Go Giants

Poetry, they’re pretty sure you’re not worth knowing,

fit for nothing, broken; that any mystery in language

perfected by its music’s just a mockery, a joke;

outmoded as the nose flute; desperate as spite;

a series of temples raised to pretexts or a pimped-

out souped-up pussy-magnet; is anyway soaked

as a bandage and see-through; a piece of plastic

crap or encrypted chat, some intimate nightmare,

and they want you put to a phone-in vote . . . I don’t.

One time I found you mooching round the back

of the loading dock at the meat factory, smoking

a rollie and eyeing the maggots writhing below

like disco rice, and recognized you from the fist

as work done by the soul’s hands, sympathetic

magic that if profitless could still outstrip each

calculated want: and at the Moment of Death as

Described by the Upanishads, or in the lift of

pressure as you shift to third and open it up on

the last bend west out the Orritor Road, what

you offer is a juncture of the two kinds of real,

the act caught in the act, as the fingertips pressed

hard against their mirrored selves establish an

ambiguous exactitude – and if it so happens that

you are the flawed compensation for our having

just the one go, it does for me, or very nearly.

by the same author

poetry

TO A FAULT

ON PURPOSE

fiction

UTTERLY MONKEY

GLOVER’S MISTAKE

NICK LAIRD

Go Giants

______

W. W. Norton & Company

New York • London

If I were to describe reality as I found it, I would have to include my arm.

Acknowledgements

The book is dedicated to Carol Laird.

Thanks to the editors of the following publications where these poems or versions of them first appeared: Dark Matter, Edinburgh Review, Guardian, Hear Here!, Literary Imagination, London Review of Books, Magma, Manchester Review, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation.

Thanks to Matthew Hollis, Paul Keegan and Don Paterson. And thanks to Julian Barnes for the loan of two lines. And thanks unlimited to Z.

In the frontispiece poem, a ‘series of temples raised to pretexts’ is one of E. M. Cioran’s descriptions of history. ‘Envy’ borrows from Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness, and the book’s epigraph is a quotation from Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. The first stanza of ‘The Effects’ makes use of a line of Wallace Stevens’s prose. ‘A Blessing for the Big Men’ borrows from Lady Gregory’s translations of Raftery. The title headings in ‘Progress’ are taken from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as is its epigraph.

‘Epithalamium’: for Sarah Manguso and Adam Chapman.

‘The Effects’: for Paul Murdin.

‘Progress’: for Lorcan O’Neill.

Contents

Epithalamium

Condolence

Santa Maddelena

Go Giants

The Mark

Cabochon

Envy

Pershing

The Mission

The Workshop

Women in Antiquity

The Effects

Tuesday

Annals of Alan

Donna

Accompanying Death

Avi

Spree

Observance

The Future

Talking in Kitchens

Special Effects

A Blessing for the Big Men

The Package from Latvia

Manifesto on Sunday

Adeline

Collusion

Charm for Unfruitful Land

Grace and the Chilcot Inquiry

The Wonder

History of the Sonnet

Progress

City of Destruction

The Dog

Hill Difficulty

First Cause of the Hubbub

Mr Skill

Christian’s Deplorable Condition

Land of Vainglory

Plain Called Ease

Mr Brisk

Hill Lucre

Giants Pope and Pagan

Vanity Fair

Valley of Humiliation

Mount Clear

Enchanted Ground

Mr Implacable

Country of Conceit

Porter Watchful

House of the Interpreter

Mr Self-Will

Chastised by a Shining One

Fierceness of the Lions

Mr Malice

Reliever

Valley of the Shadow

Giant Despair

Man in an Iron Cage

Mr Enmity

Giant Grim

Mr Hold-the-World

By-Path Meadow

Valley of Humiliation

Wicket Gate

Gaius’s Inn

The Arbour

Mr Honest

House Beautiful

Praise

Epithalamium

You’re beeswax and I’m birdshit.

I’m mostly harmless. You’re irrational.

If I’m iniquity then you’re theft.

One of us is supercalifragilistic.

If I’m the most insane disgusting filth

you’re hardly curiosa.

You’re bubblewrap to my fingertips.

You’re winter sleep and I’m the bee dance.

And I am menthol and you are eggshell.

When you’re atrocious I am Spellcheck.

You’re the yen. I’m the Nepalese pound.

If I’m homesteading you’re radical chic.

I’m carpet shock and you’re the rail.

I’m Memory Foam Day on Price-Drop TV

and you’re the Lord of Misrule who shrieks

when I surface in goggles through duckweed,

and I am Trafalgar, and you’re Waterloo,

and frequently it seems to me that I am you,

and you are me. If I’m the rising incantation

you’re the charm, or I am, or you are.

Condolence

Tucked up in the top bunk under my Spiderman duvet

I half-follow a story with a beginning and an end,

then she tiptoes the hallway to stand by the hearth

and considers, and sits, and slips the ruled sheet

behind the front page of her pad to write out in good

phrases to wives and the parents of husbands

with such slow deliberation the slack is blanched

and collapses, and the fire consumed by its ashes.

Santa Maddelena

Cool air massing on the mountain

passes through the ruled bamboo

with rumours of Etruscan archers

underneath our open window,

drawing arrows, creaking bows.

We are each other’s provocation

and since noon no one has spoken.

Even to myself I seem like something

withstood, but it will be dark in ten,

and I’m glad the linden by the pool

yields in the breeze, then steadies,

ordering the tremor of its leaves

again to an unbroken canopy,

like the shields of legionaries.

Go Giants

Go go gadget legs. Go right. Go left.

Go wrong. Go west. Go down to the sea

in ships. Go down to the river and pray.

Go fish. Go first. Go forth and multiply.

Go in now and say goodbye. Go blind.

Go deaf. Go short. Go long. Go to press.

Go to pot. Go fuck yourself. Go straight.

Go Braves. Go jump in a lake. Go hard.

Go hide. Go down with a case of.

Go ape. Go without. Go Patriots.

Go halves. Go slow. Go under the knife.

Go under the sign of the war-shaft.

Go one better. Go great guns.

Go south. Go out in the midday sun.

Go red. Go blond. Go Vandals.

Go tell it on the mountain. Go and sin

no more. Go compare. Go nuclear.

Go back to E7 from E8. Go paperless.

Go Cowboys. Go Redskins. Go naked.

Go to ground. Go ahead. Go abroad.

Go to grass. Go slack. Go all ironic.

Go down in a blaze of. Go Titans.

Go for the sake of. Go Saints.

Go fly a kite. Go against. Go gaga.

Go in peace to love and serve the.

Go and get help. Go directly to jail.

Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.

Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.

Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.

Go into detail. Go for the throat.

The Mark

In the Capitoline Museum

After that Etruscan she-wolf

tenting milk-fat twins, the grabby

cherubs added fairly awkwardly

around the time of Michelangelo,

we chance upon Marsyas, nearly dead.

Boxer’s nose. Cow’s lick. The arms tied

overhead are plain white marble,

as is the face, the beard, the gallows;

a petrified tree with prettified leaves.

The torso, though, is pavonazzetto;

the thin pink veins of which evince

a body, stripped of its skin.

*

Books tell you the Dorian mode

employed to worship Apollo

found its expression on lyres –

which the Phrygians refused,

preferring the music produced

by the reed-flutes cut from

the banks of the Marsyas River.

Though the death is not symbolic;

all pain’s non-fictional,

based on the true story of pain.

Nature is precise in this.

It hurts as much as it’s worth.

*

Also Apollo, the racist, cheated,

and the narrative’s loaded by Greeks

who’d chosen the Dorian mode.

This is just the first triumph of the state

and the death of a human flautist,

whose large head is tilted forwards

and whose face bears such a dread expression

it served Renaissance painters as a template

for their crucifixion scenes – forgetting

of course that Christ sides with Apollo,

with all good sons of fractious gods

intent on implementing father’s will.

*

There was the child who thought the darkness

in the branches was some stag that had got

its horns entangled, and thrashed itself in

deeper, to exhaustion and protracted death,

or someone from the town come

outside the walls to draw a tally line

beneath accounts for good this time,

but then he recognized him by

his substantial beard, the solid build,

and when the rug of flies shook out

he understood that all the skin

had been torn from him by some animal.

*

And since it predicts redress, is dilute with

the largesse of the much better informed,

the grief of Christ is inauthentic.

This is not. Marsyas only dropped in

to sit by the fire and play like a dream,

his calloused fingers pale darting

flames across the stops. But every tavern

has its own dog-killer and herd-god,

its bribe-swallower, its giver of luck –

and having got his pedigree,

having grasped the last injustice,

the mark was taken out the back and stiffed.

*

He dared a god and lost,

and got flayed alive for such presumption –

the river so-called arose from his blood

and the tears of his brothers and sons.

With no knife and only starlight

the youngest climbs, unties the knots

and sets the corpse free. The awful stench.

We wrap him in the swaddling cloths

and lug him uphill to an olive grove

that someone knows and in a little clearing

stack rocks around the body, then walk back

to a houseful of the vengeful and drunk.

Cabochon

She still has some cousins in Leitrim,

the tall nurse broadcasting our secret,

and bright eyes bright as trinkets

when her pink nail taps the screen.

Between the coda and the dipped head

a flicker in the quadrant’s grain

steadies to a light bobbing

rhythmically, unhindered . . .

We stand before the elevator’s

mirror now like any other passengers

disembarking at the gate, late,

a silent weight of uncut gems

stitched meticulously in the hems

of your winter coat, my leather case.

Envy

Nothing but admiration for that polar bear lying there flat out

as if he’s punctured, and sea lions we also love who, like us,

suffer from that tic of always applauding their own tricks,

but I did detect again the same strained sadness in the eyes

of the apes and the larger monkeys, as if they felt they really

should become men, but could not discover the secret as to how

it happens – and who would not admit the background anguish,

sensing something better there almost within grasp but obvious,

the lack of wit and discipline and wherewithal preventing it

and in large despair I launch plots against my neighbour Gwen

who’s also lost and carries round the same hot pennies of un-

happiness. Gorilla, sir, I want to tell you we have surely

reached a stage in the evolving which is not the final stage,

and will pass through it quickly with dignity and grace,

acquiring something like the freedom of the universe.

Pershing

His high-ness. The foot-long hands. A suit that did not,

stiltwalker trousers and clown shoes, and localized in

the pliancy of the smile; embarrassment, kindness, the loss.

I tore out and Sellotaped the page to my wall, like an icon.

Now wire hair is growing from my ear canals and neck.

I tend to smell lightly of pine. The street’s a hall of mirrors,

each reflection mine and brother wolfman, sister midget,

as I understand it we are metaphors of one another

and if I see the image of him loping down Tenth Avenue

or queuing in his anorak for coffee and a muffin –

his ducking, gentle, spectacled head an inch or two

from the wooden beam – I mean to look through him.

The Mission

You’re on your own and walking down to Ryan’s house and staring

hard at bags of rubbish thrown from cars on the old Dungannon road.

Overnight a revival tent has moored in the field as a rule reserved

for the circus or the vehicles of spectators for the Cookstown 100,

who picnic on the verge and cheer as motorbikes pass by in blurs,

in Doppler roars, and dip at the corner like fins or sails and right

again and disappear. You don’t know what you’re looking for.

You are sitting in the house alone in the unlit living room

with your Uncle Jack’s double-barrelled split-piece shotgun

propped on velvet cushions and fed with scarlet cartridges

and pointing at the hallway, as a panel van revs in the drive

and someone tries forcing the back door. You keep a list

entitled Bastards, and when that spiral jotter’s full you get

another and print with care New Bastards on the cover.

You are dragging loads of turf in white or brightly coloured

fertilizer bags from the outhouse to stack by the coal bunker,

and hear a human rumble coming from that tent tethered

three fields over. Gangs of midges gust and tremor above

the concrete slabs and a muddy lawn. You would like to be

any place else but watching Ryan crying like a little baby

as he stumbles down towards the stage to testify and get saved.

The Workshop

Her turgid sonnets.

His villanelle.

I will have my revenge,

and if I can’t explain

precisely why I

do prefer to circumvent

the course our fathers,

those great nurslings,

drove their exhausted

steeds across, believe me,

something is coming.

Nightly I walk the strand

against the wind

and watch for it.

After Juvenal

Women in Antiquity

At the checkout Cleopatra.

Eyelash. Nailtap.

The Queen of Sheba leaving Tie Rack.

Boadicea clipping tickets.

Three Venuses of Willendorf

blocking the exhibit.

Is each of these figurines

meant to represent the goddess?

Or constitute an offering from votaries

by way of worship? You express

surprise at such a wide variety,

and I stay absolutely silent.

Each wood or stone statue stands

and holds her breasts or clasps

her hands above her solar plexus,

and though the guide itemizes reasons

against nakedness: social; shame;

the cold; aesthetic; to turn aside

the evil eye; the first four are

discarded easily enough in argument,

I think, but the eye is mine.

The Effects

from The Catalogue of the Universe

To see the gods withdraw,

dethroned, exposed to ridicule,

was our allotted truth –

and not without its suffering.

They weren’t dislodged

by other, stronger gods:

they simply came to nothing.

That line of enquiry closed.

With space-time there are rules

on how to leave completely:

accrete, accrete, be massive,

wait, grow obsolete, begin

to shrink, speed up, cave in,

collapse and vanish –

and amid the photographs

of supergiants, red dwarfs,

the neon spiral nebulae,