Poems Composed at Cambridge
BUT STRONG AND FEISTY WHEN WE WOULD SIN
Or DESCENT FROM THE CROSS
7 new POEMS
FROM PEMBROKE 2017-2018
Vol. II
BY TODD SWIFT
DEDICATED TO THE CANADIAN POET
SUSAN BRISCOE
WHO DIED AUGUST 31, 2018
Introduction
This is the addendum to my previous Pembroke pamphlet, and finishes the phrase of Lancelot Andrewes, contained in his Lenten sermon: We are all weak and crazy when we would repent, but strong and feisty when we would sin. I was reading Tennessee William’s biography, A Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh in Key West recently and then read his great late play Small Craft Warnings, which my wonderful Uncle Jack AA Swift loved, and was moved by the playwright’s poetic instinct for blending carnality and compassion – in a nutshell, we are incarnated angels, and need to be loved body and soul.
I loved my time at Pembroke. It was very welcoming. It made me think a lot, about science, engineering, good social models, collegiality, and of course, what poetry and thought can do, in conversation with conversation, as it were. My poetry is about speaking, even talking. My poems talk. They talk in the mixture of how we would like to sound, and how we do sound – our fallen and angelic eloquences mixed and mashed. That’s what a sermon is – the best way to speak to others, whom presumably you wish to inspire, entertain, and enlighten. Donne is the greatest poet in the English language, for me, not because he wrote the best poems, but because he perfectly grasped the exquisite tensions between religion and the bedchamber and used that in his work.
When the poet Susan Briscoe died at the very end of August, after her very intelligent, creative and profound blog posts seeking to find a way to die that was not angry, but hopeful, even helpful, I was thrown into a confusion about mourning, how to mourn. Susan was one of the first people I loved, when I was old enough (17/18) to have a good mind, soul and body in some sort of collusion. Her death is a blow to poetry, to all who knew her, and of course, to her family – but she did not want pity. I am ashamed of how I wanted to make her death about poetry, about an elegy – what sort of art is it that so easily accommodates death and dying? The best, or the worst?
Poetry, because it is informed by experience but made of language, is doubly fallen. Poetry is sin incarnated, and even when we seek to establish civility in language – Heaney’s “government of the tongue” – we risk the great loss of immediate connection to the universal – all ritual, ceremony, and writing is an inter-cessionary evil – as a Catholic I am aware that the only thing worse than having a Pope is not having one. Untethered from tradition you have the chaos that is social media; it is a Babel. We are in a bad time. Was it ever thus. The City of God is not the City of Man, or the one on the Hill. We are love-makers in a storm-front, and we need to climb the mast and locate a light from a house above the fray, guiding us home. Or we can descend to where the motley crew dices with bones, and swig themselves into oblivion. I am half-way up that mast, and inclined to descend.
Summer Solstice 2018
On the long day let me write of what I did not do.
I see them now, the boy runners
in the park, representing my fleet actions.
Summer is bad for tracking regrets,
outdoes plenitude, it lasts and lasts
like a sublime lie of truth.
We want summer like we want heaven:
in the head and on the body, and warm;
but not as hell. With breezes.
Amplitude, and breadth, can be perceived
in youth; age has its own properties
to be valued; but not as evidently, and not as often.
The green day beckons like a long lake
shimmers in June, and this is June, is day.
Today is the high ascension of the sun god,
who is as fine a myth as any to look up to.
How to admire the solar fire in our eyes?
Well, we burn to look, we look to yearn.
Looking is the way that all souls wither,
for desire comes out of vision like a sliver
from a wound. I did not stretch my abilities
as sweetly as a boy and girl on the lawns
of possibility with love accompanying their every move;
I stirred a little, then slept more; lassitude
my address in the high dreamy pines.
The days of summer were long and lithe,
and I believed in their endless promise.
I became cloud and shade, and breeze.
The solstice was a poultice over the darkness;
largesse of time was my Logres. I lounged
above zero, and below melting point, and felt
the poles disintegrate at the meridian where I lay.
I gave up before I became myself; but in
the slight wind of the afternoon felt good.
The Waste Land Only Happens
Because you are ready to grow.
The ball is spat upon to throw.
The king is in rags to see his men.
The mirror breaks to free the soul.
I am waiting to be myself
Like people wait for passports;
I am waiting on the lip of the jump
And I don’t want to tip over.
The decay and disease is a positive sign.
The land is blown open, after the mines
Got blown wide by sacrificial goats.
I want to climb out of the gutter
One brown pint at a time. Please excuse
My excuses, my guilt is pure gold.
I never did nothing forbidden
That the Old Man ain’t allowed.
I’m a hundred percent Florida OJ,
And so eternally proud.
I’ve seen the redeemer in a chariot-cloud.
Salvation is coming after yon rapture emotes.
If you’re not washed in Selzer
Grab onto the boat. Row away from St Pete
And head for the hills. There’s a hurricane
Coming, raining free opioid pills.
We’ll sleep peaceful in heaven or in the fields.
The sower is dancing as the new reaper toils.
The sky is boiling, the damned speak in tongues.
We’re all a bit bitter but keep doing wrong.
We fell in with heathens, we sat in with slaves,
We played rusting trumpets, and rode a wild ass
That attempted to bray. We lied thrice to Pontius,
Beat Josephat with ice picks. We ate
Crawfish and weevils, then banged on the plates.
We washed our left hand and gave alms to big Baal.
We’ve done everything backwards
That could upset Paul. We’re all reprehensible,
Reprobates on speed-dial recall, decrepit
Old-timers with hi-tech yet old-school dim wits.
Our vim and our wisdom are both ragged and torn.
Thank God for his grace and the news we’re reborn.
Shark Week
I don’t exist and even if I did
I’d apologise
For causing Key West pain
It’s clear fiction impinges
On your real identity
As Tenn or Ted Williams, or Tom All-Thumbs;
The bird catches the worm speaking;
The beak is eek. Bring your own toxins.
I used to think the world was various
Now we tread carefully
In case your dreams take offense
Everything is misplaced injury
I don’t want to be clever
But I am a nurse shark
And we rarely harm humans
But that is a dangerous claim
The baseball great gets to be named
For a disease eventually
All the laws
Are broken daily by the news
What has broken down is
The lack of miscommunication
I blame the new generation
And the eventual outcome;
The forces of history are silent and slow
But never dumb; even my numbed arm
Knows the rules of being a lover
Don’t complain unless you plan to sue;
I asked permission before
I killed the schoolchildren
When I walked their narrow classroom;
I was given the bullets by god,
The blood by the devil.
And that’s my fault.
I offer a trigger warning
After the trigger is polled.
You’re cold if you profiled me online;
Every piece of data is borrowed
From Cambridge Poetica.
Nice to know ya, but suckah,
You are a drone, a troll, a bygone.
It shone, once, something holy.
Now we are so far out on the social
Angle of decline, it’s myopia central.
I am an apology for being insane.
It was not meant to be. Climb the anti-climb climate
And pile on with the masses.
No humans were unarmed
In the making of this shaking.
I am destroyed distraught doggonit.
No statement not rescinded,
No basin not drained.
Swampy Soupy Torpidity-Do,
My skin and brainstem
Are decals you can peel off
And stick on the membrane
Of the machine investing
Its rage in the market.
I beg your pardon.
Not one damn thing inscribed
Here is forgivable.
I need to be torn asunder by wild dogs
And then scattered by infected cats.
Whatever god you pray to
Has hate for me, has hated on me, deservedly.
I am not coloured in, or white or American.
My face is the sun gutted like a socket.
Call the skull to sit on the hill
And speak of the sad death of bling.
Everything I do is an outrage to the powers that lurk
In the dirk where your sock used to be.
Professional Scotsman to the stars,
Your Tartan skirt offends my agenda,
Little boys can be little girls, too.
I can’t ever be you. You can’t stay in my lane.
Stay out of my occasion to sleep.
I am identical to Rorty who was Quine,
In a former Beck video starring Jonah Hill.
The formerly despised are the currently kinged.
Half a Cup Is Better than One
i.m John AA Swift and T. Williams
The sun of course and being guided by Amazon
Into Tweens in Music, not Books. Flannery
O’Connor wrote to admirers about unbelief.
I aim for chastity, spill my seed at HDLove.
How was it once we met and courted
Before the zip of the instant thrust
Arriving in the palm like Christ?
I ride to my end on an ass
And wave at each frond
Fondly, like a friend
To man and beast.
Go slow, go on.
Lift me, Lord.
I pray up.
I am in
The way
Of need.
Bring a chalice
To my sensuous
Lips. Bill me monthly
For my insatiable greed.
The flies raft on my ejaculate
Like a damned umbrella drink
Was in the making. I swizzle in
So many ways, my soul is slickness
Itself. I have arm-wrestled unarmed
Men and downed scorpions in one, like
Bond when he was at his very lowest ebb.
Satan gave me the part of my life in his web.
I play myself but this time famous on stronger gin.
Poem in Late Summer
for my friend P.B.
I am Atom that named greed.
Wanting everything plus
is what a poor man does;
a billionaire has that, is free.
Not quite, the lie is: freedom
happens to a thing that lives;
unsure falling is free, even
leaves tangled, rain modified;
angels cut up in the blades.
Slit open the blinding corn.
It’s gold in the underground.
When you kiss your dying father
you slip a dagger into the play.
A god who disowns slaves
lets the wheat burn slow,
keen whips thrown soft as snow.
Even still, the chariots are tethered
to a great bull turning to a throne;
the beast moves a thousand chariots
and the world is turned as well;
in the pull of the bullish hunger
are the frenzies of a broken shell –
open your mouth to her daughter
to hold as the old child squirms.
Leave to those who strive, war,
who never die to live, or take
a new widow for a warning;
a winded graveside for a psalm.
Your loins are sepulchres,
dull music dumb as worms.
I want to be undivided by a blade
Instead I’ll settle for being half.
It’s not enough to speak
or act as if mostly kind; you
need to find a branch to break
a cold thought into flame;
possess a sword of mind;
when you have barely won
contesting by limb and bone
send the amazed steel spinning
into her pious lake, impervious;
go settle to farm the other side;
move as a swan, glide like Zeus.
After the Choral Recital
Everything must be said
Without permission
Even what isn't
So bringing that too
Into being.
Prayer makes only prayer
Happen until it stops
And angry words
Step up instead.
God is anger after speaking
In the growl of despair.
Look past love for love
In the underbrush on fire.
Animals copulating
Oscillating creatures
Gargantuan, oily, febrile,
Mucous vibrant on floors
That mud recoils from.
The beastly replacement
For ourselves lolls
In the doorway like a florid pimp
Expecting flushed payments
Tonight in an hour.
Go past the manger and tree.
Spit on the tarpaulin,
The scrawny torso insolently
Naked like an erection.
Proceed to an action
Unexpected and exact.
Take only the clothes
You will be buried in.
Say precisely how you came
To this precision and
Everything else. Exposit
Until the gods come begging
For your mouth to heal.
Pembroke, November 2017
Aside from the crisp fading light and virus
This could be a different aeon, a film edited
To remove the villain; there is only sadness
Due to chemical misfirings, the weather
Is a misgiving of sun. The shift is from
What was to a new way of doing things;
Each. human, and therefore complicated
By sin, or at least evolution. November
Allows a vision of a planet wiped clean,
The unfolding of billions of years of chance.
Being secondary is melancholy, tertiary
Sadder. I think it can be claimed our species
Leans into the Arctic conditions foolishly.
I am trying to portray deep regret
For the entirety of what is, the full set of sets.
All claims are invalid if claiming infection.
The creature that impacted, at crater,
Our very being with its different payload.
Sin, that apple, merely an alien condition,
Scrawling indestructible laments on graphene.
Todd Swift, Montreal-born but now also British, is the editor or co-editor of numerous global anthologies, including Carcanet’s Modern Canadian Poets. He is author of ten full collections of poetry, including Seaway: New & Selected Poems, from Salmon, Ireland. His poems have appeared in many leading journals in America, Australia, Britain, Canada and Ireland, such as Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review, Poetry London, PRISM International, The Globe and Mail, Jacket, and New American Writing. He was Oxfam GB’s poet-in-residence, based in Marylebone, 2004-2012. He was Writer-in-Residence, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, England, 2017-18. He founded Eyewear Publishing in 2012 and is its chief patron. He has a PhD from the University of East Anglia (UEA); and is married to an Irish barrister. He has many nieces and nephews; and loves cats.