John Stammers

There is a little of everything in everything
Anaximander



Lavish rays of the flagrant sun cascade on the esplanade
or coruscate the way H2SO4 does spilt on a lab floor.
A grey (or ash) acacia sweeps its sombrero from its head
making like a ranchero on a talcum-white caballo
that clops along in the shower of solar-wind particles
whose slavish job it is to bombard the Earth from space today -
Hombre, esta muy bueno aqui, muy, muy bueno.

The terracotta soil of the area merely expresses
the downright red of an Andalusian hemipode,
its feathers drenched in henna,
or a post-nuptial bedsheet doused in chicken blood
that threatens a reprise
of the madness aria from Lucia de Lammermoor -
you know the one she comes out
with it all spattered down her front
and gets into Eduardo! Eduardo! and all that,
Eduardo! Eduardo! and all that.
You would rend the nails from your fingers
with the beauty of it, those exquisite trills
embedded in gothic death.
It's that even here,
here in the epicentre of a chilli enchilada,
the ice cubes in the glass hold out against it,
little visitants of the cold realms.
...

The shadows mediated by the slats of the venetian blind
stripe the silk finish ceiling;
I am reminded of the sheen on the ocean
of glossy horoscopes I so deprecate,
am I not, after all, a logical and serious-minded Virgo?
Apparently, Venus is poorly aspected in Pisces
or something. I am practically nodding off at this point.

I expire across the bed with its sails full of disquietude,
its balsa-wood hull dipping and rising
on queasy unconsciousness like some Kon-Tiki
out to prove to me, as if I needed it,
that I am not new,
that I cannot get away from it all,
that it is all there is, and that my slumberings
retain the tell-tale signs of you
with your female body
and mouth full of explanations.
I fetch up onto this morning,
so strangely bright with exotic birds and fruit
but still with its hoard of old stone heads.

But just how did it get here, this place -
in the margins of buying and selling
or from somewhere in the veneered wardrobe
between sharp suits or materials
pre-weathered in the cutting room?
My new denim jacket had sand in its pockets,
That's how they distress them, you told me,
perhaps that's what the sand has done to me.
I am in distress, I had said, in body language
by rubbing the back of my neck, I am sand-blasted!

Or did it float up amongst all the debris?
It could have bobbed in on the cusp of beach and sea,
replete with the tactfully blanched flooring
and these hard little shells
that virtually stab your feet to death,
but that would be so hackneyed,
surely a place like this would be more original.

And another thing, who was it that said
Don't build your house on sand?
Some old deity I think.
But rocks erode away into sand
and, like Thales said,
isn't everything just water anyway?
And he should know, having fallen down a well
trying to read the future in the stars.
And when everything is liquefied and clean,
Wouldn''t he be pleased, the old prognosticator,
if he himself hadn't already melted?

I strain to hear your breathing in almost the wash
of the water's edge and the lisping of the shingles
as they deliquesce into the sea;
I am asphyxiated with desire
to stroke the fine hairs of your body
and, as the sea runs over driftwood on the beach,
follow the subtle undulations of you.
I am filled up like an inflated tear
whose surface tension is so taut
that one more image of you with your poise -
your bare arms, your hands lightly crossed in front of you -
and I will break and shower into droplets like the waves
as they smash into the old wooden tide-breakers
and annihilate themselves in the air.
...

I don't ‘go organic' often, but when I do
cash registers explode, shop assistants lurch back
beneath furry earflaps,
the wild beasts knitted on Iroquois sweaters
leap up,
their hunters let fall their bows,
returning, at all fleet, to tented encampments of their tribe
to sit wordlessly
with the Great Spirit.
Cram up my basket, I say, for I am not all water -
though hydration may form the signal part
of any halfway harmonious regime.
I am told that amaranth binds a higher protein content
than the equivalent weight
of any goodly-made walrus.
Pass me that cantaloupe, farmed in biotic growing methods
by organo-wonks with expensive recreational habits.
I wish to pay
largely for it, if you would be so kind,
and desire
little change from a high denomination banknote.
Only stay, stay your hand there on its surface
to let my own against the edge of yours, tender, as in a slow wooing.
Fresh we were and wild,
O yes wild, I say, were we,
implacable huntress of the free-range legume.
And what does it come to in any sort of natural currency?
A single meal for two, free of human taint,
the feel of cool, green skin beneath your palm touched along mine,
and a further difficulty - I see that, scourge of the brassicas -
I do not always know what I am doing.
...

Let us walk to the waterfall before lunch
and sail the paper boats we made yesterday;
let us not put away that afternoon of losses
when the August sunshine belted onto the Kerry slate roof
and cooked the lichen to fine, sallow dust.
From out of nowhere, I saw you shatter
the blank white page to an angle
and all my flat earth certitudes fell away,
as any waterfall collapses into its pool.
You see, I wanted to believe more than you thought,
but the plain fact of how your fingers
worked the terrible geometries into being
frightened me, the way a child is frightened
by death without knowing why.
This, though, was a coming into the world.
It had not occurred to me to think
you would know how to do such a thing.
You showed me the proper way of it
and so you are changed to me and I to you,
the way that creases remain always
in a sheet of paper that has once been folded.
...

The heatwave has brought forth all manner of blossom:
there are alcoholics in the gardens
of the church where my parents were married.
In the late afternoons, they lambast each other
with what life and death scenarios of the day.
They have special names like Dogsy and The Surgeon,
as do their drinks. If I ever park myself
back on that particular bench, I'd like a special name.
I wish my life were more coherent.
The pavements are sweating a sort of grey gunge.
I have lost the ability to imagine winter.
...

Perhaps you have dreams of a flat in Hampstead,
of a box at the Opera each weekend,
of buying candelabras and dinner parties you'd attend.

I have, for my sins, been a denizen of a West Heath pad,
seen any number of different Mimis fall dead,
and eaten by candle-light something light on a something green bed.

Perhaps all dreams are what someone who wants you has had
and, not being able to have you, has had what you wanted instead.
...

You guided me through Dublin and Derrida
and I went along with you though you told me
that one could not be "wrong" or "right",
that these were "words". You stressed
there was no such thing as the canonical text,
nor even the next best thing. You drew me
into Bewley's Oriental Café standing cloned
in its own postmodern pastiche
and Grafton Street. There, over sticky buns
interpolated with glacé cherries that pressed red imprints
into the buns' white substance, you somehow de-conjured up
the self-styled "writer"
of the Codex Ulysseus
so that when he put in a radical failure of appearance
you were able to sever any connection
between author and oeuvre,
"What is it, after all, that is authorized?",
you said, and gave an allusive nod,
with your feathered black fringe and Irish-blue eyes,
to Althusser whilst continuing to assert
recondite doctrines through unpursed lips
pinkened with cerise so that I tumbled
head-long into ideological concurrence with you:
I knew what you were talking about and I didn't care.

From there we pursued a line of argument
along the General Post Office where I read the proclamation
In the Name of God and the Dead Generations
leaded into the brass plaque beneath Cuchulainn
and I inserted an interpretative finger into bullet holes
typed there on the wall in belt-fed lines;
the beautiful stone, the terrible queerness
of just standing there with the paths the bullets had taken
passing right through me. So we were pleased
to walk the free streets and follow
our merely quodlibetical ratiocinations
in the sight of dead heroes and live tin-whistlers.


But, when we crossed the singular Trinity quad
and perused the Book of Kells
etched forever on the stretched skin of unknown dead sheep,
I felt a revision begin.
There were its principal letters lit up
like O'Connell Street on Paddy's Day night,
knocking seven bells out of itself,
fiddling and chanting and beating the bodhran
to the infinite glory of God
and the resurrection, with its parchment
grey from multifarious eyes draining the light from it
in rays, surveying its apostolic dogmas inscribed there
by quills snug against ink-stained finger calluses,
the nibs screeching like peewits
against the manuscript's interface, relentless,
taking pains and decades
to give the work the full weight of God's law.

So it was that I saw two sides of an antinomy take hold
and go to undo me like a zip
and I saw that it was writ
that we should be the critics of our own juxtaposition,
to deconstruct what there was between us
and discover if it was all just so much periphrasis
or something more.

Therefore when we found ourselves
beneath the spiral staircase
at the hub of the circular bookshop, in Tomes St
I think it might have been,
with the steeped banks of shelves in aisles that receded
on all points of the compass like the world itself, I delved
into the shelf labelled Poetry / Irish / in English,
came up with The Collected of yer man,
unread and silent straight from his tongue,
which I held out to you and you took hold of
so it spanned our two hands like an arc of electric
that cracked and spat between us,
both wanting to let go, each unable to.
...