[XIV]
My father’s hand was larger of palm than mine
and shorter fingered, and the hairs on its back
were blond amid the grizzling of veins as though
it had previously been the claw of a bear but
instead it had handled the watchmaker’s fine devices
and worked in the ship’s bowels with hot gauges
as though he must calibrate the earth’s turning from
its core, or adjust it in an orrery till all ran well,
so when he was dead and I’d never hold it again
I wanted to photograph my father’s hand,
that capable creature, as it lay dead upon
the sheet – its heft, its knocks, its tendons, that still
held his intelligence, its tenderness and force.
But it had already taken on the gravity
of the depths, as though glimpsed in the wreck
of a sunken vessel, and would not submit
to record; as though to return with this report
would set the blood to bubbling in my veins.
*
Lion in Sidecar
It’s a black and white wall of death,
breathless with blur: you can almost hear
the fleet trundle of the motorcycle wheels
on the cheap plywood planks –
it’s a barrel of roar.
The lion is really getting into it
at ninety degrees to vertical:
leaning into the rush of air,
eyes slitted, mane flaring like
the Sun in a speeded-up, unhinging orrery,
like Jean Marais in the underworld’s gale.
Begoggled Heurtebise bears him bravely, always
upward, though the lion knows
in these realms up is always
down. Does the lion know
where he is going? Does the lion know
where we are going? Our animal stares straight ahead
as the cycle ascends to the watchers along the brim.
*
Byron’s Mask
for the Venetian Carnevale
looked very like the face and hair
of Byron, as though he had
a Lord Byron’s head-shaped onion
for a head, and could simply pull
skin after skin off, each revealing
a slightly smaller Lord Byron’s head
until the final tiny head, still
with Byron’s features perfectly picked out
like a Patryushka Giovanni Don-doll
and, when this last shallot of Lordy Gordon
was shed, as though he would walk around
with no head at all. In fact
it was in this manner that he wrote all his best poems.
*
Explaining Irn Bru to the English (after the 2015 General Election)
As the jaws of Scotland swing at the Swing
like a creaky pub-sign in a Jekyllish wind;
as Scottish Labour hide oan a nithin, the oatless ask:
what is Irn Bru, really? Is it safe, really?
Is it Presbyterian perspiration? Is it liquid rust?
Is it produced by an irony brewery, really?
How do you girder a loin? How do you
guard your enamel or your porcelain?
It is the sippoleth, slipping down like sandpaper;
it tastes of mechanically retrieved bubblegum
the dog consumed, producing a Montgolfier arse balloon.
The glass slipper version ate through the sole.
It’s différance in a tumbler. It’s indifference in a tumbler,
The carbonated faddomer of all hangovers, electoral
and other. Too teuch for orthography, it is an elixir
that would tak the lacquer aff the truth.
Drink this, it says, the transmogrifier of English
into pish, and thirst nae mair for thistle milk
or Islington. This is the Aperol of the North,
the Harpic of the Glens. Oor A&E is your A&E.
from Executive Quatrains/Captain My Captain
2 the misrule
As Caligula’s horse takes up the reins of power
in his puckered grapefruit of an arse;
as the Capitol’s sky responds with a fools’ gold shower
and this cul on the Hill expels foul gas;
as his little Goebbels berates the post-soothsayers
from the press room of the Whitened Sepulchre
for numbering the Bacchae in the public squares
on behalf of his dyspraxic sulker;
Spooks of America attend to their Gibberer-in-Chief
while he turns his toxic thumblings down,
suspending his million minions’ disbelief
while the horseshit trickles, thin and brown.
*
4 if in doubt, bomb
Whether travel-bannin, health-denyin, or buildin his Wall,
poor Trumpo can’t cut no evil deals at all.
Thank MOAB for a swing at that good ol’ death penalty –
just gotta scale its execution up to the planetary.
‘Kill the Arctic, drink its oil
Trouble rubble and double the spoils;
Fuck Korea, can’t back down –
The world is not a big enough town.’
Although our monsters may count up the ways
to economically kill their millions –
by bombs or gas, famines or climate change,
beneath their nails remains the one vermillion.
‘Orbán, Erdogan, Putin, Xi –
These are the guys that think like me.
Grab Le Pen and come what May,
The world is mine to sign away.’
*
5 strait is the visit
Trumpo and the Queen enthroned
upon a golden barge
went steaming down the Thames to see
the narwhal called Farage.
‘Is that a dick upon his head
or is he pleased to see us?’
‘We’d really far prefer it if
you’d cease to yank and knee us.’
‘The Earl of Leicester, we recall
took such-like liberties,
but come what may, our stomach’s proof
to blandishments like these.’
‘I got no guilt, so give me gold
and never mind the plots,
We’ll never save South Thanet
if we don’t pile on the knots.
‘By Margate Sands, I understand
we’ll connect our hands in prayer –
But until then, sweet Wall, lala,
all’s Mar-a-lago, Leia!’
*
7 der totentango
Pity the Trumpo, neck-high in swamp
whence even Steve Bannon has fled:
if you once sit down with Satan’s Mugwump
you will shit yourself with dread.
Spare a gawp for the GOPlites, dingling like berries
clung to Don Dungbeetle’s arse –
fearful of uteri, melanin, fairies,
then finding there is something worse.
Shall der Totentango circumvent
a waltz with the Daily Stormer?
Dance away the excrement:
Baby put himself in a corner.
Let the squirrel dance with the polecat,
the muskrat with the skunk;
now the Republican frugs with the Fascist
like a hooker must with a drunk.
Contents List
3 Fathership Glosa
Good Makar
16 Cuttlefish Bone
17 Nightfishing
20 Broughty Ferry Beach: a renga
23 Balgay Hill
24 Blackness Caganer
25 Ghost Bowling
26 The Dundee Eve
28 Clouds at Night
30 Tay Nocturne
31 The Road Bridge
32 The Three Flies
34 Tay Lightning
36 Beach Terrace
36 i ‘The swans glow grey in the night harbour’
36 ii ‘Woken by a ghost helicopter’
37 iii ‘Swans in the smirr’
37 iv ‘Through some error when I wake up’
38 v ‘The occasion of a death’
38 vi ‘The buildings in the river’s reflection’
39 vii ‘The wind’s inventing whiteness again’
39 viii ‘Why do we think of them at all, the dead’
40 The Continuity
41 June Dolphin
42 Kafka Eskimo
44 Rain Habbies
45 Burns’ Night Impromptu
46 Physic
47 Bregus
49 Salary
50 The Swans at Broughty Ferry Beach
52 Sunday Morning Improv
55 The Wreck of the Javanese Princess
Algos
59 The Tortoise
61 Kalighat
63 Ganesh is Reading
64 The Losers’ Table
65 Four Songs in the Guangling Style, and a Signature
65 i ‘Wine Madness’
65 ii ‘Wild Geese on a Sandy River Bank’
65 iii ‘Confucius after the Death of his Favourite Student’
66 iv ‘The Woodcutter’s Song’
66 v ‘Three Day Monk’
67 Nanjing Nightboat
68 The Two Haircuts
70 An Exotic Dream of Leonora Carrington
71 Teatro Orfeon
74 Keaton in Space
75 Lion in Sidecar
76 Mother Goo
79 The Fathership
Jesus Mary and Jetsam 1
82 Verbotentotentanz, i ‘At first, owing to the absence’
83 A Jesus of the Moon
84 Emmaus, 1997
85 A Jesus of the Mammoths
87 The Muriels
89 A Jesus of the Beetles
91 The Lost Poem
92 Verbotentotentanz, ii ‘Meh skeleton twin’
The Wreck of the Fathership
95 i ‘My father was never old’
95 Boat
96 iii ‘The yellow man was doomed and knew it’
97 The Assembling of the Crew
98 v ‘He held up his hand and we watched it tremble’
98 The Last Voyage
100 Hopkinsian 1
101 viii ‘Eating sibling-quick, too socially’
102 The Discovery
104 Hopkinsian 2
105 xi ‘He approached it methodically as though’
105 The Telling of the Wives
106 Hopkinsian 3
107 xiv ‘My father’s hand was larger of palm than mine’
108 The Report
109 Hopkinsian 4
110 xvii ‘I remember the nurse saying ‘Goodbye’
110 The Burning of the Mona
112 xix ‘I keep seeing them wrestle you into’
112 xx ‘Grant them peace, Patron of the sea’
Dundee Doldrums
115 23rd Doldrum Sailors’ Graveyard
116 24th Doldrum ‘Thi Toun as thi homunculus o us’
117 25th Doldrum ‘Hunkirt wee man in blae skeh blue’
118 26th Doldrum ‘When the ghaists o thi dinged doon’
119 27th Doldrum ‘Tae loup intae nithin’
120 28th Doldrum ‘Fellini fiss oan thi Nummer 73’
121 29th Doldrum The Fireman’s Daughter
122 30th Doldrum Snugs
123 31st Doldrum Cloud City
Executive Quatrains/Captain my Captain
126 1 inaugural rain/‘In an attempt to circumvent terrible times’
127 2 the misrule/‘Language you were always going to tell us’
128 3 a gowfbaa welcomes a bawbag tae balmoral/‘What is it like this to imagine someone’
129 4 if in doubt, bomb/‘To listen as ekphrasis is an act of praise’
130 5 strait is the visit/‘The high desert for your ocean floor’
132 6 golfo de la empatía/‘You knew from the inside of childhood’
133 7 der totentango/‘The mess of ages has got into the messages’
134 8 sonetto per trumpo solo/‘Caged in renegado cabin’
135 9 memento aurantium/‘The great moment keeps passing’
Jesus Mary and Jetsam 2
138 Verbotentotentanz, iii ‘It’s braa when ye’re deid’
140 Helen in the Bardo
144 On Napkins
146 The Municipal Labyrinth
147 On Cutlery
149 Letter to Cath Jenkins
151 On Brown Paper Bags
153 Verbotentotentanz, iv ‘This thing you’re in’
155 Death Wullie
Nostos
159 Cold City
160 The Sleepers
161 Byron’s Mask
161 Follow Me
162 Fish-fight at the Basilica Cisterns
163 The Dream of the Airport
164 Pagomenos
166 Portokáli
167 Zone
168 How to Drink Ellenikós Kafés in Emprosneros
169 Kombolói
171 Maroudianá
173 Whose English Is It Anyway?
Bad Makar
176 Tyne Valley Section
180 North of the Book
182 The Calotype
183 To a Ploughman
184 The Parliaments of Birds
186 Showing Sharon Olds the Carcasses in St Andrews
187 Kirsty Wark on Broughty Ferry Beach, Or, An Indy Ref Ode
189 Explaining Irn Bru to the English
190 The Farewell to Jim Murphy (et al)
192 To a Rat
194 Bad Makar McGonagalliana
194 i The Resurrection of William McGonagall
194 ii McGonagall and the Burns Statue
195 iii McGonagall as a Dog
195 iv McGonagall and the Baxter Park Pavilion
196 v Ode tae Yet Anither Dundee Railway Station
197 vi Address to the Girders
197 vii Broughty Ferry Blackout
198 viii Address to the Dundee V&A
201 Ode to the USS Discovery (Season One)
203 The Couthier
204 Undeed
206 Mastercannibal
209 Owed to Groucho’s
210 Remains of Doggerland
212 Rogues Reparcelled
214 The Fall of Brexitopolis
216 Gunlandia
218 The Nine Trades Welcome You to the City of Refuge
220 Il Futuro
222 Dirt Bath
225 The Giantess
