I couldn’t tell in the rain whether more
or less apparitions trembled out of the city
garden’s shadows. Headstones steamed
with disaffection, plastic bags and confetti
twining: “hello, farewell,” fleshed from Wilkie
Collins or Dickens, to this age a king resurfaced
and rued the unlaurelled kingdom shrouded
in misery, a bland epoch the apparitions
vanished into the river’s cicada without
parliament’s knowledge, or mine, who hate
this mournful, nervous meridian, grimed-filigree
in New World horror. The unrecompensed host,
killed off, is passing again by the Orion-lit
Boots; then, once more, hail, and farewell
in the scorched-refreshing air of the ever-selfless
metropolis, miserable brocade; cruel; exalted;
ever remaining quiet. How shame became
living architecture, dove-flickered by time
and fire, unsettled in every puddle these buildings
swim in, I wonder, startled, astounded
by sirens choiring off like some crack-jawed
sibyl whose leaves, turned epaulettes, litter
the moon agonized by prayers sputtering
from bomb hovels, these buildings that remain,
spruced and emblematic, like a noosed O:
’O let thy graces without cease drop from above!’
until I am fissured into polluted snow, smoke
granulating the sun-threatened spires
but beat a retreat strafed with nettles,
like a hunter’s eyes cold back into stony chaos,
as I come to a chain-link alley and spot,
in a window, a cardboard pope with horns.
River with the florid repose of the conqueror,
pretending remnant of Euphrates, Tiber
ready to course back to the source like light
wincing at some oak-shade god, wrecked
through an astigmatic needle, splendid
and battered, away from its pulmonary current,
a slow slouching razor bearing a ruined idol
through the city crypting out its midge cycle
in the concrete sedge I seep by, indifferent,
hoping only to shock the ‘image-doting rabble’
to the fresh blood rouged on the banks
from the rogue queen‟s decayed bosom,
a poppy tincture of coins from the bronze
East, a scarlet rash of composed violence
stirring sudden inundations, the triggering
start of a new dispensation. Now imagine
Thales cutting his way to Cambria,
through ghosted Liverpool, slave centre
the wounded seabirds are in for repair;
stocks for the trade; slavery drew air
in English first, a ‘world-famed hypocrisy’
aspiring down the coigns where I stand,
glowering below lamps, mock torches
in the vanished blood trance of commerce
and slaughter at dawn on the marble
square shades from the dominions once
gathered in ranks to force the tongue
into speech, clawing with menace
in the unremorseful mire, until the scold-cold
roots of mute Albion seethed sickened
with apology; unction; but I am unclean,
untouched by that smear, patient witness,
scarred extreme, remembering cramped
fragments from Thomas: ‘I had never
loved England,’ and another: ‘I had loved
it foolishly,’ shaking, shaking, shaking
’like a slave, not having realized it was not mine,’
ah, there, saint, captive, the sentinel
is at the door, beating down the bulwark
of its wheatlike silence! I belong to that unceasing
circuit scaling down the dock, a mystery
among mystery faces that knows illusion
and injustice and a laughter that is silver
lashing the hummingbird in the breeze;
I know something drastic is waiting release,
an instrument which measures, in one stroke,
paradise, and when it strikes again, emptiness,
this city gripped with emptiness; it is happening
in my circadian fortress pitching rocksteady
as I look up at the mighty buildings drained
grey; progress at rest, resting of a vacant peace,
everywhere touched by the blades of rain.
“A sight so touching in its majesty”: that is Wordsworth’s speaker on seeing London one autumn morning in 1802. It is like beholding a spectre, Rome, say, or Constantinople, in the fata morgana of its fading glory. The tone is as pitiful as it is deceptive. Behind it, muted in the nondescript façade, in the ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples, is the sum of an undying imperial violence. Two hundred and twelve years later that “sight” persists, dignified in its monotone of majesty, to use a phrase from Heaney. We look upon it still with awe, as at memorials. We see a complete harmony: “earth has not anything to show more fair.” Not anything? This unnatural awe in progress is similar to Carlier‟s sick cry in Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress”: “I mean to have sugar in my coffee today, anyhow!” He pronounces the savage majesty (anyhow!), the glitter of sugar, to be had—and in the enormous maw of the Empire—today and forever. That grotesque demand, no doubt, is magnified into the historic architecture that will never be demolished. We don’t wish them that fate, destruction.
But wish, like in the sudden dissonance of rain steadily disfiguring invincible shapes, a counter sound that invokes the horror present in that mighty heart. I am kin to such a sound.
These poems are forthcoming in Muzanenhamo’s second collection, Gumiguru (Carcanet, October 2014).
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collection, Far District: Poems (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journal, Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.