| In Search of the Invisible Poet Try
to pick him out
against the timber-yards, the cool, intestinal
refineries,
his myth of the Pit.
Try to raise his eye in any bar
as if to speak his name
would bring out of purdah;
as if his people, humourless and avid,
wouldn't to a man recite
I'm Spartacus, eyes void
or fixed on all that history,
the parochial depths he's promised them.
But there he goes, shy and beery
through the back yard into elegy,
hugging to himself
the cleared streets, the edgy
acrid breeze that stands
for everything he still declines to tell:
the means and ends
he shrinks from as a kind of duty;
the strategies he disavows
from conscience, or from art, or else from pity.
Scranchions
(for Dale Huey)
Scranchion n. A mutterer, one not likely to be
believed (from M. English Scrantion, a scrap of batter or
other food, too small to be served alone)
Scranchion's Dictionary of Fraud and Fable
i
Scranchion heaves his face towards the sun
from glint of clay in the furrow,
smoke of fog in the cup of the land.
Bugger it mutters Scranchion,
the bolus of his hockle rolling on his tongue,
Bugger, Pissing Bastard, Fuck.
All his weight comes up into his gob,
all his glottals blunder to a stop.
Bugger. Hockle.
Bugger. Howk.
ii Scranchion's Last Stand
He plugs his wounds and scans the field:
the 27th destroyed; the colours down;
the Mad Nawab, his golden tooth still glinting in the
sun,
brandishing his stolen Wisdens,
cobbling a throne of Hansards,
gold-bound first editions of The Soldier's Scott.
Dammit all, sir mutters Scranchion
(the sabres are tintabulating in his ear)
Dammit, sir! -aloud-
(the fields; the House;
the generations swimming off forever,
clean as Captain Webb)
iii from Scranchion's laboratory notebook
Instead the rats composed themselves
into the face of Skinner,
Padesky's wheel of thought,
the gothic spires and oriels
of that latest dream of GAD.
All our sweet hypotheses
nulled amongst those finials;
the JCR took vows of silence
and went east.
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