Selected Poems
JAMIE MCKENDRICK
Selected Poems
Contents
Title Page
from THE SIROCCO ROOM (1991)
&
Cornbride
from Lost Cities
A Lost City
Decadence
Margin
Nostalgia
Memory
Axle-Tree
De-signifiers
Il Capitano
Sign Language
Darkness in the Mezzogiorno
from THE KIOSK ON THE BRINK (1993)
Under the Volcano
The Vulcanologist
Ye Who Enter In
Sky Nails
The Seismographical Survey
Et In Orcadia Ego
The Agave
Tinnitus
Terminus
Mountain
Ledge
On the Volcano
Flood
Il Tremoto
Lengths of Air
Hortus Conclusus
Sirensong
Skin Deep
Stood Up
from THE MARBLE FLY (1997)
Ancient History
Vehicle
A Roman Ruin
The Spleen Factory
The One-Star
The Marble Fly
Span
The Duet
Flight
In the Hold
Ultima Thule
Taken Awares
Six Characters in Search of Something
Name-Tag
Gainful Employment
Possession
A Shortened History in Pictures
Gardener’s World
On/Off
Legacies
Galatea and Polyphemus
from INK STONE (2003)
Apotheosis
Good Hedges
Fish Eye
Oil and Blood
Right of Way
Beyond
In Arcana Fidei
The Belen
Singing Lessons
Sea Salt
Salt
The Ladder
Cataract
Ink Stain
Chrome Yellow
No Smoke without Fire
The Needful
A Mole of Sorts
from CROCODILES & OBELISKS (2007)
Obit.
Guide
The Canary Principle
Nave del Lagarto, Seville
Polonius
Unfaded
Twain
Penal Architecture
Piranesi
When Casement Crossed the Line
Ès el senyor Gaudí!
Vocations
The Napkin Lifter
The Resort
Obelisk
Black Gold
Black Mountain (1933)
In the Year of the Blue Angel
An Encroachment
Meeting of Minds
Ire
Typtography
The Book of Names
from OUT THERE (2012)
Out There
On Nothing
The Perils
A Safe Distance
Après
Teazles
Bark
Oak
The Gate
First and Last
Epithets
El Puente de los Peligros, Murcia
Ethics & Aesthetics
The Deadhouse
The Fly Inventory
Guilt
Stricken Proverbs
The Carved Buddha
The Meeting House
The Literalist
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
SELECTED POEMS
from
THE SIROCCO ROOM
&
A born rebel, at ease in your outrage
you refuse the armchair’s invitation
to slump in a heap or sleep in a hump.
I’m by contrast on a hardbacked chair
sitting prim and tightarsed as Britannia
with a shield of books and a chewed biro.
The argument we’re having is unravelling
the ends that look so odd now
they’re asunder, we can only wonder
how they ever did get joined together.
It seems we’ve unwound an ampersand and
pulled it like a cracker. On the third chair
the black-and-white cat and the white-and-black,
love-locked in a tricky double helix,
keep licking each other’s necks.
Cornbride
The cornfield
is a gold comb
or a sunned fleece
the wind grooms
to a shadow
or perhaps a cloud
the wind kites
is trailing shadow
miles behind
as a bride trails
broad muslin veils
in daylight outside
though already
she’s being led
with a light tread
along the aisle.
from Lost Cities
A Lost City
Heaven is the country of the exiles.
They travelled here for refuge or for rest,
To learn the language or to taste the fruit.
Years pass. A cloud occludes the mountain’s foot
And the road home is overgrown with mist,
The white edges of a virgin forest
Neither daytrip nor exodus defiles.
The bread is good and bitter but still leaves
The palate aching for an absent flavour.
The shopping malls have windows where you find
Instead of your own face, a heedful neighbour
Whose joy to find you may be just as feigned.
Is your face too so transfigured and tanned?
Less old each day, less coarsened by beliefs?
Perhaps this isn’t heaven after all.
The walls are veined with rose and polished beryl
– An ichor that you don’t know how to tap.
New arrivals are treated with such awe,
Robed in colours, in light, as if each step
They take will help us trace some lost Before
Which if it ever was we can’t recall.
Decadence
It was the time of day when the soul speaks Latin
with a Gothic slur, and sees in every direction
an evening made of basil and magenta.
There was no breeze, and we were walking
by the canals and office-blocks of Carthage.
You were in a sour mood and foresaw
only war and burning, widows and orphans.
I suggested we stop at a bar for sherbet
– the latest thing, sprinkled with ginger.
From there, we could see the queen on her terrace
sporting her would-be wedding gown, its train
of damask roses twined with ears of corn.
The light took on a green tinge and a drunk
ex-mercenary kept muttering about drift-lines
where banded kraits would coil to clean their scales
– diamonds glittering in the sea-junk.
It made no sense to me, but sense
was not what I was after. I wanted dreams.
As dusk drew in its final flecks of gold
I felt the black north couching in my bones.
Margin
Some played volleyball using fishing nets;
some drank cans of Peroni; others searched
inland for flints and sources of clear water.
I wandered by the shore towards t
he harbour
and the blind lighthouse of Palinurus,
and found a dolphin turning at the tide’s hem
bluntly, its skin fraying on the sharp stones;
then the stringy, knifed wheeze of the helmsman
came back from the shadows and a light struck
fire through the mute larynx of the rock
at Cumae – the mad woman humming just to calm him:
That cruel place will always bear your name.
Nostalgia
I woke drenched in sweat and homesick
for nowhere I could think of, a feeling
scuffed and quaint as farthings or furlongs.
Then I remembered the room of the sirocco
in a Sicilian palace made of pink volcanic sugar.
There was a scent of waxed oak and pistachios.
Two maids were making up our nuptial bed,
smoothing the white linen with their dark hands.
You’d never have finished finding fault in their work
if I hadn’t intervened, so that you turned on me
saying Their family were turnip doctors
at the time of the Bourbons – an old enmity then,
and more imperious even than pleasure.
How to get out of that windowless room,
with not one of its walls adjoining the air
was all I could think of, from that point on.
Your voice pursued me down the marble stairway:
Don’t think you’ll ever find a home again!
Memory
The staff are picketing the pleasure gardens
of the Baia Hotel with placards.
The sun is trying to melt the rocks.
The Hohenzollerns and the Hohenstaufens
are having their annual conference inside
while their saffron-tinted, air-conditioned coaches
loaf in the parking lot above the cliff
and their drivers try to read the placards
– something about the bay being soiled,
a filter, and embezzled public funds.
I’ve got to know each curve of this coast road
as the car hairpins like a cardiograph.
(From a distance, it is gently bow-shaped.)
I know where a barn owl nests and where
the agaves leap from their rootstock toeholds
and could tell of the netted lemon groves
that hesitate on parapets so narrow
you want to talk them back to safety;
and of the watchtowers underwater,
the window where a moray eel is curled …
but I won’t – this need to depict
is just a weakening of the hold I have
on that rockface, a fatal stepping-backwards
onto glazed blue tiles that are tiles of air.
Axle-Tree
I lurk like a stowaway in the dark threshold
of your block of flats and wait for a sign.
I park my wreck beside the lorries that slouch
at the curb till dawn, laden to the tusks
with mahogany logs from Senegal.
At the docks, just a caber’s toss away,
where row after row of raw pink Fiats
are waiting for Legion to possess them,
they season in heaps and no sooner move
than they come to a halt, as if obeying
some natural imperative. Your balcony
gives on timber seeping resin
in the moonlight; the mountains bracketing
the bay’s black waves as they fret
the sea-front and the frail hull
of the unfrequented Nave-Ristorante
moored under the cement factory’s toxic plume.
It’s all crammed in like a tourist’s map.
Nightshifts, headlamps and the desultory tide.
The palm fronds shrugging on the promenade.
Loosed from the shaggy leggings of those logs
I expect a windfall of tree snakes and insects
to seep through the holes of my peel-back roof.
Only last week a scorpion stung you.
Starting as a fire on the side of your thigh
it came to a head in a charred violet point …
You became irascible and superstitious
and dreamed of a horrible martyrdom.
You felt my star-sign made me somehow to blame
as if I’d hired a familiar for the crime.
My car fell under suspicion. You began to call it
The Touring Insect House, checking the seats
and shadows on entering, where before
you’d merely likened it to the bin-skips
with their beds of decomposing ash-blue mulch.
I’ve my doubts too. Do lovers use it by night?
Its suspension is not what it used to be.
Beer bottles, cigarette packets with odd
brand-names, chewed gum-wads: all add up to something
– nocturnal depredations! Anything could live there
biodegrading, unobserved, while the rear-view mirror
makes headlights flare like stars snapped out of fixity
and the hewn trunks seem lengths of a broken axle
around which once the leaf-green planet turned.
De-signifiers
Rust and dry rot and the small-jawed moth
are our best friends and they wish us well,
undoing the fabric of our heaven.
They correspond to something inside us
that doesn’t love the works our hands have made
– wire-cutters, pick-locks, saboteurs.
‘Are you building a good memory to have of me?’
you once asked as though I’d just begun
a papier-mâché Taj Mahal.
I keep a cardboard box of newspapers
in the cupboard so everything that’s happened
is safe from pulp mills and the record-shredders
but all the while in the dark the silverfish
and woodlice are at work on the word,
its dot matrix. Living on what seems to us
dust, they profit directly from our negligence
and attention in general only provokes
their swerving, averting or curling-up manoeuvres.
Meaning? They roll it away and break it down
into unrecombinable fragments
like fatigue in our metal or cancer in concrete.
Il Capitano
He keeps a dark shed by the beach-huts and boat-houses
smelling of diesel and damp wool;
there’s a yellowed notice tacked to the door
in a strange hand, or a strange tongue like the babble
of waves on pebbles, cursives of broken shell.
Bound in his nets and tackle, he carries a trident
to tap the ground in the tireless pacing
that keeps him always in sight of the sea
where the spiny rocks sift back the waves
like krill-less drizzle from the teeth of whales.
The villagers tell how once, years back,
he commanded a vessel wrecked miles out
and drifted days on a fragment of deck.
Ever since his rescue he’s lived like the last man alive
in this coast resort buzzing with tourists and Vespas.
He was washed up here like the rest of us
by seed, tide, trade or fate but clearly lives,
oblivious of custom, under a different sky
– the stars urgent and legible; the miles of black salt
crashing into coves, his intimate blueprint.
It’s said that sometimes he sights a ship
far out in the blue and foams with an exquisite
panic of recognition. Dropping his stick
he thrashes through the waves like a fierce child
till the fishermen gently drag him back again.
Sign L
anguage
The deaf-mute fisherman sits in his beached boat
with the net he’s mending looped round both big toes
and his left-hand thumb while his right hand weaves
in and out. Air and water crash in soundless waves
through the spaces where his livelihood will catch,
the fishes whose new names I’m slowly learning:
merluzzo, alice, dentice, pesce spada …
Seeing me reading, he signs that books are better
– what he earns in a day I spend in an hour
eating fish at the restaurant he supplies.
Motorini swarm in from the cities
of the plain, from the little badlands
under the shadow of Vesuvius. Then when the bars
are closed, the cars in the car park rock like boats,
their windows taped with Il Mattino or L’Unità
and I see him picking his way home
through the refuse of a beach culture
with nothing but a bemused welcoming smile
– though when he stops outside his door I’d swear
he’s talking to himself with his fluent hands.
Darkness in the Mezzogiorno
Rubbish clots the courtyard’s fountain sculpture
of Neptune clouting a triton with a fishbone.
There’s a smell of rotting cuttlefish
off the cobbles, and an iridescent sludge
of rosy scales and silver fishes’ eyes. The sea
is everywhere, and nowhere visible, like God.
It sweats through the walls where sand from the sea