Twentieth

 

Horseless and hungry, the twentieth century automobile rolls from production line, its shining plate reads COURAGE, a kind of tiger that burns bright in the forest cities of night, Arabian gazillions in its tank. Heroic is its on-the-road journey to a future no satnav can imagine. Obsolescence enflames its fearful symmetry, a trust in rust its makers do not declare. Sunrisen and sunset, the twentieth century empires fight back, that all-red self-destructed; change their names, that burnished their crowns. Empires umpire treaties they live to regret, sell up nations they once boasted with titles and boulevards, devise management strategies from new formed departments of ANGER, their futures sunroasted, sunbesetted. Pineapple-shirted and tropical blue, the twentieth century tourist travels with a mental AVERSION list, paying for the sights and leaving a deposit, a holy smoke destination where yesterday’s pollution can take care of itself. Physical and chemical, the twentieth century proof of energy plays with fire, children with a Little Boy toy they throw in the ring. This is the ring and this is the split, this is the drop and this is the fire, they cannot resist. It comes in a black box, a game box labelled FEAR, a throw of the dice and atoms divide, the only rule: mutually assured destruction. Plummeted and pulleying, the twentieth century elevator is going up, avoiding unnecessary steps, pushing the right buttons, fun at so many levels. Where might it end if not on the whitest of moons, taking childish steps across a sea of tranquillity, collecting lunacies to store in good ship MIRTH, watching earthrise again, a unique opportunity. Motioning and pictured, the twentieth century arcade makes the case for AMAZEMENT in corridors of showcases. Feathered archdukes motion flickeringly into the oblivion of trenches. Flying Scotsmen break land speed records in brief seconds of film. Crystal clear Fabs and Top Ten girls shimmer golden up the scale, singing their youngest words to digitised eternity. Machine-driven and revolving, the twentieth century turntable says over and over again Nobody Told Me, needling listeners with forgotten truths and unfamiliar longings green from long ago. The box-set LOVE warbles birdlike through rooms, whispers pillow-talk over rooftops the central message of postcard and pulpit, now this very minute. Heating and powering, the twentieth century fossils breathe smokestack lightning, beating blue sky thinking to airy nothing, a greyer shade of pale. Gaze turns to glaze upon that which seems normal, personal satisfactions consuming product at all-time highs go gangbusters all four quarters. Vapour trails read SORROW, what’s done cannot be undone.

 

Planet

 

Ascending the curving staircase inside his mind, the staircase that puts him that much closer to the heavens, he peers through the telescope of his imagination at Mercury.  It is quite the blackest thing he’s ever seen, if almost imperceptible, before the full face of the sun. Fear is the astronomer’s first instinct. Can anything survive such heat extremes? Will the great blast absorb this morsel at an unknown hour? How does it keep on going year after year? It appears to contain all the finality of a full-stop. Yet continues, like an ellipsis. Turning the lens towards Venus, he is surprised to find it’s saffron. This is not how the planet is pictured in books. He double-checks the telescope’s satnav. Sure, Venus. Who knows, it takes courage to be up at work first thing in the morning. Still up and at it as night falls. Courage to be taken for granted, courage to be misunderstood. Most of what can be said about Venus still hasn’t been written down. Saffron. Tilting the instrument by accident he finds everything’s gone green. All manner of green. Green leaves, green eyes … O! it’s Earth. Growth reproduces growth in such profusion his language proliferates to breaking point. Clouds pure to sight are born to rainbow and to green upon continents where love is spoken of every day. Home. Reascending the whorls of stairs to stare at worlds, the astronomer is reassured by the anger of Mars. His books see red in this regard with tireless consistency. Who is he to argue? It must get exhausting being angry all the time in permanent cycles and for what reason? He wishes Mars would get over its cliché behaviour, but who will stop it? Who wants to go there? Better to turn to the wonder of Jupiter, that keeps red to one corner midst unending bursts and resolutions, firsts and revolutions of yellow. The odd thing about wonders is how words have their limits. What to say? And what to say of mirth-inspiring Saturn, a planet that could float in a bath, leaving a ring? Dazzling white in its dark night of eternal delight, that will never occur. Its humour lies in never standing still. What’s not to like? He pays attention to Saturn’s effortless ability to please. He brightens to its unique distinction. The astronomer however wishes he could avoid Uranus, grey and alone at the edge of the party. Sorrow will try its best to keep up appearances that all the time is an appearance of sorrow. Can anything be done? While Neptune elicits aversion, its bluest blue sunk with stories words deny, music cannot delve, psychology banishes to the end of the ward. Out where the known stares at the unknown for hours, long since empty of questions that could make any sense. Only its tenuous orbit gives some purpose to its baffling solitude. Time to close the telescope and reconnect with green. Or dream anon, when stars come out at night.

Keaton

 

Buster is equally capable of expressing complacent contentment. A realm of continual improvisation. Unexpected leaps. A realm of continual education. Fantastic structures and machines have the stark authenticity of the handmade. Rigour and purposefulness. Buster is equally capable of expressing inhibited longing. Imaginative agility. He turns every action into the most elegant possible ideogram. Whether by means of intricately conceived machinery or the barest of gestures. No matter how impossible the attempt. Shades of awe and amazement reliably awaken. Buster is equally capable of expressing controlled panic. This comedy of catastrophe. He undergoes catastrophes and dodges extreme risks by a hair with a grace positively angelic. As if he had done nothing at all. His trajectory and vicissitudes. That risk of harm – of annihilation – continues to play out. Buster is equally capable of expressing dawning awareness. The clear-eyed genius of a very serious child. Inventing new and undreamt of uses for common objects. He worked things out in his head. Buster sits up, jumps on the chair he is sitting in and onto the table, from which he vaults over his adversary’s head and flies through a narrow open transom over the locked door. Heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado. Not with bravado but with a demeanour that could pass for self-effacement. He is actually in great peril. Missing death by inches. Buster is equally capable of expressing unspoken sorrow. Incarnated a superior but detached intelligence. All that information alleviates somewhat the sense of pain attached to loss of independence. He plays all the parts and all the members of the audience. Neither frozen nor funereal. Nor blank nor immobile nor masklike. The most quintessentially silent. At times almost otherworldly beauty. Buster is equally capable of expressing resigned acceptance. He learnt how not to get hurt, or how not to make too much of it if he did. When it’s done, it’s done. Buster is equally capable of expressing the supremely focused attention of the scientist on the brink of a discovery. Geometric abstraction. Not only plausible but inevitable. He dives forward into a small valise held open by his assistant and is instantly and inexplicably swallowed up. 

Note to readers: Found poem using words from a review ‘Keep Your Eye on the Kid’ by Geoffrey O’Brien of two new books about Buster Keaton, published in The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2022, pages 49-51.

 

Bathroom

 

Go there in a hurry, red coming out, a burn a blister, an event breaking the surface of skin, to stop the hurry, the tearing hurry of pink squares and protective film, to hold the fear in place, a few seconds of stop, going on non-stop, that was a burst of fear fear no more. Or worse, go there for the jar of rattling antidotes, to fend off the gush of nausea, the swell of headache, the flesh prompts for disgust, something unpronounceable and no time to say, there to vomit the facts, meet the shivering need for water, or whatever it takes, held tight alone by awareness of certain walls. More normally, invariably virtually, is entry for the comb that streams the comedy file of fine lines in curves and waves, curls and dreams as preparation for out again, out into the commentary of weather, the mirth of your head tingling appreciation whatever anyone says of the current style, hilarious that human weather of commentary, the comedy stand-up of your very self brushing at the mirror, all concentration on your part, and the comb. Likewise, the satisfactions of the toothbrush. And there’s soap, milky or translucent, oaten or jasmine, readying you in fresh scent for flesh to embrace its future that today may be simply the weather again, self-respect enough, or who knows but suddenly and particularly the pleasures of love named, enough for encounter, enough to feel pretty okay really, thanks. Thence beneath the human-wrought cloud perforations of the showerhead, such wonder washing your face, eyes closed, your limbs their litheness and limits, every part of you refreshed under the solid sprinkle, the one genuine trickle-down effect, as if just for a brief while this warm heaven went on forever. Go there to manage the inexplicable fact of existing, again, like the last time was again, where expectations are you will be cleaned and tidied and scented and brushed and cured and dressed and prettified and from in there will summon some little fresh courage for out there, from somewhere. Contemplative it is in there, where you attend to your needs, that place of acoustic perfection bel canto excess in the shower recess, a well-lit cleanly place that rarely knows anger, unless another raps demand at the door, interrupts peace with their own special hurry, their hedge-backwards uncombed hair, spoiling your care. Only, on occasion, thinking about such elegies in elegy mood, do you pick at the scab of mortality, reach frustrated for the crumpling blister pack, consider a minute the sorrow of the body, your wondrous and yet mysterious friend, who is everyone’s sorrow timing down to switch out the light and go.

 

 

 

Rain

 

LOVE – Let me put it to you that the start of the sound on the roof that is not instantly understood, only as the sound increases in number until before long is a steady clatter or flow, inspires the need to rush to the nearest window where the sound is quickly a forest of water droplets let go of by clouds, dark and out of view above, radiating life and light. MIRTH – I put it to you that predictable day with its humourless to-do lists is turned by a torrent along gutters over and jib-jab of plummets in pooling puddles, into a spectacle for relief bursting with laughter at the thought, more like the surge through the body, that says your previous pile of worries are piffle, your stubborn indulgence in pettiness is dumb; that says you will watch vertical cascades turn horizontal at ground level with glee, thousands upon thousands of ground zeroes. ANGER – You read about storms in stories, as warnings from gods that your patterns of life are spoilt; about floods rising above rooftops where everywhere is one sea. You read stories of climate change that speak as if great floods, like great drought, are outcomes of a volatile Earth righting itself, casting about for solace, for a cure. COURAGE – Let me say that such enormous forces of water, looming then let loose, have been beyond your control, and mine, for as long as we have opened our eyes; likewise each generation since waters parted from the heavens; and how this unmanageable element, more a power than simply an element, may be avoided or worked with takes as much courage as ingenuity. FEAR – Why, indeed, the weight of rain falling and then rushing hitherward may get into your house, or the storm lift the roof and wash everything away from one moment to the next, as the clouds keep arriving unseen behind other clouds dark with the threat of heavy falls; may isolate you from me, even close the conversation; may render obsolete the crowded inventions we put so much store by, yours and my own small share of inheritance. AVERSION – Such is rain’s condition of seeming indifference, I put it to you there is reason to desire only ever a clear day, as the inescapable element pounds on the ground, cuts off roads, upturns bridges, and muzzies the mind with relentless pouring that would be designed, by all that is reasonable, to disappoint expectations, dampen the mood, and ruin your day for the foreseeable future. WONDER – However, such time-honoured aversions turn out to be immaterial, I put to you, when you gaze at the white falls of walling water hiding the views awhile on every side, their corresponding thunderous torrents across tin roofs and open courtyards, with inside calm and quiet within where you gaze in silence, happy to believe in good fortune, which is blessing of complete wonder. SORROW – You could choose, later sometime, to look upon the losses inflicted by the storm, what then you could do to help that you could not in the midst. Or choose to watch raindrops dropping one two three into a still pool outside your window and wonder why instead of feeling pleased, you wish with a touch of longing for more of the same downpour.