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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781910392119 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Enitharmon Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2015 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Jerusalem Deleted
By Simon Jarvis
Enitharmon Press
Copyright © 2015 Simon JarvisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-910392-79-9
CHAPTER 1
1
Julie was waiting for me in the west.
I had been thrown up on the shingle spit
close to the Magnox plant : so the first test
was make it past the clutter through the grit
cleaving to earth there where a little nest
2
past the degraded cliff line showed its lit
abandoned rolling stock, and gay weekenders
settled sedately, once, for gentle benders,
now quite destroyed. Behind me rose the sky
in grey polyphonies : the dawn came breaking
3
only so far as it should there let fly
shade after shade of monochrome whose quaking
plate cracked a little where a working eye
might at a stretch discern without mistaking
no pink nor red, but a less massive black.
4
The rain fell steadily; the cinder track
offered its open curve, from which the metal
had long been stripped, and I got up to walk.
The finer sediment began to settle
eastwards again behind me : walls of chalk
5
were thirty miles along the coast; a nettle
bit at my wrist. I knew I must not talk.
Where and whenever I should once be found
it was essential I should stand my ground.
A Monophysite 4 x 4 declaimed
6
its power of engine in the distance : two
or three miles away. I clutched at the renamed
dockets and documents explaining who
I was not. Where the truck exclaimed
it passed, eventually, to silence; blue
7
began to make its shy way through the grey
into the empire of repulsive day.
Think, as you read this tale, I am a traitor,
I glorify recalcitrance and terror;
think me the fundamentalist fixator
8
who fortifies himself in proven error.
Of the bright past deluded disbelator
I from the stone age stand up quick with terror
inflexibly committed to a song :
this is illegal, and its sounding wrong
9
stains the whole poem from its lawless heart.
Dymchurch lies twenty miles from Trebizond,
the flat-pack capital of matching art.
The distribution ribs which sit to bond
slabs to their concrete beams, transfer a part
10
of each stress to the next, whose splicing wand
holds the whole house of fractures up as strong
as line beats line back in a complex song
by twelves and fifties. Monophysite armour
kept well that citadel : the perfect jets
11
patrol its skies now, and each peasant-farmer
who hears them soar across him when he sets
his second foot down, knows the counter-charmer
sucking the juice out of the field, and lets
his face fall flat into the sterile earth.
12
The drainage channels in this time of dearth
ran with a trickle, while across Denge Marsh
(the Danger Area just to my left)
I crept to Lydd along the vanished path.
That ancient settlement was now bereft
13
of shop or post office. A sharp and harsh
claxon reverberated; packs of Dreft
sagged in the rainfall where the laundromat
had stood before the Regency; all that
lay in the far past now, since the deserted
14
Ortho-madrasa had been held and trashed.
From old All Saints a wedge had been excerpted
where the south aisle had had a great cut smashed
into its stone side, and the font, converted
into an ashtray, offered its abashed
15
gadrooned stone stem and marble bowl to where
the sun shone in now from the empty air.
I climbed in through the hoodmoulds and grotesques.
I had expected to meet Belmont there,
or had been told to. The redundant desks
16
bore rain-disintegrated scripts; each dear
labour of copying the chosen texts
stood incomplete at Q. It was too clear
that work had ended suddenly. I hid
down by a ragstone pier then, since I did
17
not know where Belmont was; he might be late.
The staggered battlemented transoms were
secured in fragments to a board. A date
left on an envelope. do not defer.
Seals and stamps proper to the withered state
18
on all this stationery could not confer
the least authority. This was the last
lost letter left here somewhere in the past.
"Do not proceed. Our churches are all burnt,
"our saints beheaded, and our cadres broken.
19
"Each small amenity which our work earnt
"is taken up into the weightless token.
"Turn back now, comrade : what you must have learnt
"stays with you till the land again be woken.
"We fly now westwards to the soviet
20
"far beyond Erzerum, where we may yet
"hold out a little; as for you, turn back
"across the fulls of shingle to the sea."
Khoda had warned me I might find this. Slack
for three long minutes, I recalled how he
21
had sketched his clumps in red across the map
to show those frost ponds of resistance he
hoped might congeal there. I returned the cipher
to my breast pocket, and the now deciphered
letter I chewed on for a little minute
22
until it was digested. Westbroke Ho
tonight, by darkness, then, at last, begin it,
not now crawl back : press on through hell as though
there were some saving element within it,
a small band in the shaw, a troop hid low,
23
a strong secreted or unknown platoon
reading the faint scripts underneath the moon.
A consultation with a planisphere
showed at this date and time the starry twins
traversed by Venus, as the failing year
24
lashed at the promontory. Opened tins
littered the wet dykes, and just west of here
I found some supper in the several bins
stacked with fresh food. The old A 259
ran to the north here, and its brilliant line
25
sang with a rumble strip. The rheostats
dimmed all the dash lights where the convoys crawled
west to the mountains, and inserted cats
glimmered a little; the wet tarmac sprawled
its curve across the marsh. The road left flats
26
stretched out behind it, as the loud trucks hauled
the Monophysite reinforcements through.
It was a little after ten past two.
Except for the suppressed glow by the road
the night was total. At the draining trough
27
waters fell out from where the Humvees strode
in languid caution. A green spark flew off
and out towards the dark marsh, where it showed
the virid halo of an implant moth.
Golden electrodes in its insect brain
28
brought it a furlong from me. I refrained
from breathing for twelve seconds, while it lingered
as though suspecting that a threefold thought
hung in the air there, and its driver fingered
deep in Nevada and his desert fort
29
his dread that some few orthodox malingered
still in this lowland. A framed tomahawk
clung to the wall behind him, where John Wayne
was also portraitured in brown : a vein
stood from his temple, a facsimile
30
of honour's signature, and John looked out
with rueful humour at the site where he
need never draw his pistol, nor once doubt
the kill chain executed. Thus set free
by this old master, the moth's pilot let
31
his grip a little slacken on the stick.
The moth found nothing, and its live soul crept
closed by five senses to the road, where thick
washes of mud and gravel from the wet
tarmac fell fieldwards. I breathed in; was sick.
32
This had become routine as urination.
The living creatures' every cerebration
was web-connected to a little grommet
wired to the deep base, and that anxious heart
searching for evils. So what made me vomit
33
was total fear, but also that this art
could bind a life into its little sonnet
so that no subtlety might tell apart
the soul from silicon, nor know to draw
a vessel backwards from the charnel shore.
34
The regiment advanced into the west
leaving a purer darkness; in the sky
light cirrhus was invisible; the best
of night was gone now, and the sorry eye
offered to close itself. As they progressed
35
towards the remnant orthodox, so I
crawled over to a nearby ditch and wept.
When I had done this I lay down and slept.
The submarines lay dormant off Batum.
I woke and made towards the silhouette
36
risen before me in the waning gloom.
The cusped reticulated windows set
into the chancel had been smashed; a bloom
of turquoise fungus on one pew beset
its oak with gaudy colours; there was room
37
here for a little library of destroyed
quartos and folios. With unalloyed
perplexity I started on the books.
Each was some way defaced; each had been spoiled
as upon system, and so each one looks
38
in hurt or panic from behind its soiled
price-tag and title-page. Well-poisoned brooks
found their originals; someone had toiled
to make sure that the source should be polluted.
This sentence would not ever be commuted.
39
But when I looked again I saw a light.
On p.100 of Ivanov's Julie
one word had delicately been excised.
I checked the Browning, where that page was duly
clipped in the same way, and then I surmised :
40
whoever had attacked these volumes knew me.
These mutilations were an exercise
meant to induct me into truth or error.
My work continued in a quiet terror :
perhaps this hack, the poet-biblioclast
41
looked for my failure, and this lack-lined niche
sang like a siren a confected past
for which wrong epos my too homesick itch
should in default of lashing to the mast
end with a bullet in a local ditch?
42
Perhaps this idyll of the just deletions
cut with its calculated incompletions
a new edition whose dissecting thread
might from these black inks guide me back to day
just as each wounded page beside my head
43
should through the holes throw light, and thus display
ex-foliate rejoinders to the dead?
Each message is an angel, whose bright face
may not be born for long, since in its place
the disincorporate unreal returns.
44
The missing words were meant for me alone :
each bit at a familiar verse which turns
just on the phrase disfigured, or a prose
senseless without that absent chink which spurns
the learned sense backwards; so from these and those
45
I might choose out within these little hours
a set selection of dispetalled flowers.
I still could not be certain what they meant
without an understanding of the order
in which these desecrations should present
46
sentence and paragraph, each disrecorder
turned to a necessary message sent
straight to that suffering-delighting border
at which the pages of the waking brain
blank into vision, and the right refrain
47
comes clear up from the cortex to the tongue.
I recombined the stolen words all day.
The true solution felt as though it hung
the longest little infinite away
from where it might as readily be sung
48
as typed or spoken, and the massive grey
harbour those timbres, hues and serifs which
should make this open misery a rich
path of negations to a common joy.
The sky was indigo; the light had failed;
49
the column still continued to deploy
along the Trabzon Pike. Mars redly sailed
past λ Libra, where that shining toy
declined a Flamsteed number, and just trailed
light irreversibly towards the earth
50
glimpsed through the filter of the broken church.
I woke next morning with the proper names
fresh from my dream of the deletions : foxes
had been here in the night : my mind reclaimed
from last oneiric residues the doxies
51
tied to those cities which they spelt or framed.
All cut words fell to their peculiar boxes;
each loss should stipulate my proper route.
Fifty miles north-north-west lay Ctesiphon.
I was to skirt it, and evade pursuit
52
creeping through Kent to Essex, so press on
beyond Alkhaltsykh towards Khertvis : boot
set north and forwards to those dead sees gone
some twenty years since into blank oblivion.
Acrylic sealants in the new pavilion
53
I must taste for myself, must eat and touch
those perfect surfaces constructed such
that none should ever brush against them, nor
know how to name them for a chronicle.
I thought of Khoda's speech upon the shore.
54
Only apparently ironical
he there proposed to sub-committee 4
as though through an imaginary monocle
the necessary strategy for England.
"Fields, hills, and rivers, friends! Be single
55
"for this real base at which the work on food
"is still accomplished in its central rhythm.
"The cities wither when essential good
"be once withdrawn from them, and there fall with them
"those superstructures which art-makers would
56
"interminably ornament. Then give them
"no neck to fall on : organize instead
"wherever indispensably the bread
"grown from the true shape of the human land
"feeds the real living, and forget the dead."
57
To him then Belmont, on his other hand :
"The land is mineral. The blood long shed
"blossoms in concrete, whose new grey is grand
"refusal of anthropomorphitisms.
"We should deny ourselves no witticism
58
"which might block witless cruelty : urbane
"polish, political, prepares a city
"whose real surfaces might be that sane
"reconciled life, of which wit is the pretty
"natural counterpart. Each country lane
59
"may lead without betrayal of its ditty
"into these boulevards, steel supersession
"of the blind helix longing for regression!"
Khoda the taciturn could not then block
at this a little sequel from his lips.
60
"I never saw a grander thing in rock
"than just those clouds which passed above our ships
"at five this morning. Let us now unlock,
"future-turned spirits, our fine fingertips
"from the Victorian monument, of which
61
"welfarist modernism is the rich
"unconscious legatee, and then at last
"the real terrestrial magnificence
"may leave built emblemaries to the past!"
Belmont's face hardened to a more intense
62
expression of resolve : his dark look cast
across our small boats stood before the dense
wave upon wave there of the rain-crashed channel.
"Wet weather fantasies, cloud-cuckoo flannel!
"Just from the most impermanent of lights
63
"you would construct your city : but Lukeria
"knew better than to trust herself to flights
"into this nebulous interior.
"The calm simplicity with which she cites
"Lenin on left-wing infants : nothing cheerier
64
"than her dismissal of the rural chorus.
"Your signs and meteors begin to bore us."
By now his comrade was in fact offended.
"I knew Lukeria. I walked with her
"here at this near coast when the last war ended.
65
"She could not ever in the least concur
"with your cloud-blindness, she who so long tended
"her flock thus vigilantly, whose fields were
"her constant care to see the fresh green grass
"spring for them right up to the mountain pass."
66
Lukeria! What would I not have given
to see that queen of our diminished band!
From her real-rational two splinters riven :
her rosy cross unpicked so that each strand
tangled the other just where she had striven
67
each with each other thread, that all should stand
unreconciled together till the real
turn, to love's reason, nature's grace. I feel
still at this hour my undiminished longing
to see her, know her : yet I may not speak
68
now of her spirit in a style not wronging
all its fidelities. I had a week
to bypass Ctesiphon. The lands belonging
to the marsh diocese gave out in weak
straggles of hedgerow. From old Romney now
69
my path led north-east to Alkhaltsykh; how
I was to get there, was not quite so clear.
Since the removal of the petrol quota
abandoned vehicles lay far and near.
I had to find some unpreowned Toyota
70
then get the fuel for it and face my fear
enough to ride with this presurplussed motor
into the city. Monophysite sentries
would be unlikely to protect its entries
from rebel motorists : combustion engines
71
were on the index. Here my dispensation
sent from the Archimandrite of the Scete
excused me from the letter; now bright St. Johns
awoke & left, with me, tergiversation
to low kings and their oubliettes or dungeons
72
whilst I appropriated from the fleet
wheels for my missing winged or broken feet.
The butt-joint glazing in a soaring wall
rose from the subgrade, and a hyperbolic
paraboloid of perspex topped this tall
73
packet of see-thru where in frozen frolic
the grille-gagged Priuses and Aygos call
straight from the headlights for a money tonic :
red, green, and purple, white, cerise and blue,
they stand quite motionless for want of you
74
condemned to pose inside this summerhouse,
pumped up on auto steroids. Pennants flapped
refrain : TOYOTA to the vacant air
where the pole curved just at the top and trapped
the strong breeze to inflate its debonair
75
brand to no customer. One flag had snapped.
One panel at the far left had a tear
through which inexorable rain could souse
the blank floor slippery. The keys were still
stuck in the dumb ignitions; each tank held
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jerusalem Deleted by Simon Jarvis. Copyright © 2015 Simon Jarvis. Excerpted by permission of Enitharmon Press.
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