when we woke, snowblind and feeble,
to the inconceivable
needleslip of blood,
the drift of cotton
smirched with heartbreak
and the panic of jackdaws
beating in our eaves.

It is the size of a peach stone,
rucked and wet threaded;
then of passion fruit,
a clutch of smeared eyes
in a hammered hull.

It consoles itself
in the interspersed darkness
of ambulance journeys,
combs out the braids of sea noise,
listening for sirens.

It swells to a hush
just shy of the solstice.
We lie in wait, for a skip in the trace,
for the handsbreadth left to cross

before love can breathe.

It isn’t beauty that brings you here, or not quite;
traipsing up into the last of the weather
day after day, carrying the cold home like a crime.

The hush in the hills is neither kind nor unkind;
just a stark breath, the soft taint of loam
in its teeth, singing vespers of feather and bone.

At most, there is a sparing muteness, a chaffinch
welt of sun caught in a claw of ash,
a throb of ease as thought whitens to its element.

More often, the sought thing stands wary, keeps
to the cross-hatched cloister of pines,
muttering aloft unseen as your footfall disturbs

a small kill, its ravened handful of brightness
all unfletched, a scarce lacquer
of scarlet deepening on the fingernail stones.

It isn’t beauty, exactly, but something sister close, gathering
galaxies in its patient waltz, folding
the seeded wind around you, knowing you for its own.

All this is happening for a reason,
or it is not. Take this apple,
as we once did, exact from
its lip dark bell a white,
a staring gape, a void,
a love staved in, its long pangs at last passing.

As well to reproach the light
spearing aslant King’s College
that May Week, vaulting the Backs
to a body in exultant flexion,
cleaving the clean flow, spilling
upon your new grace, disclosing all the world withheld.

You laughed, you know, when,
bicycling to the Hut or a picnic,
I dismounted a moment before
the chain, in slipped sequence,
came unfast, wanting a part
I did not have, that could not be had in war time.

So it is with codes, which instruct
their very unravelling; before
a mark is scratched, the other
must possess you, comprehend you
again from alpha and beta, teach you
to turn as he might, to feel his twist of purpose.

Yes, it is happening for a reason,
or it is not, a man is sitting
unseen in that room, or merely
an idiot tissue of ordained things
set in train when our plain text
was written, when we were first made to be broken.

September 11, 2011

I.

Even the Long Island Expressway
that far north, feels lulled and rapt,
a home movie, Eisenhower colours,
asphalt still to come, pine barrens
close, the quiet seep of amber,
wanting everything back,
back the way it was.

But you feel the quickening of
what’s coming, the westbound torrent
of purpose, eight lanes, tugging
multiplexes, malls alongside
unshadowing woods, lush organs,
bloodstreams of taillights
surging to a splendid heart.

So, you thread exit to exit,
leave Little League parks,
the Kinko’s violet and vacant
from West Babylon to Jericho,
slip into a spreading evening
of setting tables and wondering
who could be calling now.

Queens gathering around you,
gantries, weathered stacks, grimed
brick massing softly, sparing
offcuts of petal tender sky, then
495 ribboning suddenly aloft
your heart with it, because,
because—the chorus of crystal

the forest of crowns, the host,
the nest of light, the dreamed world.

II.

I came with the many, crossing
as soon as I could, easy-limbed
then, unencumbered, striding
avidly from East Fifty-First to
where you reared, blank above all,
unsurpassable geometries displacing
fathoms full of silky heaven.

Later, huddled with another,
sheltering beneath your feet,
leaving with keepsakes, a pair of
trinkets, all we could afford
but imperishable, for all that,
from a perished place, and
guarded still, like love itself.

We took the elevator, ushered
a liveried girl, her plump name gone
to the utmost gallery, joining
zombies of slow awe, slouching from
the brazen exaltation of midtown
to a seaplane crumpling minutely
all that glimmering Hudson skin.

How did we come to stand there,
any of us, how was magic sustained?
Steel is simple, making bold claims
upon bedrock, and calculus weaves
gowns for dancing with wind.
But we bred the incalculable too.
Perhaps the towering things were these:

cumuli of rampant dreams, elaborations,
thunderheads of avarice, of magnificence.

III.

Even if I had the psalms to summon,
it would not be my place, not this place.
I have no In Memoriam, no team colours,
no wristbands, no Santa Muerte
to set out carefully in the opal air,
changing at Penn Station, keeping
your eyes down, and saying nothing.

We have so filled the void, furnished
the very air with such intricacy
of signals, of traction, hidden workings
that the spheres are carved, latticed.
Those who want to will find a way
will clamber quietly among the seraphs,
to wound at ease the trusting sky.

Trudge quietly, now above ground
and take your place at the chainlink.
Disdain the hawkers, wordlessly
make your way and remember—
deep calls to deep, in the roar
of your waterfalls—your place.
Be still now. Remember your place.

Nothing is so complete, and
occupies such space, you could
scoop it in profane handfuls, drink it.
I waited too long to come, forgive me.
I have been so long coming—
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

So long, bringing nothing, wanting—
wanting more than anything—to begin again.

Done right, it is a footfall–torn awry.
A stone, hinged from known earth,

gives onto unsuspected air,
pitches you in a half-breath
somewhere under the world.

In the picture on the left,
a healthy volunteer begins the day
with a brisk wake up there’s
something I’ve got to tell you.

Everything you see happens
under spiralled conditions.
Patients are free to leave me
alone, this can’t be happening.

Turning to page twenty-nine,
you will see the doctor sharing
a choking sensation with a man
of inwardly healthy appearance.

The subject is given ample time
to come to terms and conditions
and any unseeing panic is
thereby skullfully voided.

After a baleful examination,
the penitent takes a shriek
in the waiting room while his
form is tearfully depleted.

In the lament of adverse reaction,
make a small incision just below
October and carefully drain away
any silly misunderstandings.

The picture on the right is of
a man who just wandered in
without an atonement and
whose wife is in the scar.

He wants to see you, he says
he wants a second epiphany,
but you really should be going
home, before it gets too dark.

By midsummer, her nights
are livid. She hears,
now as then, the water
speak in its trough of sleep.

But now, too, she hears
what cannot be other
than the thick pulse
of the wings of dragons.

For what else could set
fires in the foundation
of the sky, could have borne
him away and held him?

“For I was in the nude,

The old Queen disapproved,

But people laughed and asked

for autographs.“

– Pet Shop Boys, “Dreaming of the Queen”.

It is, we have always understood, an ineradicable quirk of British consciousness (or, more precisely) of English consciousness. The English suffer from recurring dreams in which a visit from the Queen is either imminent or underway and the dreamer is seized by anxiety. The best china is broken. The antimacassars are stained. He is inexplicably naked.

The Pet Shop Boys gave these anxieties a mischievous tweak in the song “Dreaming of the Queen”. The Queen’s disapprobation is swiftly dispensed with. People laugh and ask for autographs. The song unfolds into an allegory of AIDS deaths (“there were no more lovers left alive”) that manages to be both frivolous and moving, and leaves us with the gentle suggestion that our superficial anxieties, just as we might have suspected, have little value except insofar as they lead us to contemplate our deeper ones.

Strands of this song floated in my aural consciousness last week during the state visit by Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland. We had given way, it seemed, to neuroses of a kind not dissimilar to those mocked by Tennant and Lowe.

Discussions of these neuroses tended to open in apparently reasonable terms. Would the visit go “without a hitch”? Would demonstrations lurch into ugly confrontations? Would the Gardaí mishandle the security challenge? Would there be gaffes or faux pas? Such concerns are understandable, at least on the part of those–civil servants in the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs, senior members of the Garda, the Government, the President, and so on–who are paid, at least in part, to worry about such things. For the rest of us, depending on how closely we can bear to watch the current conduct of our national affairs, they are–surely?–matters of more or less mild interest.

Or so I had believed.

For our interest in the minutiae of the planning of the Queen’s visit, it appeared, was avid. While the “exact details of her itinerary”, it was patiently explained to us, would be kept secret “for security reasons” (an appeal to the authority of the State’s security agencies that seems never to require elaboration), certain tidbits were distributed to those who hungered. Most of these were either vague (the Queen’s visit would extend beyond Dublin), dull (the British Foreign Secretary would be among her entourage) or presumptuously sententious (“symbolic acts”, we were assured, would take place at sites of national importance, as though this symbolism could be assigned before we had even witnessed these “acts”).

Poor as they were, these morsels were the staple diet of our major newspapers and of RTÉ, our national broadcaster, in the weeks before the visit. Accompanying them in almost every serving was the sauce of controversy. “Controversy”, of course, is perniciously attractive to our media. The very mention of the word can lend to an otherwise drab story a nimbus of excitement and currency. “Controversy” allows stories to be presented in terms of conflict. Representatives from each “side” can be marshalled into studios or op-ed pages, and their exchanges can usually be relied on to exhibit some degree of unpleasantness or rancour before too long. Meanwhile we (we readers, we listeners, we gawking bystanders) can also be relied on to indulge our strong, primordial impulse to stop and have a look if there seems to be a fight breaking out.

To what extent this “controversy” existed before discussions of the Queen’s visit began to dominate our public discourse is open to debate. It is a characteristic of our intricately symbiotic connections with the media we consume that it is often difficult to discern causes and effects, to tell whether certain voices are loud because they carry the amplitude of true importance or because they have been magnified to a shriek by a feedback loop.

In any case, it may not matter. The “controversy”, we were told, was over the timeliness of the visit. On one side, it seemed, were those who opposed the visit on the grounds that it was Too Soon. Our historical grievances were either too profound or too recent for such a gesture of rapprochement to be countenanced. In some of its formulations, this argument was persuasive. It is difficult, for instance, to declare the struggle for civil rights in the North altogether over when the conclusions of an inquiry into collusion by the RUC in the murder of solicitor Rosemary Nelson are only now reaching us. In seems less tenable, though, to argue that a British monarch cannot be entertained in Dublin while Ireland remains partitioned. The Belfast Agreement of 1998, which was strongly endorsed by referendum all over the island, clearly prescribed the only circumstances in which partition may be reversed, circumstances that are unlikely to arise for at least a generation.

Opposing the Too Sooners, of whatever faction, were the advocates of Maturity. Our colonial suffering, this side maintained, was long over. Our two cultures were intertwined. Our economies were interdependent. We all had cousins in Camden Town. We were bonded by our shared obsession with the arrangement of Cheryl Cole’s hair. If the Too Soon argument tended to harden into fundamentalism, the Maturity counterargument seemed constantly on the verge of collapsing into empty circularity. Those who objected to the royal visit must “move on”. Why? Because we, as a nation, have Moved On.

Many in the Maturity camp seemed fixated, too, on the notion of decorum as a manifestation of national sophistication. We would behave decorously towards the Queen, they insisted, because that is what the citizens of mature countries do. To stint in any of the niceties of high national occasion would be to betray our collective callowness, in much the same way as failing to sit up straight in church. This substitution of obligatory obsequies for a meaningful concept of civic propriety is especially silly.

For one thing, those who ended up meeting the Queen were a largely self-selecting group. Anyone who felt that an awkward half-curtsey and a minute or two of strained prattle might rupture their composure simply wouldn’t bother turning up. But the deeper misapprehension is of the significance of politeness and social ceremony in themselves. That these things are unusually prominent in British life has been well rehearsed, and excites both admiration and alienated distaste. But the British have had a very long time to sit around in country estates deciding upon the right way to cut a banana with a fork. Even without pointing out that many of these country estates were built with the proceeds of colonial enterprise, it seems obviously deluded to conflate courtliness with virtues of any kind.

Tedium aside, there are two principal objections to the debate, and to the spurious dichotomy from which so much coverage of the Queen’s visit was spun out. The first is that it was almost entirely irrelevant. By the time it took place, the visit had been decided upon by the Irish and British governments. Our President had issued a formal invitation. No one was waiting to see if we, collectively, were “okay with it” and nothing, short of full-scale rioting, was likely to prevent it. Because state visits, of course, are affairs of state. States move towards them and orchestrate them in accordance with the slowly converging currents of their national interests. For all their pomp and the emotions they incite, they are something states simply have to attend to, in more or less the same way that individuals have to remember to return invitations to dinner parties. Indeed, the diplomatic calculus involved is hardly all that different.

If we seemed to forget this, we may be assured that Queen Elizabeth II did not. A veteran of over five decades of state visits, she has placed thousands of wreaths at thousands of memorials and implacably endured so many displays of national styles of dance that she probably wishes there were a mermaid kingdom she could one day call on. She performs these functions because she believes it to be her duty. She is the nominal head of an enormous apparatus of state. She is also the personal owner of staggering wealth and property, much of which was accumulated by her royal forebears in a distinctly pre-democratic manner. In return for her immense wealth and privilege, she has to go and do a lot of standing around in chilly courtyards while people salute at her. That’s the gig.

The second objection to the debate and its coverage concerns its displacement of the serious. Let’s leave aside for now the obvious fact that events of genuine importance, events that should have had a much greater claim on both our attention and our emotions, continued to occur unabated in Libya, Sudan, Palestine, Syria and China, to name just a few. Roll calls of this kind can seem both trite and didactic, but sometimes the preponderance of distraction makes them unavoidable. The point, however, is that the quality of the coverage of the Queen’s state visit displaced even serious consideration of that very event.

And this idea of displacement is not just a metaphorical means of condemnation. It is an editorial reality. For every article in which someone celebrated, in ecstatic and entirely impressionistic terms, the “new phase of maturity” heralded by the royal visit, a judicious assessment of our complex and nuanced diplomatic relationship with Britain was sacrificed. For every incontinent denunciation of those “stuck in the past”, a clear-headed examination of how the British-Irish axis will influence our means of national financial recovery–if we should manage that–was spiked. These more serious pieces were probably never written, of course. They were probably never even commissioned. But this makes the displacement all the more complete.

The visit by Queen Elizabeth to Ireland was important, but it was important for pragmatic and prosaic reasons. It was important because it helps, in a modest way, to secure the continuing benefits of political normalisation in the North. It was important because an open and unsuspicious diplomatic relationship with Britain is strongly in our national interest. It was important because the public perception of a successful visit in Britain and elsewhere may boost our tourism market and help to dispel negative impressions that have persisted since the financial crisis began.

But it was not the culmination of any grand historical process, though the qualified success of the peace process was a necessary condition for it. To say otherwise is to slip into credulous teleology and hyperbole. And, of course, there was never anything to be quite so anxious about. The china was exquisite. The antimacassars were immaculate. We were not inexplicably naked.

And even if we had been, the Queen would still have been polite. “How interesting,” she would have remarked, maintaining eye contact all the while. “How very interesting.”

By now, he was curled up
inside himself,
a cat that crept somehow
atop an engine

for the vanishing heat.

The water in the vase
went unchanged.
Beneath the tide marks
survived a small pool

of milky, dreamy jade.

Keeping his eyes closed,
he decided that
he had simply resumed
his stool at that bar

in San Sebastián, was it?

Spreading injured fingers
over gentle zinc,
ordering something sweet
while the sky outside

blossomed, flared, dimmed.

At dawn, they snap the curtains back,
disclose your uneluded fate;
the view, the patient sound.
They turn your chair, as if you might
neglect to contemplate a world
of failed light, purity.

If there occurred, since yesterday,
in the domain of the grey-winged,
a surge of lurid life,
it has been quelled, order restored,
a peace of ash and quicksilver
that will outlive winter.

Yes, yes, you know your nephew comes,
he takes the train from Elsinore.
Why, what would hinder him,
a guiltless youth of quite fourteen,
his lungs a pair of samovars,
from fidgeting through tea

as you try to acquit yourself
of the last tinctures of the day,
Mama asks how you do.
As he brings out the photographs—
the gardens, nectarines and lace—
the mute shore will hold you.

What if you approached, as you dreamed,
the jetty, swagged with bird-soiled ice,
the ancient pleasure boat,
the deaf gulls shrieking your escape,
the letters from home clutched by wind,
disturbed, at last, the sea?