Robert Ian Duhig

He lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world.
— John Freeman

Thrillers like The Da Vinci Code are one of the key indicators of 
contemporary ideological shifts.
...

Who I am's child's play,
a cry in a kindergarten;
though I pun on Latin,
my Yorkshire kin's laik,
...

A Sixties man thing: Dad, us, circling to bond
as hard as Ingemar Johansson's glue in the ad
around our huge box, its screen a snow globe
...

I love them. They bring a little antilife and uncolour
to the Corn Exchange on city centre shopping days,
as if they had all just crawled out of that Ringu well,
so many Sadakos in monochrome horror, dripping
silver jewellery down flea-market undead fashions.
They are the black that is always the new black;
their perfume lingers, freshly-turned-grave sweet.
Black sheep, they pilgrimage twice a year to Whitby
through our landscape of dissolved monastery and pit,
which they will toast in cider'n'blackcurrant, vegan blood.
They danse macabre at gigs like the Dracula Spectacula.
Next day, lovebitten and wincing in the light, they take
photographs of each other, hoping they won't develop.
...

The M1 laid, they laid us off;
we stayed where it ran out in Leeds,
a white rose town in love with roads,
its Guinness smooth, the locals rough.

Some nights we'd drink in Chapeltown,
a place not known for Gaeligores,
to hear Ó Catháin sing sean-nós -
Ó Riada gave him the crown.

Though most were lost by ‘Róisín Dubh',
all knew his art was rich and strange
in a pub soon drowned by our black stuff
when we laid the Sheepscar Interchange.

Pulped books help asphalt stick to roads
and cuts down traffic-sound as well;
between white lines a navvy reads
black seas of words that did not sell.
...

My torturer's hair smells of fallen leaves,
the times my family gathered acorns
for coffee. Evenings, I'd stalk the wharves
so my paper clothes could smell of copra,
my wooden shoes not sound like poverty.

One night I saw a shooting star
fall between the coamings on a steamer,
like a knot of kerosene-soaked oakum
falling from the hand of a saboteur.
To be on the safe side I joined them both.

My torturer's eyes are blank as the eggs
(which must be a fresh clutch of wild hens' eggs)
that transfer visa-stamps from one passport
to the next perfectly, if newly-boiled
and rolled warm on the feathery pages.

One night I saw a shooting star
tumble between the bars of a gutter,
like some crumpled poem with name on name
written in lemon juice between its lines.
Finally my left hand denounced my right.

My torturer's hands are suppler
than the leather he soaks in egg-water
like a folk-cure, so he won't catch my warts.
Sparks are falling from my hair. I've confessed
to everything but the hunger.
...

Even the Syro-Chaldean bishopric I offered
on the strength of Hadrian VII
did not tempt Corvo. As mere Provost
to the Lieutenant of Grandmagistracy
of Sanctissima Sophia he fled
to Venice, convinced the Rhodes Trustees
were plotting his assassination.
Where else should provide a home
to the inventor of submarine photography?
I missed his inch-thick cigarettes,
gigantic Waterman fountain pens
and Graecocorvine vocabulary.
We played duets but kissed only once.
At last he denounced me as a fraud
and schismatic. I said he played the spinet
like a lobster trying to escape its pot -
after that, my overtures were useless.
For all his violence and absurdity
I warm to think of him now,
his cropped grey hair dyed with henna,
his white hand, wearing the spur-rowel ring
I gave him as defence against Jesuits,
closed round the oar of his panther-skinned gondola
diapered with crabs and ravens and flying
St George and the red-and-gold Vesilla
of the Bucintoro Rowing Club.
I think less of the lagoon-eyed fauns
he photographs and masturbates.
Does he think of me in Godless Middlesex,
where it either rains or they're playing cricket?
The Syro-Chaldean Church is not doing well
despite my sigils, blazons, banners
and the undeniable splendour of our ritual.
The landlord's wife is singing Auld Lang Syne.
This is going to be a Godless century.
...

Most were naked but for the locked tin masks
which stop them sucking the cane they harvest.
We could see they had been made tigerish

by their whippings. Our sabres stuck in bone,
our saddle-girths were slashed by their children,
crones tore shot from the mouths of primed cannon

while our powder-monkeys fumbled and wept.
But we have laid them up in lavender.
They think their dead will wake in Africa.
...