Figures move over the strand, passing the small, fat man,
who has walked far out on these long, smooth sands,
then spread a green towel and undressed.
It is hot and blue, he wants to be deep in the water,

he wades out and stands, his ankles lost in the wash,
surprised at his want, surprised at the feel
of the water, running in over his feet, the joy,
as pleased and as lulled as a child who yearns

for the mystery of the water. This swimming
is a strange activity, as strange as fish and full of longing,
strange as this heat that’s pasting butterflies
onto white walls—spread leaves—and sends to us now

a man who stands alone in a brilliant sea.

Taken from Where Now Begins by Kerry Hardie, published by Bloodaxe Books on November 12.

The post Voyeur appeared first on Standpoint.

She has wrought iron gates,
hard standing parking for two.
Her pea gravel driveway sweeps
to a Cloudy Apple composite door,
stained window with leaded detail.

Her hallway is carpeted with sycamore
seeds and cherry blossom throughout.
Her white dogleg staircase leads to a spindle
gallery landing, with access to a loft
conversion with a skylight window.

Ground floor comprises open plan lounge/diner,
recesses either side of fire breast wall.
Her writing desk has been nudged to the brink
of the bay. Curtains may be drawn
around her to quarantine at will.

Dining table moonlights as tributary desk,
cable-knit cardigans draped across Ikea
chairs come as standard.
Spider-warding conkers mob
her laminated corners in vain.

She boasts a galley kitchen
with splashback tiling. Integrated
fridge/freezer, sunken spotlighting,
eye level oven (rarely used)
white goods to remain.

The master bedroom is in need of updating,
juliet balcony in state of disrepair.
Outside: She has a storm porch
with power and lighting,
chipped area to the side.

The estate agent’s daughter retains
many original features, coved
ceilings, double glazing throughout.
Unsuitable for first time buyers,
no ongoing chain.

The Estate Agent’s Daughter by Rhian Edwards is published by Seren (2020).

The post The Estate Agent’s Daughter appeared first on Standpoint.

Don Paterson’s Zonal is published by Faber.

The post The Overshoot appeared first on Standpoint.

That year we danced to green bleeps on screen.
My son had come early, just the 1kg of him,
all big head, bulging eyes and blue veins.

On the ward I met Grace. A Jamaican senior nurse
who sang pop songs on her shift, like they were hymns.
“Your son feisty. Y’see him just ah pull off the breathing mask.”

People spoke of her in half tones down these carbolic halls.
Even the doctors gave way to her, when it comes
to putting a line into my son’s nylon thread of a vein.

She’d warn junior doctors with trembling hands: “Me only letting you try twice.”
On her night shift she pulls my son’s incubator into her room,
no matter the tangled confusion of wires and machine.

When the consultant told my wife and I on morning rounds
that he’s not sure my son will live, and if he lives he might never leave the hospital,
she pulled us quickly aside: “Him have no right to say that—just raw so.”

Another consultant tells the nurses to stop feeding a baby, who will soon die,
and she commands her loyal nurses to feed him. “No baby must dead
wid a hungry belly.” And she’d sit in the dark, rocking that well-fed baby,

held to her bosom, slowly humming the melody of “Happy” by Pharrell.
And I think, if by some chance, I’m not here and my son’s life should flicker,
then Grace, she should be the one.

“Grace” from “A Portable Paradise” (Peepal Tree Press, 2019) © Roger Robinson, reproduced by permission of Peepal Tree Press

This poem is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

The post Grace appeared first on Standpoint.

The doors being shut

The moon’s soft gong
has sounded somewhere, dawn
air padding at it, and the dense
flurry rises, prickles and liquid,
chit and purr, and the breath
of soil, grass, blossom, the dressing
gown, drapery not yet burned
off by hardworking heat.

Walk into it, the cloud
discovered only in this
cold space, walking a tall
man’s length from the next
riser from sleep. This is
the cloud in which stones
grind fast, spark, and the first
fire jumps out above the sun.

Noli me tangere

I could have said, Don’t touch
me; never mind the doctrine
mandating your distance, why
should you have the right
to probe and roam wincing skin,
browsing to find the little
doorways into familiar pains?
I don’t want what I know,

I don’t want thick air,
the breathless damp neighbourhood
of voices and beating words,
the cloud swaddling and rubbing
with old practised polishing
weeps of a working thumb. A tall
man’s length from me, do you know
how I want that?

Heart burn

Standing here, weather
moves through us, drifts
like microbes or like neutrons
falling, clouds of prickling
song or picking nails. A tall
man’s length away, unmoving,
is the visitor, whether in touch
or not I can’t decide.

The moon, rinsed to a shred,
dissolves. Clouds are sucked
upwards. Light turns raw,
earth dries out. So what am I
hungry for, the globe of shining
distance, for the palm
of breath and liquid sound against
the face, for the thin, thin

Unseeable gap between breath
and breath, opening and clenching,
where it burns so hard, so
quick you don’t know hot
from cold or now from then
or I and it, the needle point
where the gong starts to blossom
and the air quivers with wounds and difference?

This poem is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

The post Easter Sunday, 2020 appeared first on Standpoint.

When the evil empire collapsed, Conquest’s exposure of the crimes of communism in his books was vindicated. He also skewered totalitarianism in his verse, epitomised by what the American poet David Yezzi called “perhaps the most brilliant limerick of the twentieth century”.

There was a great Marxist called Lenin,
Who did two or three million men in;
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

In similar vein, but less well-known, is “Garland for a Propagandist” (1967), on the lines of the “Vicar of Bray”.

In good old Stalin’s early days
   When terror little harm meant
A zealous commissar I was
   And so I got preferment
I grabbed each peasant and I said
   “Can there be something you lack?”
And if he dared to answer “bread”
   I shot him for a kulak.

For on this rule I will insist
Because I have the knack, Sir:
Whichever way its line may twist
I’ll be a Party hack, Sir!

Then Stalin took the Secret Police
   And gave it to Yagoda.
Many a Party pulse might cease
   But I stayed in good odour.
At all the cases that he brought
   I welcomed each confession.
And when he too turned up in court
   I attended every session.

When Yezhov took the vacant place
   And blood poured out in gallons
Thousands fell in dark disgrace
   But still I kept my balance
I studied, as the Chekist pounced,
   The best way to survival
And almost every day denounced
   A colleague or a rival

When Yezhov got it in the neck
   (In highly literal fashion)
Beria came at Stalin’s beck
   To lay a lesser lash on;
I swore our labour camps were few,
   And places folk grew fat in;
I guessed that Trotsky died of flu
   And colic raged at Katyn.

And when things once again grew hot
   From Western war-psychosis
I damned the “cosmopolitan” lot
   Because of their hook noses.
The Doctors should be shot, I cursed
   As filthy spy recruiters.
But Stalin chanced to kick off first
   —So I cursed their persecutors

Malenkov, now our Party’s head.
   Tried out a tack quite new, Sir,
Saying what had never been said
   —And so I said it too, Sir:
I boldly cried that clobber and scoff
   Should go to the consumer.
—But his overthrow soon tipped me off
   This was a Right-wing bloomer.

When Khrushchev next came boldly on
   Denouncing Stalin’s terror,
I saw that what we’d so far done
   Had mostly been in error.
My rivals all lay false framed
   Under the Russian humus
And their innocence I now proclaimed
   —Because it was posthumous.

But Khrushchev guessed his chances wrong
   And the present lot took over.
And I saw that though we’d suffered long
   At last we were in clover,
Now Stalin’s name I freely blessed
   A bonny, bonny fighter—
And I told the intellectual West
   When it’s right to jug a writer.

Now the Collective Leadership
   Of Brezhnev and Kosygin
I’ll back until some rivals slip
   By intricate intrigue in;
And, if the worst comes to the worst
   And they’re scragged in the Lubyanka,
I’ll see they get as foully cursed
   As any Wall Street banker

And on this rule I will insist
Because I have the knack, Sir:
Whichever way its line may twist
 I’ll be a Party hack, Sir!

Poems © the Estate of Robert Conquest, 2019, and excerpted from “Robert Conquest: Collected Poems” edited by Elizabeth Conquest, published by The Waywiser Press, £24.99

The post Robert Conquest: Garland for a Propagandist appeared first on Standpoint.

Along the road, a flicker in the dark,
the tarmac starts to swarm. It is not
tarmac, it is alive—a colony

of baby frogs, uprising, where the light
catches. Before, they were jelly, the kind
you shouldn’t stab at with a stick. Now

they are an army, grey and solemn;
elbows out, eyes front. They know
what they must do.

Catch them if you can, like water
in a cup of hand; be careful not to spill
the frogs. Chariot them across the murder-

road. That day, I saw a little one undressed
down to its guts out on the lane. Nothing
princely then. Back to jelly again.

Unkiss me back to that first frog-ness, my legs
and arms all wrinkled in the bath, floating
pale and fleshy, thick as reeds. I won’t mind.

I’ll hunker in my hedgerow, pulsing throat,
till jerky limbs are galvanised, strike out
ungracefully but sure—I’ll know I must

keep on. And if I falter, somewhere in the dark,
some giant hands will stoop to lift me up
and I will not look back, and they’ll be gone.

Mooring

“This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did—no miracle—but her best.”

  Charlotte Brontë,  Jane Eyre

There never was another choice for Jane;
out on the moor, she’s cageless and unclaimed.
What was the wind that whimpered through her ribs?
Not screaming in the night, not that wild thing,
only the small gasp of a church door, opening
forever, like a wound, and letting in
what never can get out. Jane got out.

Red Room, dead friend, you learn to be alone.
She broke the rope that bound them, bone to bone.
Umbilical, this tied and tearing love, unbeautiful
as moorland, hard and true. To find all that
and cut yourself away—no screaming rage, no blood,
just tell it plain. You do what you must
know you’ll never do: begin again.

Smash up the slate, break morning ice; fetch
water, hold your nerve—no compromise.
Jane was the girl who stood up on the chair,
that word albatrossing round her neck—liar.
She knows herself; no bird, no frightened wings,
though small and trembling, she’s feet set firm,
she’s earth and rocks and putting out of fires.

Reader, there never was a choice. The air
between these pages is sucked out each time
we watch her go. Jane Eyre lay down to die
out on the moor—it would not take her.
Her and him apart, and bleeding inward.
And still the thread, stretched, blind, across the hills
would find her out; would snare her on his voice.

Perhaps the whole world’s bound fast by such strings—
Charlotte, awake at Haworth, draws them in.

Magdalene

I

Woman, why are you crying? That voice
like tendons tearing. I’ve heard all things

that voice could do, I heard it reach its close, lose
its humanness, turn creature, screecher, stop.

I heard it stop.

II

The sky was skinned to pink. It was a kind
of skinning. A layer being cut and torn

away. They screwed those nails through—the crack
stung the backs of my eyes. Even then, the others softly spoke

of great white wings, an offering of light.
The rain was nails, and the wind was nails.

Their voices, they were nails, and their hands
lifting me away from that hard ground

taking me to take the body down. They saw it too.
They knew it dead. The thing they prayed for

I knew that I can’t bear. The worst has happened—
you’re digging in a wound that will not scab.

Leave it alone. There’s things we are not meant
to understand. There is a high shelf of glass

we must not touch. Don’t speak to me of angels.
Leave him alone.

III

                                 I saw his mother, see.
Down in the dirt—her face a perfect oval
of nothing at all. I’d always envied her.

I met him too late. The cardboard star,
the shepherds, three gilt men, their palms

heart-shaped and open; mystic gifts.
I never saw the baby wrapped in white,

bandaged like a wound in space and time, like Lazarus,
who I also never saw, and when they ask

I’ll tell them—the dead should not come back.
I’ll die believing that.

IV

                                                 The voice I hear
is close enough to touch. It feels like a touch.

Like tendons tearing. A hand inside my belly
clenching tight. I do not turn around, I don’t

look up. If I could have forever, I’d choose this.
A moment when it’s all still yet to happen.

They have taken him away. They have taken
his body away. It is not his body

I came here searching for. Some sort of comfort
in knowing it is over. I saw it sealed, felt the cold

creep in; the skin clean and pearlised, pale as stars.
There is no blood here, there are no screams.

If they ask me, I will tell them—he is gone,
he’s gone, just let him go. A gardener

may have his voice—but so may trees, and wind, and burning
leaves. His shadow falls between the sun and me. Woman,

why are you crying? It is a common thing
to think you see the dead. To think you hear them

gently call your name.

The post New poetry appeared first on Standpoint.

For half a lifetime, Clive James has lived with fear. It’s not the fear of death. That’s a done deal, so there’s no point fretting about it. “Stop worrying. No-one gets out of here alive,” he says. What does worry him is the dread suspicion that the obituaries, when they eventually come, will fail to give him credit for any of his achievements in the fields of literature, music and cultural criticism, including 40 books, 200 song lyrics and 50 years of dedicated devotion to the poetic muse.

Instead, they will focus, he fears, on the other side of his public role. He has seen the headlines in his dreams: “Japanese game show man dies.”

For millions, Clive will always be the amiable Aussie with the hooded, piercing eyes and the wry Cheshire Cat grin who entertained them for 20 years with shows like Saturday Night Clive, the Postcard From . . . travel documentaries and Clive James on Television. When this last series unearthed the spectacularly brutal Japanese “torture TV” game show Za Gaman —otherwise known as Endurance—British television crossed a watershed.

Alongside this television stardom, Clive was still producing thoughtful, incisive essays and literary criticism, still adding volumes to his Unreliable Memoirs and still writing poetry. Clive has always wanted to be taken seriously, to be judged on the quality of his work, rather than on his jokey public persona. When we were talking, at his home in Cambridge, after the publication of Loose Canon, my book about his songwriting career, I suddenly realised that no-one had attempted a proper critical assessment of his poetry. Given the slightest encouragement—which he generously provided—I felt that I should take on the task, if only to ensure that something of the sort had been done before his failing health took him away from us.

In 1983, the august London Review of Books featured a new poem, “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”, which is still a major landmark in Clive’s career. Over the years, it has found a place in many anthologies, and has also attracted some unexpected fans, including Australia’s Liberal Party Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. “I have seen it reported that he quotes “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” at dinner parties,” Clive told a startled interviewer from The Australian newspaper. “I therefore judge him to be the greatest democratic politician since Pericles.”

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered,
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book—
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week.
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine.
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook .
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots—
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment.
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.”

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error—
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

The poem is a masterpiece of well-honed schadenfreude, a hilarious, malicious, crowing, vindictive and irresistibly sadistic hymn to the sheer joy of witnessing a literary rival’s humiliation. Its enduring appeal stems partly from its subject matter, partly from its vibrant energy and gusto, and partly from an attention to detail in its execution that is easily underestimated by the casual reader.

Clive says that “The Book of My Enemy” was prompted by an actual experience of seeing a rival’s work stacked waist-high among the remaindered dross, though he has always refused to name names. “It was almost a religious experience,” he says. “It’s a sin to rejoice so much in someone else’s misfortune, to write out of vengefulness. But I did see these huge piles of deservedly unsold books. And I did enjoy it. It wasn’t my most worthy moment, but I probably had more fun writing this poem than anything else I ever wrote.”

“Injury Time” is less optimistic; there is no implication here that the plates can be kept spinning for ever as long as the dying man can keep on writing. Death has been deferred, but the final whistle will go at any minute. The tone of Clive’s poem is resigned and calm, tempered with a sense of bemused curiosity at the fact of his continued existence. The poem is tight, spare and underplayed. The sonnet form uses a strict, if unusual, rhyme scheme and the five-stress iambic pentameter lends a sense of quiet poise and authority.

Injury Time

This is a pretty trick the fates have played
On me, to make me think that I might die
Tomorrow, and then grant me extra time.
By now I feel that I have overstayed
My welcome. Every night I face the climb
Which might as well be straight into the sky:
The Himalayan slog upstairs to bed,
Placing my feet so carefully I seem
To tread on rolling logs, and there I dread
I come back down next morning, still not dead.
This nightly dream can turn out to be true
Only so long, and one day this notebook
Will lie untouched, to show how long it took
Silence to do what it was bound to do.

The striking central image of the poem—the “Himalayan slog upstairs to bed”, which “might as well be straight into the sky”—brings with it biblical echoes of the ascension, as well as emphasising how laboured and precarious this everyday business of climbing the stairs is for a man in Clive’s condition. And the detail of having to place each foot so tentatively, as if treading “on rolling logs”, has its own nightmare quality. We can’t easily imagine how someone as weakened and ill as Clive feels inside, but these few lines give us a momentary glimpse of how it must be when your strength and co-ordination have been drained away.

There is something neat, complete and classical about this sonnet, with its emotional and structural discipline and its elegant, measured execution. There is no sentimentality or polemicising. There are no extravagant lunges into dazzling wordplay, obscure cultural or  historical references or grungy street talk—none of the extremes that habitually delight some of Clive’s readers and enrage others. It is just a thoroughly well-made poem, taking us, vicariously, into aspects of living and dying that few of us will ever encounter for ourselves.

For Clive, John Donne is as great as an English poet can be without being Shakespeare. He talks of him as “my touchstone poet” and regards him as a vital, practical influence—not just appreciated as a historical giant, but drawn on directly as a source of energy and inspiration.

“Dream Me Some Happiness” pivots on the idea of “bad faith” (“Each kiss a Judas kiss, a double game”), gaily intertwining Donne’s adaptable religious convictions with his ambivalent attitudes towards more earthly relationships. No-one has ever doubted Donne’s ability to enchant both readers and potential lovers with his honeyed words, startling conceits and ingenious arguments. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that he—or at least the “I” in his songs and sonnets—is prepared to cheat outrageously to get his own way and quite happy to blame his own promiscuity on his mistresses’ loose morals.

Dream Me Some Happiness

John Donne, uneasiest of apostates,
Renouncing Rome that he might get ahead
In life, or anyway not wind up dead,
Minus his guts or pressed beneath great weights,

Ascribed his bad faith to his latest flame
As if the fact she could be bent to do
His bidding proved that she would not stay true:
Each kiss a Judas kiss, a double game.

Compared with him, the mental muscle-man,
Successors who declared his numbers rough
Revealed by theirs they found the pace too tough:
The knotty strength that made him hard to scan

Left him renowned for his conceits alone,
Figments unfading as the forms of death
Prescribed for Catholics by Elizabeth—
Tangles of gristle, relics of hair and bone.

Brought back to favour in an anxious time
Attuned to his tormented intellect,
By now he charms us, save in one respect:
Framing his women still looks like a crime.

We foist our fault on her we claim to love
A different way. Pleased to the point of tears,
She tells us that the real world disappears.
Not quite the Donne thing, when push comes to shove:

He wrote betrayal into her delight.
We have a better reason to deceive
Ourselves as we help her help us believe
Life isn’t like that: at least, not tonight.

However much we tell ourselves that the poem is not the poet, this is the John Donne we feel we know, the one voice of his era, other than Shakespeare’s, that speaks to us across the centuries with such an abundance of energy, wit, humour and human fallibility. Like the enigmatic, comically anxious and paradoxically modern-seeming faces of the 12th-century Lewis chessmen, Donne’s poems jolt us into the realisation that our distant ancestors were real flesh-and-blood people, much more like us than we generally assume. We want to think of the poems as autobiographical, because we want to know this man, with all his flaws and inconsistencies. In talking about the persona as if it were the man, Clive is only doing what every reader of Donne gets drawn into doing, including the many feminist critics for whom the songs and sonnets are a red rag to a bull.

The post Last lines: Clive James appeared first on Standpoint.

The birds are stoned with the humidity
in the sluggish air, the element
condensing on their feathers like beads.

It must feel to them as though their world’s
capsized—it does to me—the dark ground
of lavender clouds, their claws trailing

through the rain pooling in hollows of the sky
warm as an afternoon bath. Smaller air-dwellers
have it worse; lepidoptera, unable to keep

their powder dry, drape over a surface
like a woman sitting down, suddenly, in her dress,
on the steps of the house

with her hair sticking to her forehead, her shoes
lifting from her heels and falling away
like spring’s spent husks.

A collection of gnats become a clump,
all stuck together underneath a leaf,
a dragonfly’s sheeny tissue paper loses its ply

its translucence, everyone stripping off
and mopping themselves, shining with portent,
your fingers are slick on the back of my neck.

Try the trick with the glass, the one in which water
is pushed beyond its talent and doesn’t break.
Dare to hold that invert sea over your head.

Falconry

It is a machine for the power of extraordinary sight,
a drone, with hungry instincts at the controls,
thoughts of meat and capture.

When at twelve she launches the hawk
into the sky above the Alhambra
it is for information about heaven

corroboration of rumours.
From the hunting air she sees the land
parcelled by olive groves

and the land’s end, the drawn rule
of the inquisition, and then sea.
And when she flies further

understands the townships of water
marked by shining walls,
the shipping regions

blue-blue pieces tessellating
and slowly heaving. What more is there
to be learned? Already

she can see the map of her dominions
laid out in front of her
like a game of chess,

the black queen in her circlet
standing in the desert
like a bolt of lightning

a rent in the air, the fire-trail
of the plummeting hawk
as she stoops to the lark

and lifts it from the air. Talons,
sky whipping away, unbelief.
Sky tilts. Eye is filmy, landscape

falling past irrelevantly. The world contracts and
Juana receives the gold-eyed spear onto her fist,
admires its elegance with the lark,

turning it over, opening
its breast and glutting the palace gardens
with all that has been learned.

The post ‘Surface Tension’ and ‘Falconry’ appeared first on Standpoint.

He is training at the Yavoriv base.
Where I had to work as a translator.
Where I have not had the guts to work as a translator.
His name is Oleksandr.
He was married twice.
The first time they separated
because they couldn’t have a baby.
In the next marriage
there was not enough trust.
He is listening to my made-up story which does not even come close to the one of his
while lighting up my cigarette.
(Oh God, he is going to be cannon fodder!)
He says: yes, I am an adult.
He says: in the relationship the most important thing is trust.
He says: if you want, don’t be shy and dance.
He says: in autumn already at the front.
He says: I am an adult.
He exits and says: don’t be sad, I am coming back.
He buys me a coke with cognac.
He says: at the base there are many Germans, Americans, Lithuanians.
He says: I just love the electronic music here.
He asks if I don’t want more cognac into my coke.
He says: and there they fried a huge boar.
He asks what’s my name again: Ira or Vira¹,
And says: yesterday was your Name Day, congrats!
He exits and says: don’t be sad, I am coming back,
And you dance in the meanwhile, do not mind the crowd!
You know, I can barely hold myself while I’m writing this.
You know, while waiting for him all these five minutes, I have died already.
And he returns and wonders why I am not dancing.
Returns,
Pours more coke into my cognac, smiles and exclaims through this loud music:
(But I cannot hear his words).

¹ “Vira” means “faith” in Ukrainian. εἰρήνη is the Greek for “peace”. Eirene was the Greek goddess of peace and Irena (Ira) is a version of that name.

When the subject is me

What do I have to stress
when the subject is me
Unproud unselfish unsuperior
Undoing myself deconstructing myself
deluding myself
They told me in language class to
underline the subject with one line
The predicate with two
And the object with dots
I have always mistaken the last one
Confused it with a subject
Then broke the straight line
with an
eraser
It looked so ugly

In geography class
Due to the lack of knowledge on the topic
Each time
I started to underline those parts
of the sentence
Embarrassed to leave the classroom
when everyone was still writing
Embarrassed to be not writing
when everyone was still writing

Out of embarrassment I underlined
What I thought I knew

“I” in Ukrainian is “Я”
A beautiful letter I learned to draw better
than any other
I keep drawing it with my finger
Under the desk in the classroom on my
knee
Me
Me . . .
Anxiety coming
Anxiety going

In Ukrainian “I” is “Ja”
The assertive “Yes”
Anxiety going
I acknowledge you
I know, you’re Anxiety

And this is Me

What you are not
In syntax the subject is underlined with
one line
In phonetics they told me to never stress
it
Don’t stress the subject they say to an
Eastern European
Put an emphasis on the end of the
sentence
Don’t stress the subject
I, the Eastern European, tell my students
In syntax class. In gender class. Outside
of class—find the subject.

Underline it with one line
Assert your own singularity

But don’t stress it

Who am I to myself to get hold of myself?

Who am I to myself to get hold of myself
Like the water flows down in this canal
The canal is just a container to it
Or is it the Whole
(well mostly it stays unmoving)

Who am I in this moving body
Which sleeps when I want it to write
Which demands food and coffee
Amidst all my lectures
Which stays frozen
When my mind desires someone

Who am I in this frozen body

Who am I in this moving body
Which stays frozen when I command it to move

Went down the ice-cream shop
And bought a treat for it
Went by a lingerie shop
And bought a treat for it
Like for my lover

I wanted to write: “Who am I to myself to get hold of myself—a god, a devil, a slave owner, a
slave”
But I crossed it out
Eyes stared at the line with ridicule

For it’s not the Other
As well as I’m hardly the Other

It took a lifetime for all my parts to say my name in unison
The voice cracked in the noise and faded

You just turned back to listen
But that was it
And I can’t reproduce it

Home

shadows of gables on thick snow in deep sunlight
is what I picture
thinking of home
but that’s not true

I picture a day when
a language teacher
gave me a card with the word home
and I had to explain it

it was a bit too late
by then
I had moved from my hometown
so I asked for a different word

at home
or place where I stayed I laughed
at my own escape from explaining home
to my classmates

those at language courses
merely target audience
of the word home

what would I tell them?

1. You will be asked a lot about it
once you leave it

(Every day someone invites you to visit the past
With a smile you lie about having a busy evening)

2. You will be chased by the questioning feeling
which comes too late

(Turn back and sleep,
the conversation is over)

3. Just like a memory of the former possession
once you’re broke,

Your non-existing home composes you
but you’re too much of a future to think of origins

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