JOEY CONNOLLY
LONG PASS
FOR TERI, NIGEL AND JUDE
‘Better the erratic approach, which wins all or at least loses nothing, than the cautious semifailure; better Don Quixote and his windmills than all the Sancho Panzas in the world…’
John Ashbery, Three Poems
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Theories
The Finest Fire-Proofing We Have
The Draft
Chekhov’s Gun
Poem in Which Go I
The Rider’s Song
First Letter from the Frontier
[untititled]
Beauties of the Northwest
I. a daytrip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park
II. a walk around Manley Park
Six Filters
Failed State
Content
Coming to Pass
Netherlands
Of Some Substance, Once
An Ocean,
Some Pecuniary Observations
The Way of Doing Things Trees Have
Carrying
Average Temperature at Surface Level
The Big House
History
2. Windmills
Escape to the Reservoir Café
For the Very Last Time
Comprehension Test
What You’ve Done
Incapable though the cards are
In the Process
That rogue longing
Your room at midnight was suddenly
Saturation
Loss
Poem in Which if not Well
On Latterly Overcoming Last October’s Loss
Themselves
2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014,
Didn’t Jokes Used to be Funny?
Liguria
In the moment,
Third Ballad
A Picture
Fantasy of Manners
A Brief Glosa
I am positioned
Why?
Last Letter from the Frontier
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
1. Theories
THE FINEST FIRE-PROOFING WE HAVE
It’s a poem about a father insulating his family home,
written some time in 1924. It notices, the poem,
the knotted rope of his spine through his
flannel workshirt as he hunches to the skirting;
his intent fingers working loose the dark wood,
panel by panel, and pressing in material from the roll of
asbestos matting behind him. With love he does the work
that fathers do. With aching thumbs he rocks the tacks
back into their beds, as the poem tucks its nouns into their gullies,
investing itself as fully as it can in how this father,
out of the dust of 1919, this father surrounds with love his
young wife, their new son. It drags and it dwells on this love,
it stalls and weeps for it, almost, this love inhabiting 1919
and written of in 1924. There’s love in the way panels are pried up
and replaced. And something else. How the poem’s author, reading
of the Medical Board’s classification of asbestosis
in 1925, how she was reminded of that young wife arriving home,
and the pride already metastasising inside the husband how
she’d never know how anything behind the boards had changed.
THE DRAFT
First this. Who is speaking? Careful,
it’s dark. No, no, say careful, the darkness
is brimming with something. Yes.
First this: who is speaking? Careful,
the darkness is brimming with something.
With what? The darkness is swarming
with resolution. First this: who is
speaking? Careful, the darkness is swimming
with resolution. Put your hand out.
CHEKHOV’S GUN
From a train, she passes how all things pass, wrapped
in their instants, messy and simple as the as-yet unlooked-at
complication, under the sign for a rail-station named Marsden –
which is like the surname of a first love, from
before I understood, like now – standing alone,
the inscrutable woman, all cheekbones
and short hair, and red polkadots rapped onto their white,
her hand raised to rest against her cheek. Life,
for Chekhov, is neither horrible, nor happy,
but strange-unique-fleeting-beautiful-awful, according to Gerhardie
in this book I was reading before I shot by and saw the lee
of the sign for Marsden. And for me, also — and for me.
POEM IN WHICH GO I
There but for the conciliatory haze of fiction go I.
There but for the crazy kindness of strangers
go our crises of conscience. There
but for the salt wind off the sea
goes the gold-drenched memory of 1992’s
family holiday. There but for the graze of fog go we.
There but for the winnowing of Yahweh
go so many of our quaintest folk-statuettes. There
but for the faintest sense of justice
goes the conciliatory haze of fiction. There but for the
uncomfortable persistence of humanity
goes the neighbourhood.
There but for the harrowing frequency of laundry-days
goes the grace of god. There but for the slough of despond
goes our Christian. There but for one specific curtain of
palm-fronds goes the amber clarity of our faith.
There but for the goes of going walks our lord. There
but for the gauze of saying so goes all.
THE RIDER’S SONG
two versions of ‘Canción de Jinete’ by Federico García Lorca
I.
Córdoba. Apart
and apart.
Powder-dark horse; charged moon;
unpitted olives loose-panniered and khaki.
A road I believed familiar spells itself out
strangely, uninflected by memory
or Córdoba.
Through dust and across dust
(powder horse; flame moon)
there’s a death
aware and waiting
in the wings and the spires
of Córdoba.
Ah so long road!
Ah powder-fine horse, stoic and disintegrating!
Ah patient death, that
skilful interception. Córdoba!
Córdoba! Córdoba.
Córdoba.
II.
Córdoba: romantic
and apart, and – the Instituto Cervantes research grant
blown on olives – lonely as this
bedsit study. I slant my pen to see
an ink-dark horse; an A5 of moon;
unpitted olives loose-panniered and khaki; and,
parting from the river, a road
I considered familiar spelling itself out strangely,
uninflected by memory – Córdoba. The word
is unpocketable as the place.
Through dust and across dust, as
desert and air alternate furiously around
a blinkered horse, a tired-to-bloodshot moon. My eyes,
they weaken. I lose my hands to the sand-laden air,
my thoughts to the pull of Córdoba, and my pony,
its becoming its shape, its name. I cannot separate myself.
Ah! Road like a ten-clause-sentence!
/> Ah! Inky and well-meaning and disintegrating pony!
Ah, my glasses returning to sand, my cash
to blank discs and paper, and I
all a word loses to its repetition. Córdoba.
Córdoba.
Córdoba.
FIRST LETTER FROM THE FRONTIER
‘Mearc’, Old English: mark, sign, character, boundary, limit
Our Bishop has stationed us at borders
and on boundaries, to force up a congregation – to find what passes
through these mountains as we can – and has gone into the night.
We plucky few with our taken orders
held out flower-like to these unlettered masses, an information
their crass tongue is proof against. Thus I write,
put down this mark which drives between us,
pressing me into the paper and you
outward from it, to breathe out in the piercing air
of the world, bounded by its skies of bone and water. Thus
I am alone. So much unnamed: the trees, their branches. What’s true
rises from what’s sweet like incense smoke. But here
every written word’s a convoluted signature
and every painting seems a drawing of a picture.
[UNTITITLED]
for AW
The orthodontic meddling of language
with the world, its snaggling malocclusions
between a group of objects and their name
or the unnameable collusion of object and fact which
fritter truth like a spendthrift thrush
its energy in song. The determined unorthodoxy
in the solitary stance of a dock leaf, miles
from the nettles we suppose are its cause.
All I want is to tell you that I love you,
but how to trust that craft – its shoddy caulk – on those
bracing seas between us? And the jaws have
already sprung closed over the moment, albeit gappily.
And I am stung into refuge among such
exquisite cosmetic meaninglessnesses as the
awkward stagger of a branch across the sky above me as it
divides the blue into jagged, arbitrary portions.
All I want is to propose that we be wrong
in corresponding ways.
BEAUTIES OF THE NORTHWEST
I. a daytrip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park
which comes back to you in drifts of memory
the shape of the sculptures,
the properly mysterious knotting and bunching
of Merlot-black materials, metals
and white marble and fibreglass, as if
the Yorkshire air had been ruffled
and calloused into solidity, or like scrap,
these jeep-sized bits of space, trailing their
explanatory plaques, weather-lacquered
and futile; trailing their talk of
bringing out the inherent resonance
of material; a mystery, a mystery to you; mysterious also
the meaning other visitors found or appeared to in these
dense clutterings of properties, these pieces of space that rest
so heavy on the haunches of their predicates.
But the lunchtime conversation
in the tea-shop was a good one, hard
to understand now, the ideas
catching between the teacups and the scones,
but clear is the feeling of something
being hammered out between you
and your parents, of a thought coming together
in the mouths of a youth counsellor, an antique restorer,
and a student. Something about
how beauty is best understood as a way of seeing,
so – the way a river is always busy with carving
the route it will come to flow, or the pose of a question
so often describes the shape
of its answer, or how a sound
cuts a noise-shaped gully
in your attention to settle into – the reach
of your looking, its rough branch, can be
stripped and whittled to a molecule-fine point
of concentration. And between the scones and teacups
our words given shape
by the idea they fail to complete.
II. a walk around Manley Park
which is heralded – out of the comfortable
white district you live in – by the boxy, uniform terraces
and a woman whose headscarf happens
to match the fading hydrangeas, leaning
over the garden walls, hovering
like a collection of hopes
over the pavement.
Around the corner small niqabis gather
around a burqa’d woman, making
birds of their hands, hooking thumbs and forcing
wings from the wave of their fingers; you cross the street
to avoid intruding, to offer
the olive branch of attention
to decorum. So it’s this neat frame
of mind, walking home,
the woman steps into, with a movement
inside you – a wash
of ruffled blood – as much as of herself, her
body, appearing from its tiny
terraced house, old gold–shade sari-wrapped and so off-key
with her pebbledash surround, olive-and-marble eyes
only for her rotund goddamn husband
swinging his car door closed; she neuters
all other prettinesses
at a stroke. So you think of
how much beauty and detail
could be contained in every one of these
tidy domestic units, and you think
of atoms giving off their
minute particles, parcels of the most
immeasurable quantities of energy, barely keeping
it down, holding it together in their radiant
pink-gold glow, or electric-blue, and you walk
back past the globing hydrangeas,
a system of complicated hopes
floating over the August pavement.
SIX FILTERS
Every quitter carries in their greyer pockets a marginal awareness
of the number of filters they possess, and papers,
and of how much tobacco there is, and if the lighter
still burns at the first attempt: the mental dance
between these poles a waltz in the Aeolian mode.
And Ireland Argentinas as Egypt Burmas. Little Librans,
all of us; all of us scientific calculators upon which
precocious teenagers first discover the possibility of typing
obscene words. Your eyes blur as Rome burns, and it’s the lack of focus
which matters most. We are stacked odds, and the means
to decidedly obscured ends. And the backs of all our minds
are the stats sections of long-discarded football cards,
and Greece Irelands as Syria Egypts, and the fingers
move across the keys they are able to reach.
FAILED STATE
I.
So for the time it takes to exhale
everything is breathing together, the quiet, the blood
in your glad-rags, in this battered
and sweet-smelling jeep, somewhere
on these new borders of former Rhodesia.
The air, set to echo. The glass sand.
II.
Everything goes heat-hazy
with what feels like
but isn’t held breath.
When it goes, this stillness, it will go down
like a country collapsing, currency
skittering from control, the cop’s revolver
in a blockbuster: the conceit
is excuse for a fistfight, for a brawl. Yes,
countries could collapse and p
eople die
in droves and what’s important
would be those moments
of intensest experience in the extinguished lives
of the deceased. Isn’t it. Their rattling brevity, the failed states
of ecstasy. Yes, the senate falls and the priesthood
goes to ground, and the national bank
shuts its doors. The state falters
and goes down – once, for all – taking
its market partners with it and so
any hope of resurface. Bread disappears
from the market-stalls, women appear on doorsteps
waving their stubborn arms at reporters
from the first world. They begin to look like seaweed
swaying, unconscious and miles from the good
dry oxygen of the IMF. People return to custom
as they will in such times; headscarves
begin to reappear – the divorce rate plummets,
awfully. Children rehearse the national anthem,
and dictators mass on the sidelines. The place
is begging for a Junta as you shudder your last breath
into the handkerchief I hold – for no reason – to your lips.
Or not. There is a death: a moment,
a person, a country. What matter
which? States arrive, touching the sides
pleasurably as they do. Easy go, easy go.