browser
which made me feel worried though I don’t understand why
and my poem had vanished: it was a poem about my
grandmother
who was the wife of a miner twice buried alive in the pit,
who survived who came back up into the air in Fife.
It’s a worry if when you go to paste your poem to send to your
friend
your poem has been replaced by http://www.google.co.uk/
If you can’t import your poem or attach your poem
will it be enough to be attached to your poem, to the memory of it
now that it has gone, vanished into cyber space.
Cyber space has no face, not like the face of my grandmother.
Every line of this is true and as I was writing this
even this disappeared for a second and a dashboard appeared
with a clock, a calculator and an icon of safari.
The clock told me it is 3 o’clock in Amsterdam.
Kay’s poem about a lost poem is all about surface and depth. It asks about a disappearing truth, a lost attachment to the past, a lost attachment to the process of art. It makes visible, instead, a blocked or diverted set of connections. It asks what, in this case, attachment actually means, when it (and we?) can so easily be disappeared, when histories of survival and stratification can so simply vanish in front of our eyes. Its last stanza is a driverless car, a place where the present is slippery, can’t be trusted; the ‘true’ lines — precariously there one minute, gone the next — echo the lost lines of the human face, exchanged not just for the face of a clock but a clock that tells an irrelevant time.
*
“Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
‘The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.’
I’d been at a loss so I’d gone and stood in the study, which I only ever did when I felt the very worst. The desk was piled up with the talks you’d been supposed to give at that university. On the top was the one about time. I’d picked the first page up (suncurled, dried, a bit faded), I’d glanced at it and at the still quite pristine page below it and I’d laughed when I’d seen Walter Benjamin’s name, because, much like my brother used to shout when we were kids in the back of the car and we were driving south, Ten points to the first person who can see the Forth Road Bridge, or my father when he was teaching me to drive, Ten points if you can hit that woman crossing the road, what you used to say when you’d make me come with you to those boring conferences was, Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.
My own job was trees; I knew about how they prepare themselves for winter way back in the summer, how they ready themselves in the winter for the fruiting months. Unlike flowers which die right down every year and have to start all over again, break the surface again, trees can keep going from where they left off. I knew about small willow moths, clearwings, leopard moths, buff-tip moths, and goat moths and exactly what kinds of willow they preferred.
Ten points to the first person to see someone back from the dead. There was an explanation for the stain where the tea had sunk into the floorboards. I’d done it myself, obviously. But I had to congratulate my imagination, for you were very like you. Though I’d never have imagined the imagination could be so good with smell; you smelt quite strong for something or someone imaginary. Either way, you’d come back, and it was about time.
But if I went to bed and went to sleep, would you still be here when I woke up?
Tell me where you’ve been, I’d said to you earlier. What’s it like? And don’t just say ‘what’s been, again?’ Come on. You used to know all the words. You knew more words than anyone. Tell me.
Your black eyes gleamed like cut coals, animal eyes. You raised your arm and hit the wall next to the bookcase.
Four, you said.
You mean the wall? I said. You mean four walls? Like a prison?
You shook your head. I could almost hear you thinking. It was like the noise a broken tree makes when its broken part, after lightning has hit and split it, is too heavy for the rest of the tree, is about to split right off and fall. With great effort, you spoke. You pointed first at one wall then another.
Dark. Dark. Dark. But one is light.
Three dark walls and one light wall? I said.
You tapped the coffee table with your hand.
Again? you said.
It’s a table, I said.
Yes, a table, and people, food, a woman, hair, it’s what is it? Light, bright hair.
There’s a woman there? I said. With bright hair? What woman? Who? Do you know her?
And a man, next to the woman, you said.
Oh, right, I said. Is he with the woman? Or is the woman something to do with you?
— he’s got, it’s wood, with, what is it, again? String? Hand. A man, and the wood with the string, in his hand, you know. Epomony.
He what? I said.
Epomony, you said. Epomony.
Oh, the imagination was fantastic: mine didn’t just make up some place you’d been, it even made up words whose meanings I didn’t know — which was exactly what it had been like, to live with you. In fact when I went through and tried to look up that word in the dictionary I couldn’t find a word like it. So the imagination was even more amazing than I’d given it credit for. Lying in bed now, for instance, with you next to me with all your clothes still on, I could actually feel what felt like real grit and dust all along the underside of my left thigh.
D’you think you could take the mug out of your pocket? I said. It’s poking into my hip bone there and it’s actually quite sore.
Mud, you said.
Mug, I said.
Mud, you said again. Then you said the word: fog. Then the word: town.
Where? I said. Where you were?
Oliver, you said. Twist.
How’d you know I’m reading Oliver Twist? I was about to say. But you’d begun to snore.
If only I’d reimagined you without your snoring. But then it wouldn’t have been true, would it? It wouldn’t have been you.
I lay there beside you, beside myself in the dust and grit of you, because though you were gone you were here, and what would happen next? Whatever happened, I’d let it, because it knows us inside out, the imagination. It knows us better than we know ourselves. It couldn’t have been more timely. It knows the time of day all right.
On form
I placed a jar in Tennessee
because I could not stop for death
to see a world in a grain of sand
where Alph, the sacred river, ran.
Nobody heard him, the dead man
alone and palely loitering,
rage, rage against the dying of
the golden apples of the sun.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy.
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
And for that minute a blackbird sang.
What will survive of us is love.
It would maybe have been better if you could have come back from the dead a bit differently. I mean if you could have come back as an array of different yous, like anyone with the originality you had when you were alive should naturally have done; for instance if you’d come back as a dog, a mythical sort of one, one that could speak and would even occasionally do my bidding, occasionally sit at the table with me and converse while we ate our dinner, or if you’d come back as a small star, or a wing or a tongue of flame hovering above my head whenever I went anywhere, or a mystic vision of, I don’t know, an ibis, or a waterfall which would just suddenly appear, or a flowering bush or an angel or a devil or a rain of coins, a puff of mist with a big paw for a hand like in the Italian picture of the woman being held in an embrace by nothing but a gray-black raincloud.