees: honey:

Flowers, love's language, love, heart's ease, poems, praise.