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.