George Szirtes

O, my America, discovered by slim chance,
behind, as it seemed, a washing line
I shoved aside without thinking -
does desire have thoughts or define
...

The eye is drawn to that single yellow star
that no wise man will follow.
The hunched men in caps, the grimacing woman
her eyes screwed up, cheeks hollow.

We look and look again until we burn a hole
in the paper. We strive to learn
from their resignation but it is beyond us.
We let them burn.
...

It was the empty chairs he feared,
not those with a proper behind rammed into them,
not those littered with stray bits of food or waste paper.

It was the voices that did not speak,
the wheezes and creaks the chairs didn't make.
The kicking over, the collapse,
the broken legs of chairs, the everyday business.

To see them ranged about a table
turned in on themselves as for a ritual,
that was the unsettling thing, and that one there,
yes, that one with its open arms
and its invitation to sit,
its somnolence, its stab at dignity
its emptiness, was the very devil.
...

The hard beautiful rules of water are these:
That it shall rise with displacement as a man
does not, nor his family. That it shall have no plan
or subterfuge. That in the cold, it shall freeze;
in the heat, turn to steam. That it shall carry disease
and bright brilliant fish in river and ocean.
That it shall roar or meander through metropolitan
districts whilst reflecting skies, buildings and trees.

And it shall clean and refresh us even as we slave
over stone tubs or cower in a shelter or run
into the arms of a loved one in some desperate quarter
where the rats too are running. That it shall have
dominion. That it shall arch its back in the sun
only according to the hard rules of water.
...

Finally we arrived at the city of silence,
enormous, high-walled, its furious traffic lights
signalling in panic. The streets were covered over
in thick rugs. It was a place without doors, a series
of moving mouths.
Their eyes, of course, spoke volumes,
vast encyclopaedias. There was little light reading.
Their white gloves fluttered before them
with grotesquely dancing fingers.

It was written that all this should be as it was.
Their thought-crimes, hand-crimes, and heart-crimes
were listed in long numbered chapters.
Policemen pulled faces or pointed at notices.
The civic authorities were sleeping in the park.
DO NOT DISTURB, said the signs.
ASK NO AWKWARD QUESTIONS.

The rest went on feeding and breeding.
They were planting tongues in the cemetery,
thick flowering shrubs of silence.
...

Suddenly there we all were, talking together
but not to each other. It might have been I
who had started it, muttering as I do
to myself, or rather to a figure to whom
I have something to say in the manner known
as l'esprit de l'escalier, that ghostly meeting

on the staircase with a person already past meeting
for whom we now have an altogether
brilliant answer, one we have always known
but had failed to produce when required. And now, I
and the others were talking, all of us, to whom
it would finally concern us to talk to, as we do

each day on the bus, knowing just what to do
and to say at this and every other such meeting.
There were friends, fears, ghosts, and past selves whom
each of us had to answer, all of us speaking together
every which one a distinct and separate I
in a world where everything has always been known.

The air was packed solid with voices we had once known
or were ours, it was hard to tell which, for how do
you tell the inner from the outer, or distinguish the I
from the not-quite-I? And soon each intimate meeting
had spilled onto the street, all voices singing together
to make one thundering chorus, each who with its whom,

in doorways, on staircases, singing to whom-
soever could hear and respond to the known-or-unknown
harmonies we were producing as if we were together.
We were ghosts. We were dead. There was little to do
but to listen and sing and be dead and be meeting
each ghost on its staircase. And so it was I

myself spoke to the dead ones within me since I
was their only voice, the lost hum of their whom.
It was crazy this sound, the music of meeting
all of them now, there on the bus, having known
only the steps to the top deck, knowing what to do
only in emergencies when we're all thrown together

and have to make do as we are, no matter with whom
we travel or have known, these voices with their I,
their you, their singing together at each and every meeting.
...

When he had gathered all the books

When he had indexed, catalogued, cross-referred and annotated them
When the little princelings and mighty emperors of China
Were dancing on the pinhead of his own estimable head
And the bile of the world was swimming in the gutters
And the fists of the janitor were beating street girls black and blue
And the oleaginous salesman had lubricated the hinges of the cassone
For the delectation of the housekeeper
A tiny gale started blowing
Down the alleyways and through the portals
Through the flightless windows
Through the wainscoted corridors of the rathaus
And the Groszbeggars stirred and shook a leg
And the Dixwounded rattled their small change of limbs
And acrobats stood on their heads like stars
And there were murders
Murders and conspiracies
For the intellect to catalogue and classify
For the mind to annotate and the fingers to cross-refer
For a superior consciousness to make sense of
In the hallways and beer cellars
In the prisons and surgeries
In lavatories and libraries

Where the books were gathered.
...

The point about the madhouse is that it's virile.
The point about the madhouse is that it sticks by its beliefs.
The point about the madhouse is that sanity is bourgeois.
The point about the madhouse is that no one is acting.
The point about the madhouse is that no one gets in by simply being nice.
The point about the madhouse is that it liberates the spirit.
The point about the madhouse is that you can think just what you like there.
The point about the madhouse is that anyone can enter.
There's nothing special about the madhouse, people come and go all the time.
There's nothing threatening about the madhouse, we are all of us dying.
There's nothing terminal about the madhouse: you go along for the ride.
There's nothing sad about the madhouse: weeping and gnashing of teeth, that's nothing.
There's nothing mad about the madhouse, it is sanity by default.
We are sane by default, we are mad by design, but the mad are more admirable.
Admirable is the ape, the bulbul, the mitochondrion, the swelling of the larynx,
Admirable the orchid, the garlic, the fire inside the shut book,
Admirable the cry of the tortured, the lost voice of the nightingale, the laughter
in everything ostensibly sane but tending towards madness
such as sunlight, the slow rain, each pendulous drop, the wide road,
the brimming eye, shadows, picnics, public conveyances, thunder.
Nature is a madness with a method and all the madder for that.
Culture is a madness everyone inherits.
Science is a madness in love with numbers, the perfect amour fou.
Health is a madness that shifts from minute to minute, gesundheit!
Money is madness that fills your pockets and leaves a silver slugtrail in the garden.
The point about the madhouse is not to describe it.
The point about the madhouse is not to change it.
The point about the madhouse is to live there
to accustom yourself to its immaculate manners
to dwell in the house of the Lord for ever
with the prophet, the poet, the dwarf, the scholar, the fire.
...

I have seen eternity and it is like this,
a man and woman dancing in a bar
in a poor street on an unswept floor.

It clings and plots and is desperate,
at a point between violence and abjection,
between warmth and agoraphobic fear.

Let me reverse this and accept the fear.
Let me drop all objections to abjection,
since life itself is desperate

and has to tread the unswept floor
carefully, lovingly, while the bar
hovers in eternity. Like this.
...