Alan Gould
Six poems
Lightness At The Liquid Rise
Lifted from the well of two long seas,
from the milky slant amid fast weather
a young bloke’s photograph has found
Captain L. Colcord in his halo of calm.
He liked to stand just so at the see-saw stern,
foulweather jacket buttoned to his neck,
his arms folded across his chest,
hands tucked under elbows for the warmth,
small stoic comforts so that he might bring
the confluence of a self to bear
on some high point of technical arrangement,
for which he tilts his head into the light
and thus the light lightly keeps him.
And if I quickly glance behind his person
where the sea gathers and cannons,
shawls its old recklessness, regathering,
I observe authority to be
a slight man cast upon space
with ears that stick so roundly out
from his dark close-fitting cap.
But also I am seeing his perfect balance
in the liquid rise-and-plunge of the world,
and know he’s scanning for a tremor
along a topsail’s windward edge
and that ten thousand human years
are narrowed in his scrutiny.
So when the glinting tundra sways and topples
and the two young fellows (out of picture)
are fastened on the helm like stanchions,
I think how humans are not angels, yet
you can catch in them the angel moment,
the high confidence, whole as all imagining,
and ordinary as in this photo where
a small man deep among the sea’s valleys,
attent to the tremor of high canvas,
has for this moment the sun aslant his face.
An Interrogator’s Opening Remarks
We have no wish to lead you anywhere.
If anything we’d like to do you good.
The facts, of course, will shine like silverware,
but you must feel secure; that’s understood.
A good rapport is what we’re really after.
By all means keep the things you know concealed.
We know you know, behind the tea and laughter,
your secrets are a gravitational field.
We’re falling in toward them very fast.
This happens by your simply being here
subtracted from the household of your past,
naked with what we think you think is dear.
So now let’s chat, old son. You’re not alone.
Your time is ours. Your choices are your own.
The Whisky Lurch
They favoured whisky and the whisky lurch,
and tumbled deep into its imagery.
They ran The Bureau Of The Out-Of-Reach,
issued their memos to The Momentary.
The Moment Tree, The Memo Tree,
gave memos to our lemon tree,
and sat astride our yellow mares
saluting our dazzling infantry.
We find them sleeping in abandoned cars.
The April frost is hairy on their skin,
and night a vast aquarium of stars.
“Watch,” they’d wake, “we’ll tickle them all in.”
We’ll tickle them, we’ll pickle them,
we’ll fickle them all in.
For frost has scattered fractals
across my maiden skin,
and frost has sowed its follicles
across my young man’s chin.
Pastoral Care
Once at a barbecue
deep in the long winter of wool and poetry
I explained to a merino farmer from out near Bribberee
how pastoralists and poets might
well make common purpose in their plight,
being both hardworking primary producers who lacked
control on market price of bale or lyric,
and a clientele deserting the real for the synthetic.
My reasoning was sound and he had his good ear cocked
in my direction, his eyes narrowed
in scrutiny of my person. Then suddenly I heard,
‘‘Scuse me mate, but that there jumper you’ve got on,
‘Would that be wool?’ And I, upon
the briefest pause, could say, ‘My word,
hundred-percent-made-in-Bairnsdale shall I persist?’
the shockwave that I’d passed
a critical snap test with flying colours becoming clear
only later. ‘Ye-mate,’ he nodded, hunkering down to hear
the matter out. As one does
when explanations command fair manners
unleavened by the remotest scrap of interest.
Amor Fati
Overnight In Hospital
The wardsman shaving my pubic hair
is shyer than I am here.
We contrive to talk
from further selves for manhood’s sake.
Amid sea-green professionals
I watch myself on screen.
The catheter probes my blood-vessels
like a mouse in a maze-experiment,
finds as they expect, no more.
The talon of arteries that holds my heart
erect to life has one weak claw.
I feel humiliation, not fear.
The plastic bottle they insist
I use to pee, I’ll not use.
Courteous, desperate, I last
till two am, evade the night-nurse.
The triumph’s paltry. Returning, I see,
huge on my inside thigh
my Viking blood has splayed and run
to a purple map of Europe beneath the skin.
My forbears went to the New World from that,
and sure, it’s proper, says my heart
to face the thing and snuff it quick,
Grettir on Drangey, not liking the dark
but taking what comes and its loneliness,
strange elation at how exact is this.
But here are good professional staff
reading screens to make my future safe
who require no more than a stranglehold
upon the wild affections of my world.
For this is blockage, infirmity. This
is not me, but the mortal incubus,
the hobbler who
must walk beside me with his cue
of Now when it comes, it will hold no surprise,
a self watching my self with angel eyes.
A U-Boat Morning, 1914
Will come as we perform the mundane toil,
say, tossing the breakfast scraps astern,
or washing down the maindeck among the oblongs
of sail-shadow. The morning sun
will mint its coins across a lazy sea,
the weather tacks and sheets will rise and fall
in languid intersectings of the sea-rim.
And there, so sudden, ordinary, too close
to dodge, or do anything about but wait for
with quiet interest, will be the thing of hearsay,
cigar profile, stub tower, little gun, so credible,
for all that it will be the first such vessel
we will have seen outside some journal’s
crude picture.
Through his loudhailer,
the officer will be polite, but firm,
reading the English translation from a card.
Fifteen minutes. We’ll stow such extra food,
water, charts, as time will allow,
also oilskins, a mouth organ, a piece
of unfinished scrimshaw perhaps, nothing bulky,
then lower the boats, and stand off from the barque
at the distance we will have been directed to.
Oddest for our sense of what is proper
will be the sight of the helm unmanned out there
in open sea.
And this will be the manner
a moment in time will surface to say, Of course
your lives are free. Of course they are compelled,
as we watch, quiescent, attentive, the lifeboats
gentle as hammock-sway in the swell beneath us,
the little gun puffing its little smoke,
and thin smoke oozing from somewhere on board,
Gradually our home will lean into
its odd stricken angle, and spill wheatgrain
from the holes in her side, slipping under,
natural as a sleeper turning under blankets.
When it is done, the captain will salute us
just once, the submarine chug away, routine
as a mailboat.
And without undue hardship
we will survive, but no one there will serve
in sailing ships again. This is how
an ancient confidence will vanish
casually like a fashion in jokes. Instead
we’ll live into a time strange to us,
we’ll live aware of how the unborn have
their faces turned away from all we took
for granted, as stubborn or quizzical, we will
submit to someone else’s scheme of what
is pressing, waste on the floor of life’s renewal.
And if this quiet impending morning leaves
one thought in mind, it might be wheatgrain
fanning from a ship across the ocean’s dark
like brassy beads, like fabulous golden blood.
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