Cassandra Voices

Category: Literature

  • Poetry – Kathleen Scott Goldingay

    The Lamps of the Virgins
    from Bearers of the Broken Vessel

    At dawn, weaving through hills,
    go Daughters of Jerusalem in white,
    faces illumed by the flames
    of their lamps.
    They sing a song about lovers,
    become a string of dancing lights.

    At dawn, before babes awakened
    and bawled to take suckle,
    their mothers lit fires
    and filled the girl’s lamps.
    “Where are you going?”
    asks a sister too young for a lamp.
    “To remember, to remember,
    the daughter of Jep-thah.”

    “Why are you crying?”
    “The daughter of Jep-thah
    ran dancing,
    shaking her tambourine.
    She was the first
    to greet her father,
    returning victorious in battle.”

    “But why are you weeping?”
    “We go to the hills like she did,
    with our friends.
    We go for one who is soon
    to kiss her father goodbye
    and leave to be married.”

    Jep-thah, whose mother
    was without blessing,
    had not trusted Yahweh
    to hand to him his victory.
    He had sworn an oath:
    in return for winning my battle,
    I will give Yahweh a gift-
    the first soul
    who runs out from my house-
    as a burnt offering, whole.

    The daughter of Jep-thah
    ran dancing,
    shaking her tambourine.
    She was the first
    to greet her father,
    returning victorious in battle.

    Jep-thah tore his cloak
    and fell to the ground.
    “I love you, my daughter.”
    She knelt,
    put a kiss on his forehead,
    “I love you, my Abba.”

    On hearing what Yahweh
    was promised,
    Jep-thah’s daughter did not flee.
    She avowed,
    “Here I am, Yahweh, I’m yours!”

    But first, with her friends,
    she climbed up in the hills
    to grieve,
    singing, “My love will not perish
    in flames.”
    She would never know the tug
    from the cry of a babe.

    At dawn, a soldier’s widow weeps,
    looks out her latticed window.
    She sees the flickering lamps
    dance on the hill and remembers.
    She puts a kiss on her babe’s
    waking warm cheekand sings to her daughter
    of Yahweh.

    Feature Image: William Blake, Wise And Foolish Virgins, 1826, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

  • The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann

    The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann

    All around the snot-nosed parishes of Ireland
    small people of both genders, and neither,
    are flapping open
    copies of The Sunday O’Duffy
    getting worried
    about the continued existence
    of the Citizen Army, Fenian Brotherhood,
    Official IRA.

    We can’t have
    parties who perspire to government
    secretly controlled by cabals
    of men (and ladies) whose faces
    we never see; apart from those
    faces prescribed by prevailing winds
    and the agreed rules
    of the European Union,
    which we need never see
    but rest eternally assured
    are there. Or thereabouts.

    The only weaponry allowed
    those seeking elected office
    are five piece suits to help little
    men appear substantial,
    and no more than six
    plastic chairs on which the faithful can
    every other month gather
    to recite the Our Father,
    or discuss the rising
    price of sewage. Even

    the Social Democrats must come clean
    about the continued non-existence
    of their army council, and what role precisely
    Fintan O’Toole plays in its
    military high command.

    A mature democracy like ours
    needs parties whose manifestos
    political correspondents
    with excellent haircuts (and none) can safely
    spread across their living room floors
    and roll around naked on
    without fear of being interrupted
    by men and women wearing
    illegally held
    balaclavas.

  • Synapse Fire

    One of the main things I characterize my misspent youth by, is a knack for exploiting the trust my middle-class parents misplaced in me. At seventeen, I was too old to be dragged along with them on what seemed like monthly getaways, but too young to exercise any degree of responsibility or restraint. My folks had a mobile home near Ballymoney beach, which had hosted many a night of debauchery for my older brother and his cronies. He was away in Amsterdam, so I’d decided it was my turn. That bank holiday weekend, I had access to a car, three malleable mates and in the palm of my hand, an assortment of different colored pills.

    My mother’s arty liberal ideals had long since crushed my father’s more traditional views into dust. You’d only ever get the faintest of grumbles from him, dampened behind a rumpling newspaper. This self-censorship wasn’t always prevalent or so he told me, over glasses of scotch, his tongue unbinding nostalgically in the wake of my recent nuptials. I am now a man it seems. After what they’d been through with my older brother, Dad found it best to defer parenting us to my mother, who for lack of a better term, had notions.

    My father had been ‘too strict’ with my hyperactive brother who had some violent tendencies. The significant shift of power happened when his bright idea of sending my brother to boarding school backfired in a big way, offering more of a breeding ground for criminal activity than an educational utopia. Kenny’s expulsion from the school brought a great shame to my father. A gang of boys in the year ahead of him had caught wind of Kenny’s lucrative little drug trade and expected a sizeable cut in exchange for their silence. If their demands had been more diplomatic he’s always maintained, there wouldn’t have been a problem. They were too greedy, couldn’t be reasoned with, and Kenny refused. These boys were all “somebody’s son” and were bred to get their way.

    Junior Cup team rugby players could use the pool and it was common knowledge that Kenny swam late at night. He was always the last to leave. So when three of them jumped in on top of him, he thought they were trying to drown him. One boy had a chunk of flesh ripped out of his cheek, and another suffered a fractured skull. But it was the ring leader who got his teeth knocked out, some of an ear bitten off, and lost the sight in one eye. So obvious was it a  three-on-one attack, that no charges were pressed against my brother Kenny. However, his dealings were exposed, and he was turfed out.

    My mother employed a more permissive style of parenting with me, indulged my every whim, never punished bad behavior and challenged my thought process in ways she must have thought Socratic. I got away with fucking murder. Although I did appreciate the level of freedom this afforded me, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for my father, subjected to the periodic “I told you so” moment, anytime my report card pleased her or I’d been involved in some minor sporting victory. It brought me no joy seeing him voiceless and defeated. I had this recurring dream, before I got medicated, where he manifested as a wounded fox, caught in a trap, bleeding from his soft eyes.

    So my folks fecked-off somewhere abroad for the long weekend, as did my mate Dan’s parents, whose neighbors had no visibility of their driveway. No one to notice the missing car. Dan and I had gone to primary school together. We had not been friends, but gravitated toward each other in secondary school, given we were among the few token posh-lads at the community school. His Dad was self-made and didn’t believe in private education, but my mother gave me the option to choose where I thought would best meet my developmental goals. I’d love to say it was my selflessness that led me there, being aware of my father’s crumbling business. Private school fees would have been a strain. Then again, the boarding school my grandfather, father, and brother had attended did not have a football team and rugby was compulsory for all first years. That and it was full of wankers. I made the case that I would become a more well-rounded individual given the opportunity to carry on playing competitive football and also broaden my worldview immersed in an environment boasting a more diverse student population. A more prominent priority was my overdeveloped libido that had been cultivated, I believe, by early exposure to a wealth of magazines and conspicuously labeled VHS tapes in my brother’s bottom drawer. The community school was co-ed and I’d been assured, full of ‘damp yokes.’

    Dan and I were placed in A1. The tiered class structure was supposedly based on an aptitude test we’d taken, but I’m positive that in seeing where we’d come from, the Year Head had employed mercy. A1 was no cake-walk, but it wasn’t exactly Dangerous Minds, like C2 for example. Woodwork and Metalwork were housed in the C-Area and despite me disregarding my brother’s advice to “batter someone on day one to let people know you’re not to be fucked with,” I did feel compelled to jump in and help Dan, who was himself on day one, getting “battered.” His expensive shoes, pressed shirt and an accent he couldn’t convincingly conceal, made him an easy target. I did manage to get one good dig in, bloodying the nose of Barry O’Neil, but ultimately was booted around with Dan until burly Mr. O’Brien came rushing out of his classroom to put a stop to the ‘madness.’ Dan was soft as shit and I didn’t feel like we’d anything in common, but sticking together seemed necessary.

    Stu’s experience was ours in reverse. His mother had notions too, and identified in him a level of intelligence that had escaped his siblings. He traversed the gauntlet of his council estate covering up our primary school’s crest with his definitive black bomber jacket. He’d bate through that estate early each morning and came skidding into the yard on his orange BMX. He and I would kick a football around together. We were schemers, thieving whatever was in fashion, taking turns every few days at the small-break. Pogs, Premier League stickers or whatever was going. We had another little racket that proved more lucrative, both of us having somewhat of an entrepreneurial spirit instilled in us by our older brothers. We’d get to school early and pilfer the strawberry and chocolate milk left out on the school steps, which were very much in demand, most parents having opted for low-fat regular milk for their little darlings. We’d sell our spoils. Shamefully now, I must confess we did abuse the good nature of an elderly newsagent proprietor in our boldest of schemes. We’d drop a box of one bar or another from the shelf and kick it underneath the stall, only then to enquire about said missing bar. He’d potter into the store room to fetch another box. Stu’s hands were as fast as lightning and his bomber jacket’s pockets were deep. I’d keep sketch at the counter and stall the shopkeeper when necessary. Most of our classmates had money and no one dared rat on us given our brothers’ reputations. Our little enterprise drew us close together. His mother adored me, finding my little posh-lad witticisms funny. Mine found his salt-of-the-earth Dublin attitude a charm, often dropping Stu into conversation with other parents as though it were proof of her open-mindedness or some such shit. Stu didn’t think it was shrewd to associate ourselves with Dan in our rough secondary school, but ultimately shared my sympathies for our pretty and effeminate alumnus.

    Katie came from the same estate as Stu and was in a similar boat. Her mother had intended to send her to the all-girl convent school, but when her parents split, Katie’s cunt of a Da was not forthcoming with chipping in on her tuition. She was into boxing and as a result, rumoured to be a lesbian. I can attest to the fact that she was not, after our ‘five minutes in heaven’ shared in Stu’s downstairs bathroom, during a game of Spin the Bottle, back in first year. She was also better at football than Stu and me put together. She’d definitely been a tomboy growing up, but had blossomed into an athletic goddess and never abandoned us. She did harbor though, a great deal of hatred for those girls that had ostracized her and the lads who only started paying her attention when her breasts filled out. We, her real mates, dared not taint our genuine friendship by trying it on with her. She wasn’t interested in us that way more like, and we knew it. One good thing her Da had done, was teach her to drive, and any chance we got, we’d borrow Dan’s parents’ Jeep and have adventures to which no one else in school was privy.

    I’d been taking a pill, here and there, from my brother’s stock. He often tasked me with cutting up coke for him and for my trouble, I’d also taken a little sample of that. Stu was doing the same with his older brother’s weed. Dan’s folks had a never-ending supply of wine, and with Katie able to drive, we were sorted for our weekend by the sea.

    I’d been involved in school debates since first year, much to the glee of my mother who’d heard about them in a parent teacher meeting and hadn’t ceased encouraging me not to waste my ‘gift,’ the ablity to talk my way out of essentially, anything. If I’m honest, I did enjoy the debates. The most recent one was about different types of civilizations, Eastern and Western philosophy. I’d been arguing publicly, that to our society’s detriment, foundations laid for us by the Greeks and Romans were being forgotten,. I argued that in a perfect society, like many of the great Greeks, everyone would be bisexual, citing the statistical odds being for more love in a world where marriages end in divorce and of those ‘successful’ marriages, only a fraction are purported to be happy. Privately, I’d made known to the lads my personal opinion, that there wasn’t one good way, and that we should be learning from all cultures, taking meditative practices from the East and hallucinatory journeys from the Native Americans.  “Are you fuckin’ high, Man?” Stu asked in response to this. I said I wasn’t, but that I highly recommended ‘getting high’ together. With a smirk, Dan added “Theory AND Practice. ” I’d fuck all practical knowledge, but in theory, the lads agreed. Even Katie.

    The plan was for all four of us to trip on something different, together. We would get out of our heads around a bonfire on the beach. We’d get to know each other, and ourselves, on a deeper level. We weren’t live-for-the-weekend piss-head, druggy wasters like lots of our classmates. Our trip was about enlightenment. That and our heads were fucking melted from Leaving Cert propaganda, to which we were not immune.

    On the Saturday we’d gone swimming and had a BBQ. We drank copious amounts of red wine and even dusted off a holy grail type bottle of scotch. It’s absence would certainly be attributed to my brother. Our experience was to be had on the Sunday night, us having Monday off to recover. Stu and I gathered firewood, while Dan and Katie discussed our path to enlightenment, deciding who should do what drug, and why.

    When darkness fell, we were all fairly buzzed on Dan’s fancy wine, and Katie revealed our missions, should we choose to accept them. She was highly strung, admittedly, and had never smoked a cigarette, let alone weed. She would get blazed and allow herself to relax and submit to the humour that was all around us. Stu was quiet, so he was to do some white, freeing himself from the shackles of self-consciousness and let his words flow. Dan was the consummate jester of the group, and we were often plagued by his seeming inability to share his true feelings, veiling everything in jokes. A yoke was to be had, whereby his heart would unfurl in waves of sincerity. I, being the depressive of the group, had issues sleeping and because of the meds, never remembered my dreams. We’d all been listening to a lot of Bowie, and were aware that if one were to take certain sleeping tablets, and force themselves to stay awake, they’d enter into this trippy dreamy state. Even if I couldn’t remember, the group would let me know what I could see and what I was saying. I was up for it, on the condition that they try their utmost not to let me drown in the sea.

    The ironic ceremony began with Dan raising up our offerings to the drug gods, and I blessed them with the sign of an upside down cross. Stu gave us his iteration of something resembling a Gregorian chant and drummed away in rhapsodic gesture on a Jacob’s biscuit tin. Our sage Katie danced around us, puffing plumes of weed smoke to protect us on our journey.

    Wine-red tongues told the stories of our lives up to that symbolic juncture and proclaimed what the future would bring. That sacred fire erupted between each speaker, fueled by my bottle of lighter fluid, with a well-timed squeeze. A handful of sand was sprinkled, let to trail in to the sparking flames, as a gesture to mark what had passed. This, before we acknowledged the infinity of what lay ahead, with a nod to each end of the pale grey beach. Faces were warmed with the memories of our shared experiences and an assurance that from what we had been born in to, we would indeed escape. Then we sat in silent reflection. Only the moon moved, slipping down the back of a starlit sky until the horizon bore an orange hue.

    As the sun was coming up, Dan and I had wandered from our camp, walking at the water’s edge. The cold ends of each wave rushed over our pale freckled feet. Dan’s drug-sticky palm was on the back of my neck. He was expressing some sense of loss for not having taken part in the debate, but said that he shared my sentiments. Stu was burning the ears off Katie, who lay euphoric in the sand, her muscles rippling in the morning light, her face awash serene, unperturbed by Stu’s rapid hand movements, wild eyes and practically unhinged jaw.

    We had always joked about Dan’s sexuality, in good humour. His overtly heteroerotic jokes and signature pelvic thrusts accompanied by animal noises were a daily occurrence when discussing girls ‘we’ fancied., He’d had girlfriends, so none of us were really sure, but we wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d come out to us. It might even have made his life easier.

    The other two weren’t moving, Katie unable to peel herself from the sand and Stu entranced by her beauty. Dan and I walked, arms around each other’s shoulders, through the endings of rushing waves.

    He kept banging on about ancient Greece and then he stopped me. Looking into my eyes and cupping the back of my head, he leaned in and kissed me. Drunk would have been an understatement, but I was not so drunk that I lacked the capability to immediately push him away, had I wished. I allowed him his moment, before sensitively withdrawing. I explained to him that there was no problem at all, but that he’d gotten it wrong. It was just an argument that I’d been making in the debate, an ideal that I believed in, but sorely lacked the capacity for, because, I was straight. I said, “Sorry.” He was unperturbed to say the least, smiling and gripping the prominent erection pitched in my shorts.

    I’d nicked the wrong blue pills from my brother and had not enjoyed the hoped for dreamy state. They weren’t Ambien, they were feckin’ Viagra. Watching the sun rising, my dick became hard out of nowhere, and my error became painfully clear. If Dan had been high like Katie, he might have gotten paranoid, but in his euphoria all he did was stroke my face and sympathize with my obviously hilarious situation. How did I know if I never tried? I never tried, that’s how I knew, I told him. This did not convince him. He brought up something we’d spoken about more than once. We had both been pining away for Katie for years. Lust only distorted the truth that it was primarily a physical attraction and that he and I shared more in common and were better suited as partners, ‘if only’ we were gay. He walked ahead and declared the beach his stage. A compelling speech ensued, arguing that in the spirit of our exploratory weekend, we should have a real kiss, purely to decipher whether there was something there or not. If I felt nothing, he’d forever go in peace.

    My inebriation coupled with comfort in my own sexuality allowed me to humour this proposal. I can’t say that it was a wholly unpleasant experience. He took me in his arms, embraced me and kissed me with tenderness, withholding any predilection he may have had for groping. When he released me, dough eyed, I couldn’t help but make a joke that the absence of any ‘magic’ had defied the boundaries of biological science, and actually eradicated my erection. I expressed my love for him, and offered our relationship as an example of how a platonic love might be the purest form. I could love him more than anyone on earth, my feelings unsullied by lust. He echoed my sentiment that we’d be friends forever, and we hugged before he started walking back to the others. I maintained I was going to hang back to let my lad fully go down, but really, I just needed a moment.

    I had achieved my dreamy state, but this was due to sleep deprivation and being full of Shiraz. Blood dripped out of the sun.

    Turning to face my friends, now nestled around the still smoldering fire-pit, I took note of Dan’s long wide footprints in the sand. I walked in his same path, placing my small feet inside the impressions he’d made, knowing that the following days he’d shroud his embarrassment in jokes, though there was no need. I wished I could get inside my friend to take away his pain, and carry him through the undoubted hurt to come.

  • Poetry – Brendan McCormack

    omeros is unforgiveable

    they come and they go
    fleeting wet bullets
    my bed has left me
    for another bed

    the world has lost eternity
    clocks are now winding
    towards a new paternity

    i wait within the ward of maternity
    for mother to give birth to me
    so that the idea of him
    will return

    midnight in the soup cans of desire

    the taps have stopped dripping
    love is cold
    i am stuck like ketchup
    waiting for her
    to give me a slap
    and release me from
    the gravity of our affair

    sometimes it is enough
    to sit and cry
    and stare

    sometimes the night
    is stuck like this
    and who knows
    who is dying
    by chance

    it is raining in dublin
    all we can think about
    is love

    a soupçon
    is enough for now.

     

    Brendan McCormack is a writer from Dublin. He now lives and works in West Cork. He is an environmental activist and was part of the successful ‘Save Our Skibbereen’ campaign and ran as an Independent in the local elections of 2019. His first collection of poetry, ‘Selling Heaven’, was published in 2012 by Burning Apple Press, NJ, USA. A second collection was published in 2014, ‘Phuckle – Irish Auf English’. He has featured in anthologies such as ‘The Gladstone Readings’, 2016, and ‘Songs for Julia’, 2014. He was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2009. He is currently working on a novel, ’88’.

  • Poetry – Lynn Caldwell (with recording)

    Holding Vellum to the Light

    The pages of the city
    unfold its secrets
    like holding vellum to the light,
    a palimpsest of the past.

    Who walked here on sacred ground?
    What foundations lie under
    that coffee shop all birch and glass?
    You may see
    a piece of broken railing,
    the bronze of a sword.
    This step led to an open door –
    kettle’s on, teacake still warm –
    a girl, flaming hair and rough linen.
    The open space above you
    was a window:
    a woman called children to dinner;
    there, that corner,
    a man waited for a lover
    who never arrived.

    Take a minute.
    In the blank spaces
    look into the light:
    you can see footprints, a torn letter in the wind,
    a field of buttercup and burdock,
    willowherb and silverweed
    underneath the paving.

    Watch your step, consider
    what marks the trail you leave behind.

    Lynn Caldwell’s work has been published in The Irish Times for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award; Dedalus Press’s anthology WRITING HOME; FLARE; and The Antigonish Review, and has featured on Irish radio’s Sunday Miscellany. She was a runner up in Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award 2017, has a BA in creative writing from the University of Victoria, Canada and blogs at http://kennedystreet.wordpress.com. 

    Featured Image Daniele Idini.

  • Heart of the City

    On the LUAS, she counts thirty cranes spiking the skyline. She hasn’t seen this many since 2007. The entire journey into town, she keeps her face visible; she doesn’t care who sees the scar snaking from her cheek to the bridge of her nose. Under her jacket, she grips the hunting knife, reassuringly heavy against her rib.

    She gets off at Westmoreland and heads across the river to the northside, cutting down a side-street that leads to the Pro-Cathedral. The cathedral, or the heart of the city, Gavin once called it. She keeps her head up and her pace brisk, ignoring the eddy of activity around her and the odd looks she gets for the scar.

    On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.

    The heavy timber doors creak open, puncturing the silence within. Gavin stands rock-still up near the altar, a bar of garish light spilling slantwise over him from the beaten-gold apse above. She recognizes his stance. Barefoot and stripped to the waist, his prized kukuri knife slung across his torso from a scabbard, he looks like some sort of urban savage. Even that far away, she can feel his gaze on her, assessing her face and movements. He could be grinning; he usually does when he sees her. Forcing the door shut, she mutes the city’s roar.

    The Pro-Cathedral is more like an art gallery than a place of worship. Gavin told her he hadn’t set foot in it since he was a kid. He’d hated the smell of incense, the bone-white texture of the pillars. He doesn’t mind it too much now, though; grim-faced statues of saints and garish Stations of the Cross seemed to console him. She’d never been inside it before. As she moves among the pews, she sees they are alone.

    Mass has long since emptied out. Not a lone parishioner left; she expects to see some still scattered amid the pews, heads bowed and hands clasped. There isn’t even anyone lighting a candle at the back. No danger of being seen or heard. It’s better to meet in places such as here, where no audience can assess them. He walks down the nave, meets her halfway. Coils of scarring – mementos from previous duels such as this – ripple on his chest and arms. Some she’s dished out to him personally, little welted tokens of her dexterity and skill. Of course, there are others she doesn’t recognise, fresher and angrier-looking; clearly given to Gavin by opponents who aren’t her. She notices him smiling as he advances.

    “Howiya. Fancy seeing you here. How’s that keepin’?” He nods at her scar.

    “I’m still here, aren’t I?” She stares and his smiles broadens.

    “And I’m glad y’are. Thought I scared y’off there.”

    “You wish, Gavin.”

    “Y’have what we agreed?” She nods, unzips her jacket to reveal the leather sheath slung across her waist. The pommel of her Damascus steel blade catches the light. He eyes it.

    “Let’s get to it, so,” he says finally. She glances up at the light pouring through the apse and walks backwards, keeping her eye on him. He turns and walks thirty paces back down the aisle, drawing out the kukuri as he goes. He seems to fill the entire cathedral, his movements tight and regimented like a soldier at parade and a flicker of misgiving darts through her. He almost seems to be planning each move as he snaps the kukuri this way and that.

    The kukuri hisses cleanly and flashes in the dim, dusty light and as he cleaves the air, the blade’s white arc blurs with the whirl of his strokes. She expects he’ll either accidently cut a notch off one of the pews’ varnished oak or dislodge it, but he’s too nimble.

    As long as she’s known him, Gavin has jealously guarded the kukuri. He’s owned many knives in the past, some new and some antique, some acquired locally or online, and others collected in far-off regions where knives rank as works of art and skill with them is in high demand. She’s seen his full armamentarium of Bowies and Swiss Armies, butterflies and sharpfingers. He often takes better care of these implements than he does his own body. He once boasted that, if he’d the time and resources, he could ensure his knife collection would last for centuries after they’re both gone.

    But the kukuri is his pride and joy. He keeps it in a handcrafted leather sheath, and no one, not even her, is permitted to touch it. It’s a combat weapon, trademark of the Nepali Ghurka tribesmen who made it famous. The blade is stainless steel and razor-sharp, hand hammered to a black, thermoplastic hilt. It can be cleaned, sharpened and repaired. Formidable in its simplicity, it can cut through any material she cares to name. Even when it’s no longer suitable for the job, Gavin will not discard it. The kukuri cost him a mint when he bought it online, and a single slash from it could lop her head clean from her shoulders.

    She has been careful in her own choice of weapon: the Damascus was bought second-hand from a vendor in town, its bone hilt smoothed to fit her grip. Her collection of blades isn’t nearly as extensive as Gavin’s, but she’s taught herself well with each of them. After much consideration, the Damascus is her best bet against the kukuri. She’s spent each evening of the week practising in her flat, once she is sure her flatmates have all fallen asleep. She is loath to go anywhere without it now.

    He faces her, and his grip tightens with a neat flick of the wrist. His other hand is held out, open. She removes her jacket and shoes, to leave them bundled on a nearby pew; her own scars, mainly on her arms and ribs, are now in plain sight. She shivers a little at the chill wafting over her. She scans the nave, calculates how limited her movements are actually going to be. Then she draws out her own blade, raises it, and walks up to face him. Of the two of them, she has the longer reach while Gavin has speed. He also has an exposed forearm, the tendons waiting to be severed. She notices them first.

    They meet like this once a month, and never in the same location. That way, neither of them is at an unfair advantage on familiar ground. Once they duelled at the end of the pier in Dun Laoghaire, at her suggestion; another time it was in a building site behind Gavins house. Once they agree on the place, there is no going back. Under no circumstances will either of them withdraw.

    Their rules are few and fair: there are only ten minutes to fight. He will fight with only his kukuri, and she with her Damascus steel. No nails, fists or teeth allowed. No point in even trying to emerge unscathed; getting cut or sliced is inevitable. The wounds must be inflicted cleanly and whoever draws the most blood wins.

    The last time they duelled, she’d been a hair too slow dodging his slash, and he’d given her the scar on her cheek. She remembered how he stood back, eyes glazing, in admiration of his handiwork, even as blood dribbled down her face. He helped her dress the wound afterward. She went home and practised knife moves in the dim of her flat, swearing to herself she wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

    This is their strangest arena so far. It’s always been out in the open until now. Manouvering will be difficult, unless she manages to back him up towards the altar. She sees her chances of that as being about even.

    He lunges, lightning-quick as a dancer, swinging at her forearm. His body becomes a fever of movement, limbs snaking and dashing at her, the force of his attack bringing her to heel. Were she still a novice, it would have happened too fast for her to even react. But she’s trained herself hard, and well. His curved stroke narrowly misses her. He chops at the air, butchering dust. The kukuri falls hard and heavy, and Gavin gains ground.

    She parries with the flat of her blade, blocking his blows and stabbing, to drive him back somewhat. Their steely clangs and clatters echo through the cathedral like the shrieks of ill-fated souls. To anyone else, that sound is murder on the ears. To her and Gavin, it’s sweet as an aria.

    She lashes out in between his blows, her blade nicking his sternum. It’s not a deep cut, certainly not enough to warrant victory for her, but enough for Gavin to grunt and stagger backward, dazed. He glances down, and his free hand locates the laceration as blood starts seeping down his chest and onto the tiles. The splashes, too, echo loudly and they both stand back, appraising each other and the damage. She sees his smile is askew and can hear his heavy breathing. Holy through his own blood, she thinks.

    “Nice one”, he says, with something like approval in his eyes, and raises the kukri to resume the salvo. But his strokes are sloppier and his breathing has gotten heavier. He tries hacking again, in a downward arc, but she dodges and his blade is stuck fast, lodged in a pew near the front. He wrenches his knife free, but a few noticeable notches are left behind in the wooden bench. Gavin grits his teeth and spits, approaching her with fury in his eyes.

    He’s starting to break one of his rules, the one he told her when she first picked up a blade: never get angry in a duel. It blurs concentration, makes you clumsy and more likely to be beaten. He’s no less dangerous for it, though. Droplets from the cut on his chest spray over the pews and floor; his feet leave prints in his wake as he swings and keeps missing. He flails now, aware slightly that a shift in the air has occurred and he is no longer at an advantage. Weakened, he wards off her advances on him, blocking her riposte somewhat, but it’s not enough. He forces her back a bit, but she charges, and he lists against a pew, grabbing on to it to catch his fall. With raspy breath and mouth agape, Gavin steps forward, blade lowered, staring wildly at her. His empty hand finds the nick and the blood pooling around it stains his fingers. The cut runs deeper than either of them thought. His face now registers something alien, for he has no facility to fathom defeat.

  • Anarchy Booked

    A poetaster’s tribute to Geoffrey Hill’s The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019).

    I heard Sir Geoffrey refer many times in his Oxford lectures (2010-2015) to our current situation as one of ‘plutocratic anarchy’. I suspect that, like many, he was fascinated and frustrated by the oxymoronic sight of ordinary, ‘common’ people persistently voting for, excusing, and admiring those who would subject and exploit them.

    People voting against egalitarianism, that sort of thing. People claiming to hate élites and experts, while lauding fatuous celebrities, mendacious politicians and tax-avoiding oligarchs to the skies. What the hell! It’s a job to keep calm, it is. What’s happened to intrinsic value? After such gnosis, what forgiveness?

    Hill is, in this Book, much concerned with our chaotic, self-defeating times, but he’s concerned too with cultural instances of last words, late testaments, final goodbyes and deathbed flourishes. The barbarians may be at the ruined gates, but the professor has brought ashore and stored (in his memory) a whole load of good stuff for us. He’s passing it on.

    The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin is a Last Supper, a séance, a cénacle, a ‘Scipionic Circle’ (see poem 128), a consistory. Just look who’s been invited, look who’s turned up!

    What are they talking about? They can’t be serious. Stuff about ‘fate’ and ‘genius’ and ‘intrinsic value’, and ‘poetry’ and ‘gnosis’ and ‘hierarchy’. And, what’s this, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) – ‘the Augsburger’ – and his ‘epic theatre’, Brecht who once versified the Communist Manifesto in Lucretian hexameters, and named Brueghel’s Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) a ‘great war painting’ (see 123) – well, ‘it is vital that we | resurrect Brecht’ (124). Christ!

    Bertolt Brecht

    Final Words?

    How to categorise this weird offering, its preposterous form? Is it a biographia literaria (Coleridge)? A tractatus theologico-politicus (Spinoza)?  A religio poetae (Coventry Patmore)? A Day-Book of Counsel and Comfort (George Fox)?

    Does Hill intend for us to think this is epic theatre? He refers peevishly to W H Auden’s political poem ‘The Orators’ in poem 158: ‘The nearest we get to epic theatre is ‘The Orators’.’

    Of this 1932 poem (G.H. was born in 1932), Auden wrote: ‘The central theme of ‘The Orators’ seems to be hero-worship, and we all know what that can lead to politically.’

    There’s plenty of hero-worship in The Book of Baruch, plenty of wrestling too with the betrayal of the working class (31), and the embarrassments of the Tory tradition: ‘Tory, to me at this latter day, is both rabble and oligarchy’ (261).

    Is Milton’s Paradise Lost epic theatre? I guess so. Milton’s all over the place in The Book of Baruch; amidst the civil war of austerity-and-Brexit, anarchic plutocracy’s generous mess of potage, Hill takes comfort in the compensations of falling towards the grave.

    We might more readily expect a Last Will and Testament, I suppose. GH was in his 80s, and whilst he always seems to have written as if he thought he might die tomorrow, well, this is more obviously an apostrophe to those who would survive him. The poem numbered ‘47’ begins, perhaps, with an old man muttering to himself:

    If this is going to be your testament best press on with it.

    A testament – leaving stuff to someone, testifying to having existed; let’s also remember that GH is masquing himself as one ‘gnostic Justin’, who may understand ‘testament’ more grandly to mean a covenant or new dispensation of some sort, (for those who come after), a scripture, even.

    Well, William Blake’s engraving (plate 14) for his America: A Prophecy (1793) is the jacket image, after all. (And Justin appraises that engraving too – see ‘170’: ‘his beard imitates mine in my mock senile portraits’. Sir Geoffrey threatens to get senile on us, but there’s exquisite method in this discombobulation, I suspect).

    ‘America is an early radiant work if we simply let the illumination bathe us’, a voice declares. I propose that we take time to consider the professor’s last things, and bathe in the illuminations and recriminations that Hill-Justin has to offer?

    A Great Gift

    So; a generic hybrid. A testament, a covenant, a witness statement, a testimony, a symposium, a reproach, a mockery (Pope’s Dunciad is a lost friend). H’m. I’m only fussing over this because I feel that GH is bequeathing all us ‘poetasters’ – ok, I admit it – a new form to play with.

    It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears. You might say he’s just teasing us with being mock prophetic (as well as mock senile), but that’s ok too, isn’t it? Look at the long lines – they don’t even end at the right hand margin, do they?

    Folded back into hanging-indent paragraphs, like a manifesto or, (actually), a stanza from Andre Breton’s ‘Ode to Fourier’ (see 179), or, I should say, looking remarkably like Rimbaud’s lineation in Une Saison en Enfer.

    Who’d ‘ve thought it? GH makes something of this source in 167, raving about Rimbaud’s (and David Bomberg’s) part in the invention of ‘modernist poetry’, through an instinctive concurrence, apparently, with the philosopher Berkeley’s redemptive notion ‘that particles are units in the mind’s energy’. (This stuff may need some work doing: you could try D J Greene’s 1953 journal article, ‘Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Anti-Newtonianism’.) It’s all part of a thrilling defence of poetry for the 21st century; and look out for Kit Smart (‘no hoodlum’, 28) throughout the poem, and the product of his season in hell, Jubilate Agno.

    Not obviously poetry then, but beyond prose, certainly. A 21st century Walt Whitman, for sure, inventorying what’s excitingly referred to (47) as ‘the untenable sanctities of abiding things’. Beyond grasping, out of kilter, implausible, but we do know such things, don’t we?

    Certainly, [Listen to me – ‘Certainly’!], an old humanities professor might know a thing or two about what’s worth preserving, what might stay us, what abides, what might redeem the time, dare I say. Is this about redemption, after all, HaShem’s ways to man, and is it now delivered by these here genii and their gnomic achievements?

    GH reminds us, for example, of the poet Thomas Nashe’s ‘finest poem thrown away on a dull drama’ – remember that invincible line?

    Brightness falls from the air

    This from a poem in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600), a comedy. Well, if poems can do that…

    ‘old-fashioned encyclopedic knowledge’

    The thing about testament and prophecy, we might remember, is that they’re inevitably political and more or less obviously, satirical, (you can’t get away from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, the other mockers – Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’, for instance). Oh, yes – and also theological. Sorry. Well, just think Søren Kierkegaard, if it helps – his many pseudonymous personae – Johannes Climacus, that sort of thing.

    Come to think of it, the title of Johannes Climacus’s 1846 work is perfect for GH’s book: Concluding Unscientific Postscript – ‘scrapings and parings of systematic thought . . . divided into bits’, as its epigraph notes. So much I have known, and know, don’t you know? Unbelievable stuff, ‘untenable’, beyond my grasp, inordinate, but something there, let me tell you. I’ve seen things, as the replicant says before expiring in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner. Peace be upon him.

    It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears. I’d like to try it too; who knows, my children might be grateful to their poetasting father, when he’s gone? I’m not as old, nor as learned, nor as wise as GH, nor would he have deemed me a poet, but there’s plenty to encourage me here: ‘Poets with old-fashioned encyclopedic knowledge bring good seed to tillage’. (126) And then, later, he writes:

    –                                            With always an encyclopedia on which to rest my left

    –              arm, I do not have to resort overmuch to erm. (256)

    Seems to be down to knowledge, then, and not, erm, inspiration (or genius?) Phew! I can do this. The gnostic Jonathan. A gnostic poetaster. Let’s see.

    Geoffrey Hill 1932-2016.

    Automatism

    What else? How to get started each day, overcome the embarrassment and inferiority of the poetaster? Well, I can tell you, GH recommends the practitioners of automatism.

    Robert Desnos is our (hu)man – ‘far and away the best of those Surreal men’ (139). I have to look into this. Peter Stockwell’s book The Language of Surrealism is certainly helpful. He writes: ‘in principle anyone could engage in automatic writing’, and refers to a ‘meeting on 25 September 1922 [the year of ‘The Waste Land’, and of Ulysses], in [André] Breton’s studio on the Rue de Fontaine in Paris, at which [René] Crevel, newly arrived from a spiritualist séance, suggested using the same technique for writing.’

    Apparently, Robert Desnos was proficient in writing during a ‘self-induced trance-like sleep’, ‘in which striking images were often expressed with dense echoic sound-effects of alliteration, rhyme and punning.’ He wrote, for instance: ‘Mots, êtes-vous des mythes et pareils aux myrtes des morts? [Words, are you myths and similar to the myrtles of the dead?]’ This was published ‘in Littérature in December 1922 . . . under the name Rrose Sélavy (a pun on eros, c’est la vie)”. And these good mots duly make their appearance in Baruch – check number 139. Is this the discombobulating method?

    There has to be something in this for the gnostic Justin, right? I can’t prove this – (Go-ogle doesn’t know, for heaven’s sake – how agnostic is that?) – but I think the line quoted in poem 73 of this Book of Baruch: ‘To run on empty is to achieve a sort of hallucinatory abundance and clarity’ – I think this must be a translation of something in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and that Breton is the ‘Parnassian and … sassy man’ also mentioned there, (not Hopkins, who is above that, as we know).

    André Breton in 1924.

    The paradox, the oxymoron – they’re pretty surreal, aren’t they? GH always had plenty of time for the paradox, the oxymoron; and the cryptogram too, I’d say; all is surreal in such verbal tourbillions (Robert Graves’ brave word; see ‘On Portents’, and appraised by GH in one of his lectures). And – just in passing – there’s plenty of focus in Baruch on ‘codes’ – ‘the codes from London were always that absurd’ (89) – and the weird poetic lines/codes in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (‘a cultural film of established acclaim’ (139)), and – would you believe it? – Alan Turing’s turned up (227).

    There is something in this. Let’s remember, those codes did mean something, (to those in the know, to those in the Résistance (89) or the Widerstand (255), for instance, God bless ‘em). People do solve cryptograms, don’t they? Poetasters are with the resistance too, right? Codes for a consistory. Like Polari, or Yiddish.

    But how much cryptic and recondite erudition can the nation – those to whom we bequeath all this – tolerate? (See 163) The poetaster will do well to remember how her work may be received; words of warning: ‘Poem as inaccurate | prism inaccurately decoded; progressively derided; making honest | decent people appear stupid; all the pretence of a séance’ (163).

    But take heart; let’s not forget that final mystery about which the mystics advise, and via, apparently, this same automatic writing (see Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism) – look at this in poem 40, our professor musing on ‘intrinsic value’ and John Donne’s final writings: ‘our grandest poetics | perform their mystic dance of savagely disputed provenance.’

    Hallelujah. Hill-Justin notes, approvingly, ‘Rouault’s mystical aggressive passivity.’ And has a mystical experience of his own, with ‘[d]ense holly trees’ (221). This is, after all, ‘’Geoff’s Mystery Tour’, perilous self-entertainment that would have | delighted my Aunt Nell, the bright one of our family.’ (178) This delights me: ‘All the mysterium of God is in the measure of time.’ (183) Who knows otherwise?

    Form and Process

    So much for form and process? Worth pausing here; because I want to say that (what used to be called) the content of this mock-prophecy is absolutely fascinating too, no doubt about it, I’m ashamed to admit. So I’ll come back later, if you don’t mind, to this thing about form and genre and provenance, this ‘All Souls’ Night’ (Yeats) summoning to a final showdown, a last reckoning.

    A little bit about the content, even though the Professor insisted this is of no interest if it hasn’t got ‘technic’, (also Yeats, (and Ezra Pound)). But we’ve established the technic is automatism, isn’t it, the subjective-made-objective, the mask which is self-portrait, the sensibility-register. The anti-lyric, too. See 182: ‘The form I choose is monologue though with frequent episodes of multi- | voiced fugue.’

    Firstly, if you’re the sort of person who likes to hear, say, Sir Geoffrey Hill choose his favourite bits of music, (he was once on Radio 3’s Private Passions, where the ‘Coventry Carol’ played alongside Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Star-spangled Banner’), well, this will be a revelation, (as prophecies are supposed to be, no?)

    Here – this is important to say – you have to simultaneously hear, as counterpoint to various musical miracles, the bells in Wren’s churches crashing to the ground during the Blitz. This prophecy is ‘loud with falling bell-chambers’ (10), ‘bells, a last | cascade of thrashing, mangled squeals’ (36), ‘bells falling and bawling’ (2); and ‘the toppling creel of half- | melted bell-metal’ provides a great metaphor for automatic writing and this whole book: ‘astonishing collocations of syntax and semiotics’ (36). Hill-Justin listens, too, hoping to “cough up the phlegm of a poem”, to

    The mingled throps and thrangs of bell-ropes and bell metal, mangled and
    _          muffled songs, when you stand beneath the bell chamber, hearing the
    _          ropes grunt and clamber. (72)

    We might recall the opening lines of Yeats’ séance poem, ‘All Souls’ Night: Epilogue to ‘A Vision’’:

    Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
    And many a lesser bell sound through the room;
    And it is All Souls’ Night

    The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, designed by Christopher Wren.

    I think it’s midnight for GH too, and HaShem’s in the tomb, and Tennyson’s ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky’ is a distant memory, (lacking some ‘obduracy of the mind’s address’, apparently (69)). When Hill-Justin tried to compose music himself, he informs us, he failed: ‘My piano compositions failed because I could not compose a convincing | ground bass’ (249). He succeeds here, with Wren’s crashing bells.

    We should remember GH didn’t want to be a poet, after all:

    I would have prayed to excel in mathematics and music if I had prayed at all;
    _          envying Wren and the musicians of the Chapel Royal; passacaglias and
    _          Purcell; for that is where the mind stands to itself, albeit in hell. (25)

    Well, look – listen! – the music of Purcell does seem to come out on top here. (When GH was invited by The Economist to read his Clavics and work-in-progress at the Purcell Room on the South Bank in 2011 – ‘What! Six daybooks, already?’ we all declared. (Actually, seven now.) – GH closed proceedings with the most menacing and atoning rendition of Hopkins’ sonnet ‘Henry Purcell’ you could ever dread to hear.) GH seems to agree with what Hopkins says of Purcell:

    The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him
    that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of
    man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and
    species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.

    Wow! (Plenty of derogatory stuff about ‘moods’ as the domain of mere poetasting in Baruch, be warned.)

    And Hopkins is a key presence at the table – this cénacle – throughout. In 176 Hopkins and Purcell are linked via Purcell’s ability to create ‘sprung rhythm | two centuries before ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean fire’ which its | rediscoverer – a devout Purcell admirer – felt duty bound to keep | hidden lest he should bring notoriety upon the Society in which you do | as you are bidden.’

    Odes and Welcome Songs

    Let’s see which bits of Purcell are playing at the Feast, on ‘the wind-up gramophone’ (137). Well, it seems to be his Odes and Welcome Songs (185; 187; 188), and this is what Hill-Justin says of them: ‘these ‘welcome songs’ feature a benign vision for the future of the | kingdom in accordance with divine nature’ (188).

    He goes on to express extraordinary gratitude and estimation (189): ‘Tell him his saddest | music well-betides us, elides all but our last, worst fears.’ Plenty of compensations, then, even after a referendum and all history’s idiot repetitions.

    So much for content? O, but look out for, nevertheless, Schubert’s Quintet (70; 253), Handel’s Saul (79) – ‘how profound the accessible can be, | given mastery” – Thirties jazz –  “accurate music appropriate to heaven” (36) – Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (130), ‘L’hymne de l’Union Européenne’ (140), symphony number 9 by Malcolm Arnold – ‘old Malc’ – “that final untri- | umphing lento of twenty-odd minutes”, “its near subliminal song” (197), and Ralph Vaughan Williams:

    I bless the marvellous
    ‘Five Mystical Songs’: although strong music cannot
    _          even begin to mend wrongs, it is, in some way I wish I could well relate,
    _          analogous to the Pentecostal tongues. (85)

    Ok. So – poetry – this poetry – aspires to the condition of music, yes? Well, I’m not sure about that with Hill-Justin, after all. Set down this, set down this: ‘Not | music. Hebrew. Poetry aspires | to the condition of Hebrew.’

    Of course! Now we’re talking. This naughty apophthegm is ripped from Hill’s 2000 prophecy, Speech! Speech! (poem 20). Such wisdom bears contemplation. (Well, I’m reading Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century as back-up).

    And I was always told the three archetypes of the human condition to be Faust, Don Juan and Ahasuerus, don’t you know. [Whilst we’re here, Wikipedia keeps us informed that Kant himself refers to the legendary Ahasuerus, wandering Jew, in his The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. I’m reminded of Hill’s long-time interest in Peirce’s ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’. – Sorry – am I going into séance mode?] And what about Lear as archetype too (God’s spy)? What about Falstaff (God’s clown)? Our prophet is all these.)

    Hill-Justin – the poet-prophet – as Ahasuerus. Exiled, unhoused Adam. Well, this did preoccupy John Milton at the end of all his hopes and dreams. Where did it all go wrong? And Milton’s all over The Book of Baruch, as I say. ‘Latterly, led by the hand in his good grey coat, a blind good looker, looking like | a Quaker.’ (18)

    Supremely non-conformist, speaking truth to power, aficionado of peace. And a reader – don’t you know – of the Hebrew scriptures. Geoffrey Hill, Hebraist, (there was a quotation in Hebrew for The Triumph of Love (1998), wasn’t there?) He refers mysteriously in 96 to ‘the | inexorable semitic-semantic code.’ Is this that ‘God’s grammar’ thing, again; isn’t that from John Donne? Still, the still, small voice.

    John Milton 1608-1674

    Love Supreme

    The gnostic Justin, we think, was ‘Jewish-Christian’, and, excitingly, considered a heretic by Hippolytus, (third century). And look at this:

    But because I am not a Jew I desire to know all that was said when, once a year,
    __          the high priest convened in holy fear with the Ark of God.

    Hill’s naughtiness and perspicacity, his agile-mindedness and contrariness and impetuosity all remind me, at least, of the Hebrew prophets. It’s a familiarity with HaShem (her omniscience and inordinacy), a longing to hear HaShem’s voice (in the gathered silence of this Quakerly meeting), which makes Hill’s encyclopaedic mind, too, into a psaltery of praise and vexation and vexatiousness. Isn’t this the Hebraic mindset? Forgive me.

    Hill repeats this sense, actually, of exclusion from, what, the chosen race? In 216: ‘I am not a Jew though I married one; and I subscribe to their iron scorn.’

    Jewish cultural illuminati are prominent and are revered. Besides the anonymous authors of the Gnostic Bible (40) and The Book of Job (86), there’s Simone Weil, of course, Robert Desnos (very much so), Len Rosoman and his commentary on the epicentral Mad Meg painting (is it a pogrom?) by Brueghel; David Bomberg too, Celan, Tzara, Gershom Scholem (think his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)), the Mandelstams, Gillian Rose (quoting from his late friend’s Judaism and Modernity, wouldn’t you know; must read this), Sandy Goehr (his co-eval), even Leopold Bloom; the Jewish century, I’m convinced.

    We see ‘Willy Brandt at the | Ghetto memorial’ (77), consider ‘the topic of Jews and usury’ (186), never forgetting strains of antisemitism in ‘my grievous heroes’ (186; 111; 177). And a strange and riddling identification: ‘Ich bin Dreyfus, an old man who walks with a cane, thus – ‘ (189). If poetry aspires to the condition of Hebrew, then I suppose the poet’s task is both to resist and to aspire to scriptural authority for herself. A bit much for a poetaster, truth be told.

    Anacoluthon!, as decency demands. Yes, even Love Supreme has to come to an end. Let me finish, please. We’ve got the Hebraic mindset then, the surrealist automatism and discombobulation, the musical passacaglia – and we’ve also got pained awareness of the betrayal of the working class (and the European mindset, bien sûr), the death of intrinsic value (O, no it’s not!), there’s Hill’s gnostic ‘back garden apple’, his parents’ suffering and his childhood, poet-soldiers and – pilots, (Eric Ravilious, d. 1942 (242)), war photography (Mathew Brady (247)), divination (everywhere), and Coke (1552-1634) and Grotius (1583-1645) laying the foundations for international law, as all great poets do, too. Mind you, let’s be clear:

    The waters recede: neither covenant nor creed. (236)

    This great prose poem, divine table-talk, is endless. You can’t stop loving it. As Ezra Pound wrote of Wyndham Lewis’s work in 1917 on illustrations for Timon of Athens, (and quoted in Baruch, 229), we hear everywhere the prophetic “fury of intelligence baffled and inspired by circumjacent stupidity.” But this fury is never unmixed with “ ‘summer’s sovereign good’” (from, is it, the last poem Hopkins wrote?) and (though not “irrefutable”) “evidence of cosmic cadence” (256). How GH loved this all, all this wisdom, all this folly.

    Love you, Professor. Lead the way.

    Intrinsic value that I care about is as tenuous and wiry as a bit of great verse. (163)

    It is a great gift, and I, for one, am moved to tears.

  • Poem written in old age

    Poem written in old age

    The light that streams across the universe
    Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
    Where midst the flux of fields and particles
    Eternal wisdom older than the stars
    Unweaves her web of possibilities
    The patterner experiments and plays.
    Bright pearls arranged according to the laws of chance
    Or unknown logic, now ingathering
    Dark threaded galaxies where furious force
    Sweeps stirs and scars the dust of earlier worlds
    And in continuous creation builds again
    Forms that persist beyond the death of stars.

    I too shall praise the heaven’s magnificence
    Honour with awe its ever abundant power
    That once with measured force spread out the sky
    To be a bound and roof upon our world
    And a protection to the fragile Earth

    I dreamed we built a home for everyone
    There where I danced beneath the moody sky
    We gathered gifts from the untamed wilderness
    And put our passions together to prove our skill
    I piled turves around the tallest tree
    To form a seat and meeting place for friends
    And all around
    We planted seeds and hope in the dark ground.

    A craftsman wrought a jewel long ago
    Welded of words and of lines laid true:
    From older songs he hammered out his tale
    Of courage and of loss, of king and earl
    Of men and monsters, a memorial
    An elegy of an imagined past.
    This that the war geared Danes far in days long gone
    Gained fame in story, glory in war
    How that the Ethelings harassed their enemies
    Tribute and treasure took from tribes all around
    So that the gold giver strong in his growing band
    Folk wielder, wide ruler, strong in command
    It pleased the peoples’ king to plot a towering hall
    Gathered the workmen there from every land
    To build the glad mead hall wondrous in workmanship
    Famed amongst every folk, glorious and grand
    Glad in the glee of hall, song mead and feast
    Welcome to give to all, stranger and guest

    He shared God’s wealth with all, except the common land
    Care for the young and old , while shall the hall still stand.

    Fast came feud, the dragon crawls along the rock
    Brother by brother slain, who from his dark tower gazes on his hoard
    The works of man overthrown, and grimly the dragon guards his greed
    Nothing of worth remains, while treasure proud he broods of doom
    War without end, he who is now the wyrm was once a man
    He will devour all, and in his banks and barrows guard his pride.
    All of our wealth they bury deep, they who were human once are monsters now.

    Until a hero would come who had learned all the language of birds
    Who had seen how the hazel nut falls who had found out the strength of a wolf
    Who far from the friends of men had drunk of the spring and the well
    And boasts he will reforge the shattered past.

    Because I knew two fat and greedy slugs
    Had crept into my garden to destroy
    And everywhere they’d been they’d left their slime
    On everything I did and still do love
    So I must wander in the wild lands
    Of my imagination flying far
    Beyond each seen hill. into each dark wood
    In endless exploration travelling
    And trace each little river to its source

    There is no river running round the world to bring us back
    To step and step again on our own land
    And see it for the first time: river run
    River run, river run, always new under the sun
    River run to the sea, river run, river run.

    And then my mind moves on
    To Homer’s heroes weeping by their ships
    Who in the pain of war
    Or washed by slave girls
    Sitting in high seats
    Would eat their roast meat and their mixed red wine
    Gold jugs and silver basins, gleaming oiled skin
    And think themselves like gods
    As some blind singer skilled
    Sang of their war achievements and their crimes.

    The old man now remembering his loss
    In his imagination finds his home
    Trickster and fighter once, teller of tales,
    Sacker of cities,
    To meet again the weaver of his dreams.
    An old man now imagines his return
    That trickster, trader, sacker of cities, king
    Teller of tales of whom once tales were told
    Will find his way again still with deceit
    His youth disguised now only by old age
    To meet again the weaver of his dreams.

    He will imagine what the swineherd said.
    That happy is the lad that had no need
    To be a hero.
    Odysseus had taken all the boys
    To fight in wars for Agamemnon’s glory
    He’d let them kill the cattle of the sun
    And brought back none.
    And now the arrogant young lords
    Devour all and never leave a scrap
    Till everything is gone.

    They taunt and mock the poor.
    And drive the needy stranger from their door.
    And if the king returns he’ll do such things as will be told in story
    He’ll bring a bloody climax to their deeds
    Renew himself
    In all the joy of action….

    Then I awoke in a fair field of folk
    And let the leaves of memory fall through my skull,
    The bare and distant trees where few birds call
    The ferns and dead leaves by the waterfall
    And the grey lichen on the granite wall
    We go to hear the sermon of John Ball
    For Much the Miller will grind small small,
    Because I know that winter is delayed
    While all the colours of the evening sky
    Still gleam and fade.

     

    David Hillman was born in Launceston, Cornwall where the poet Charles Causley was then working as a teacher. One of the children of Ron Hillman, a postman. David read widely and explored the countryside on foot but restricted by his family’s poverty he had never been more than fifteen miles from home until he left at the age of fifteen to get involved in politics and study. He obtained degrees in Physics Maths and in Modern History in Brighton, Oxford, and Liverpool, and has spent many years teaching in Oxford including some quite challenging environments. He considers himself an apprentice poet, now in his early seventies.

     

  • ACME

    The Jehovah’s Witnesses were driving me crazy with their too-polite knocks and damnation pamphlets. Maybe they earned extra credit for early morning salvation attempts? I was always too sleepy to answer and peeked thru the peephole at their church lady hats and cheap briefcases as they walked to the curb. Martha at the hardware store was one. She had hair she could sit on and I saw her eating a bowl of cereal on the bus. She once showed me a little laminated card in her wallet – NUNCA SANGRE – blood transfusions were not allowed even if you were dying in the street.

    Maybe the Jehovah’s did the math and figured the odds were on their side; after dozens of mornings of relentless knocking, I answered the door on Saturday. With dripping hair and wrapped in a towel, I swung the door open dramatically.

    “Good morning,” said the lone guy who was most definitely not a Jehovah’s Witness.

    “Oh,” I answered, my hand reassuring the knotted terrycloth around my chest.

    “This actually happens all the time,” the young man said. His hair was the color of a manila envelope and obviously cut while blindfolded. His eyes were the most boring eyes in the world – just dots really – but his smile was so ridiculous, so dazzling – like a movie star, like a billboard for toothpaste.

    “I was praying the towel would finally scare off the Witnesses,” I blurted out.

    “I’m not scared, but I’m not one of them.” He held up clipboard; a pencil on a string dangled from it. “I ask questions.”

    “Door to door?” I asked. “Door to door,” he nodded.

    He was wearing a light blue workshirt with an embroidered ACME patch over the pocket. It seemed vaguely professional.

    “I will answer your questions,” I told him. “Come with me to the Laundromat and ask me questions from your clipboard.”

    He followed me into the kitchen. The small TV on the counter was turned to the Spanish soap opera. Louisa shouted at Ricardo – “Donde esta mi madre?” – I pushed some magazines off the second chair and Acme sat down. “I watch this to keep my Spanish from getting rusty. The main thing to remember is that ‘Estoy embarazada’ does not mean what it sounds like. It means ‘I’m pregnant.’ I found out the hard way.”

    Acme laughed.

    I spooned two tablespoons of instant coffee into two mugs and poured boiling water from a small saucepan. The brown grains swirled to the surface until I propellered the spoon and they dissolved with the heat.  I handed Acme his coffee and grabbed an elementary-school-lunch-sized milk carton from the almost empty refrigerator. “Have you seen me?” was written on three sides, next to a postage stamp of a photo of a girl with a crooked smile and startled eyes.

    I plopped down in the other kitchen chair and we sipped our coffee. “You are still in your Jehovah’s Witness towel,” Acme pointed out.

    “I know. I do laundry every Saturday. Every piece I own except this towel. We can wheel over to the Laundromat after coffee.”

    “Not that I mind,” said Acme. “I just wondered.” He noisily slurped his coffee. “This is probably the worst coffee I’ve ever had.”

    I laughed. “The coffee at the Laundromat is even worse. Somehow you can even taste the styrofoam cup.”

    We sat quietly. Outdoor sounds squeezed in through the half-opened window – a man coughing, an outburst of barking, a plane jetting overhead and then fading away. I tucked my feet under my chair and slid them back out on top of white canvas tennis shoes, the backs bent in, flattened. Using my pointer finger as a shoe horn, I

    wedged on the still doubled knotted sneakers.

    “Ready for our adventure?” I asked, as I buttoned up my raincoat over the Jehovahs Witness towel.

    The wire grocery cart was waiting next to the front door; the lumpy cloth laundry bags oozed through the slats like mashed potatoes.

    Acme grabbed his clipboard and we wheeled the cart down the sidewalk towards the Laundromat. The handfuls of laundry quarters in my coat pockets rattled as I tripped over every bump in the cement I did not see.

    “Ok, first question – why are you just wearing a towel and washing all your clothes at once?”

    I sighed. “The Four F’s, I guess. Fire, flood, famine, father.”

    Acme looked confused. “Five F’s – one is for follow up. Please.”

    I rolled my eyes. “My dad was a fireman so he drilled it into me to always be prepared.”

    “Prepared for what?”

    “Prepared for anything. To save time, to escape as quickly as possible. At night I got my breakfast 90% ready – cereal poured into the bowl, two pieces of bread poised in the toaster, the pre-buttered knife diagonal on the plate. All I had to do in the morning was push the toaster button.

    “He would do time trials to see how long it would take me to get out of the house. I never knew when they would happen. Sometimes the smoke alarm would go off after midnight. I once caught him standing on a chair in the hallway, exhaling an entire pack of cigarettes in front of the smoke detector.

    “Every rung of the escape ladder shook as I climbed down in the dark. The blackness was only broken by my father directing his powerful flashlight at me, like one of those helicopters looking for fugitives from the sky.

    “A few times he blasted the referee in a can – that metal tube with a horn attached. He stood in the driveway and squeezed it mercilessly. Of course the neighbors hated him. And he used a stopwatch. I wore my nightgown over my school clothes. It helped me feel at least outwardly normal. It also cut seconds off my escape time.

    “No matter how often the drills happened – sometimes it was months between them and other times they were back to back – there was a constant fear of sleep. Each drill was a crazy adrenaline rush. I needed to run off the extra energy surge and I’d stand in the dark living room and jog in place until I was finally exhausted.”

    “Jesus,” Acme said, shaking his head.

    “My father wrote down my times in a pocket notebook he kept with him at all times. Rows of numbers, colored pencil charts and graphs. It wasn’t until he disappeared, the day he emptied his pockets onto the kitchen counter and calmly walked out the door, that I began to under- stand what he had done. How he had negated every single day for a future of emergency and disaster that never happened. I realized how much time was lost, wasted.

    “He unplugged every lamp, every appliance, but the refrigerator, at night. He blamed faulty electrical work for most household fires. I learned to see in the dark, to feel my way around the house, to trace the outline of furniture, doorways, with my hands; count out the necessary steps to the bathroom. It was like living in a Braille coloring book. I slept with the curtains open to get even a sliver of street light into my room.”

    “Did you ever sleep?” Acme asked.

    “I learned to sleep at weird times in weird places. Snoring in the shower, catnaps in the cafeteria. Even now, beds seem dangerous. I still make my bed with all the sheets at once, one on top of the other. That first night, it’s like I’ve built a force field around me. And every morning, I peel off a layer, like an onion, and my protection shrinks by that precious millimeter.”

    We paused at the intersection. Acme turned towards me, the sun blazing and outrageous behind him. Suddenly his hair was orange, like it was on fire and his skin was transparent. Red and blue veins that had been invisible suddenly made a nonsensical roadmap of his forehead, his neck. It was as if he had been turned inside out.

    He was talking to me, but I was tuned out, distracted by the gentle pulsating in his temple. His talk no longer words but just sounds, like the teacher in Charlie Brown. Then I noticed the blood trickle, ever so slowly, from his nose, outline his upper lip and then drip down his chin and onto his blue shirt. The blood blossomed into a spidery red flower. My eyes refocused, and startled, I asked, “Are you ok?”

    Acme reflexively rubbed his face, smearing the blood with his fingertips, then looked at his hand. “I’m sorry. It happens.”

    I poked around in my dirty laundry and handed him a gym sock. “Thanks. People around here are used to it. Sometimes they even seem kind of disappointed if I don’t bleed.” Wearing my sock like a puppet, Acme tilted his head back and pinched his nostrils. The blood soaked his fingertips and striped the white cotton sock on his arm.

    Acme and I stopped on the sidewalk, his head tilted back, looking at the sky, hoping for gravity to stop the blood. A bowlegged woman in a terrible housecoat was waiting outside the Laundromat, her tiny dog impatient and tangled around her concave ankles. At her feet, a thank-you-for-shopping-here plastic bag was dropped, a box of popsicles melting into a rainbow puddle. A few noisy bees and a line of ants were drinking in the sweet decay. The dog was licking its feet.

    “We’re here,” I laughed and pushed open the door. I wheeled my overloaded cart in like a drunk driver.

    “Good morning, young lady,” called out Miss Helen, the attendant.

    She was the oldest woman in the world, a skeleton really, ruling in her secondhand upholstered armchair, aluminum TV tray at her side. Miss Helen wore plaid polyester pants and a faded sweatshirt, a fistful of tissues tucked underneath one wristband. Nobody had ever seen her out of that chair.

    Acme looked at Miss Helen and whispered, “Is it really her job to sit there all day?”

    “She runs a tight ship. Her dead husband opened this place a million years ago.”

    I walked over to Miss Helen. “I’m renting one of your

    National Enquirers until my laundry is done,” I said, and tossed a quarter into the mayonnaise jar on her tray. She nodded. I waved the yellowed tabloid in the air: Dolly Parton Shocker! “This looks good!”

    The Laundromat was a big square bisected by a long countertop on skinny legs. On one wall were the port- holes of the industrial washers and on the other leg of the L, were the dryers. A row of molded plastic chairs, segmented like a caterpillar, ran along the steamy windows.

    Acme, still pinching his bloody nose, looked around fascinated. He watched the woman leaning against a washer, holding a paper cup, ringed with old coffee like an ancient tree. Her movements were slow and stiff, a rusted robot, as she brought the cup to her lips. “It’s like a meeting of Sleepwalkers Anonymous in here.”

    “It is another world,” I agreed. “Planet Fluff and Fold.”

    I dumped my laundry onto the big table and sorted it into piles to wash. Acme talked, the gym sock muffling his voice, like a kid trying to do impressions. The blood on his shirt was growing, climbing its way across his chest. “I think my nosebleed finally stopped but my shirt looks like a crime scene.” Acme slowly unbuttoned his shirt with wet fingers, dotting the fabric with bloody halfmoons. “Tshirt too,” I commanded.

    He sat there, shirtless in the plastic chair, looking at his reflection in the round glass of the dryer door and wiping his nose with the sock. His skin was so pale, he glowed.

    “No shirt, no shoes, no service,” I reminded him, pointing to the cardboard sign scotch taped to the wall. “Miss Helen is very strict about topless customers. That’s why I wear my trenchcoat.” I handed him a bedsheet. He knotted it around his neck like a cape.

    He washed the blood off his face in the water fountain, his features distorted like a funhouse mirror in the molded metal. Then he held his shirt above the spout and the arc of water blasted clean the center of the bloody stain. The shirt turned brown, then pale, then a rusty shadow. He tossed the wet shirts into the drum of the washer and they thwacked solidly, like a fish slapped onto a dock. The quarters activated the machine and it gradually came to life – the steady bursts of water, the sporadic release of detergent, the increasingly rhythmic agitator.

    Acme in his cape, me in my towel – we quietly watched the portal of the washing machine as if it was the most fascinating movie in the world. It was soothing and hypnotic.

    “I told you about the midnight ladders and why I am sitting here, now, with you, in a Laundromat. So how did you start going door-to-door with your clipboard asking strangers questions?”

    “See that guy over there?” Acme asked. “The guy in the grey space suit?” He tilted his head toward the fat man folding dozens of pairs of underwear into tidy origami packets. He was wearing a puffy plastic jumpsuit, with thick elastic cuffs at the wrists and ankles. It was like elephant skin.

    “That’s George. The first time I saw him I was eight-years-old and assumed he was an astronaut. He was in his front yard, raking leaves in his inflatable suit.”

    George was whistling. I noticed the rubber gasket with a big knob, attached at the belly button, on his crinkly jumpsuit. I suddenly realized it was an inflatable sauna suit from the back of Parade Magazine, the kind that plug into the vacuum cleaner hose for extra reduction powers. “I always wondered who actually bought those diet suits,”

    I said to Acme. “The FDA outlawed those things when people got dehydrated and passed out in the middle of Kmart.”

    Acme said, “George never seems to get any smaller but he always seems hopeful, even when his suit is deflated. He stopped wearing real clothes decades ago. He even wears it grocery shopping. When I saw him pushing that cart filled with paper towels and Tang, I assumed he was an off-duty astronaut. That’s the beauty of a uniform, even a half-baked one – your identity is never questioned.”

    I watched George methodically pairing up his clean tube socks, his plastic suit rustling loudly like candy wrappers in a movie theatre.

    “I’d see George,” Acme continued, “and shyly ask him questions about outer space because I was obsessed with the moon. George never actually said he was in NASA, never once agreed with my crazy science fiction-fueled theories. But he never said no either, never denied my assumptions. I’d ask him stuff like ‘What’s it like up there?’ and he’d answer ‘Dark. And, ummm…cold?’”

    “Did the other kids think he was an astronaut too?” “I was never sure,” Acme answered. “I felt like it was our special connection, that I was the only one smart enough to guess his top secret secret. After all, it’s more exciting to talk about peeing in zero-gravity than sitting in a broken Barcalounger and watching Wheel of Fortune all day. It was a secret that made us both happier.

    “A few years later I found a balled up polyester Burger King uniform in a bus stop. It smelled like a million french fries. I’m not sure why, but I pulled it over my Tshirt and wore it home. Strangers asked me questions about my job, like if I could drink unlimited milkshakes. Just by putting on a different shirt, I became a different person. It seemed so easy, maybe too easy, to not be me. Suddenly I understood George, and how it was easier to just go along with things.

    “I wondered who else I could become. I looked for mechanics shirts at the thrift shop. I’d find supermarket cashier smocks abandoned on sidewalks in a minimum wage rage. I had a drawerful of termite exterminator sweatshirts and a faded lifeguard tank top. I’d put on a uniform and go to a part of the city I didn’t know and plop myself down in a coffee shop all day. People would ask me questions, treat me like an expert. It felt good to be an authority on something. I had been fired from every real job I had ever had. I was a pizza delivery guy with no sense of direction. I somehow left open all the ferret cages at the pet shop and couldn’t mow a straight line at the golf course.”

    I laughed and turned to look at Acme. He was staring straight ahead at the washing machine as he spoke. He sighed and adjusted the bedsheet knotted around his neck. I looked at the washer. Framed in the shiny glass door, the wet white laundry was sloppy and spinning, suds dotted the water. A lonely red sock swirled among the towels and Tshirts, spiraling like a giant peppermint candy, first in one direction and then in reverse. The air was humid from the endless cycles of clothes dryers drying. Miss Helen dramatically fanned herself with a rolled up Weekly World News.

    “But what made you stop answering questions and start asking them from door to door?”

    Acme shifted in the plastic chair. “I was wearing a starched lab coat and a teenager offered me a cruller if I gave her a second opinion on her upcoming gall bladder surgery. I realized Readers Digest medical knowledge was a dangerous thing. So I told her I was a veterinarian. She was disappointed.”

    A small boy in Batman pajamas set up a tiny bowling alley on the floor next to the industrial washers. We watched as he rolled a dirty tennis ball into a triangle of miniature boxes of Tide detergent from the vending machine. Some were full and some were torn open, and with each collision a cloud of grit and blinding dust exploded into the air like spores.

    Sometimes when the ball missed the kid kicked the boxes over with his foot and satisfied, smiled.

    Acme looked at me. “Those miniature detergents are just like the fun-size boxes of cereal I used to beg my father to buy for me. I loved to cut along the dotted lines and fold back the cardboard wings. It was like a camping trip in your hand.”

    George sat across from us and rested a can of orange soda on the shelf of his stomach. The Laundromat got hotter with each load of clothes thrown into a dryer. His face was flushed and sweaty. George wiped his forehead with a bandanna then retucked it into the cuff of his suit. With each fidget his plastic space suit noisily suctioned and unsuctioned onto the molded plastic chair, breathing, moving, almost as if it was alive. I looked at George’s wrinkled wrists, imprinted with years of elastic, and I thought about all those years spent mummified in plastic, his body cut off from air, from the world, so much that it was gradually losing its elasticity, its color, that it was starting to resemble the plastic suit he wore like a suit of armor.

    Acme pointed to Washer 17. “It’s winding down,” he said, as it did a lethargic last spin. He pulled out an armful of wet laundry and looked at it helplessly. “I need a dryer.”

    I found one and he dumped it all in. The front of his bedsheet cape was heavy and grey with a circle of damp; the back hung and billowed. I pulled out quarters from the pocket of my trenchcoat and slid them into the slot. The wet laundry thumped clumsily as it slowly began to spin, picking up momentum. George slurped is soda. Acme leaned over and said quietly, “I’m scared George will become one of those shut ins who refuse to leave their vinyl recliners for years and eat cases of potato chips and their skin eventually fuses into the cushions. Somehow they lose themselves…”

    I finished his sentence, “…and become a chair with a face.”

    “Exactly,” said Acme. “It’s scary. George went from an astronaut to a Lazy Boy recliner all because of that stupid jumpsuit. It seemed like too much baggage. The gall bladder question – the responsibility – shook me up and I threw it all out, every uniform I had. But the Acme shirt seemed different. It was universal but somehow vague. I carried a clipboard and everything shifted. Strangers stopped asking me to diagnose the weird clanking in their dishwashers. I asked the questions.

    “The first questions are always easy, to build up their confidence, like those $100 categories on Jeopardy. Then things snowball from specifics like ‘Left handed or right handed?’ to ‘Would you ever parachute into a volcano?’ to a zinger like ‘Tell me about the time you were most disappointed by your parents.’”

    The dryers hummed and the washers thwacked all around us. The air felt thick with dampness and heat. The whole place had that yeasty smell of lint. Miss Helen shimmied in her chair and used both hands to lift her limp left leg over her right knee, an oddly ladylike gesture. Her left foot dangled and shook.

    “I ran out of my own questions after the first week. I underestimated how excited people were to talk about themselves. No one was surprised, no one refused to answer. I started an endless master list of questions. I stole from everywhere – Cosmo magazine, crackpot pop psychology books, supermarket scandal sheets. Even Bazooka Joe comics. Somehow the randomness made it all seem oddly legitimate. I took some notes, but mostly the interviews became meandering monologues. I nodded a lot.

    People finished, unburdened and exhausted. They even looked lighter and brighter, more buoyant. Some glowed.”

    I looked at Acme. “It sounds like going to confession with scientist. And without the phone booth.”

    “It is. And I even have the cape,” he said, flapping the bedsheet around his shoulders.

    “Don’t underestimate the power of a cape or a trenchcoat.”

    We watched the dryers spin. As the minutes passed, the wet clothes tumbled and incrementally fluffed up behind the glass doors, like whipped cream.

    “Ask me a question,” I said, slightly dizzy from watching the dryers

    “Here’s a good one. What’s your favorite vehicle?” “It’s a tie. A golf cart and a cement mixer.” “Why am I not surprised,” Acme said.

    “I’m pretty predictable. So what’s yours?” “An elevator.”

    “That does not count.”

    “It counts. It moves.”

    “Maybe I should borrow your demented dictionary,” I said.

    The dryer spun, then paused, then noisily shifted gears for a final reverse spin. We watched the digital red numbers count down. Two minutes, then one. Click! The hot laundry crackled with electricity. I pulled at a knot of stuck socks, stretching them like saltwater taffy. Sparks fireflied into the air. Acme flapped his knotted bedsheet like a dimestore Dracula.

    The windows of the Laundromat were dreamy and foggy. At eye level, circles and slashes were rubbed out by fingers to see the world outside. I took off my trench- coat. Side by side, we sorted the laundry. Faint ghosts of warmth pulsated from the piles of socks and shirts and skirts. I dug out Acme’s shirt, grabbed it by the shoulders and shook it out. It was hot – alive again – like skin, as I put it on.

  • Nimbus At the Green Border

    Cyprus, 1965

    The lads of the 42nd Infantry Battalion sat slumped on the Land Rover’s steel floor as we lurched over dirt tracks; shade from the tarpaulin kept them cool as they spoke quietly together, in Irish. Since arriving in Cyprus, they’d spoken no other language. I knew most of them had joined up at barracks straight from the Kerry and Galway Gaeltachtaí. There was no one from Wexford, apart from myself. The Irish was oddly soothing to hear, if I ignored their wary tone.

    I sat in the driver’s seat, sunglasses shielding my eyes, and kept the Land Rover shuffling at sixty miles an hour. Its engine growled and sputtered, leaving smoky exhaust behind us.

    Beside me, Byrne, the company sergeant, lit a fresh Woodbine and rolled down the window. He spoke into the Land Rover’s vehicle-mounted radio, grunting our location back to HQ. His FN rifle lay across his lap, the barrel aimed out at the land. He paused, glanced over his shoulder.

    “Still talkin’ the Irish, lads? Too browned off with us Jackeens, yeah?”

    No one replied. He smirked and blew smoke out the window. Turning to me, he said, “Jaysus. The fuckin’ state o’ that shower, Ned. Thinkin’ we can’t understand ’em. Not as if we can’t hear ’em. Tell y’one thing, if they were as smart as they thought, it’d be them runnin’ the show, not me.”

    I made to reply, but a crackled squawk from the radio cut me off.

    “Infantry. 42, this is HQ, do you copy? Over.”

    “Yeah,  go      ahead       there,      boss,”      Byrne       responded       into      his       handset.

    “Don’t stay too long in Lefka, righ’. Just head in, get what yis need, and get out. Time’s not on your side.”

    I stared out of the windshield and kept going. Our convoy was led by my Land Rover. Two armed personnel carriers travelled behind us, along with the main vehicle of officers and heavy equipment. We were on the coast road, which uncoiled ahead of us.

    It was late afternoon. We were a patrol unit from the Irish branch of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, with three weeks left of a six month tour of duty. We’d been sent in to maintain peace, following violent clashes between the island’s Greek and Turkish populations. For the last five years, the bloodshed had become too frequent to ignore. Greeks had been shot en masse in the grainfields. A crowd of Cypriot Turks had been massacred on the border of Limassol Province earlier in the year. At Famagusta Harbour, Greek-Cypriot guerillas had been discovered receiving arms shipments. Many inhabitants on the mainland fled their homes under cover of darkness after being looted.

    We were the UN’s fourth Irish deployment, taking over from the 7th Infantry Group, who’d left just before we arrived.

    Our orders were to refuel in the small village of Lefka, before continuing on to our outpost up in the Troodos Mountains, a neutral zone. Cyprus is an island of peaks. Driving an armed convoy through this landscape was a challenge I hadn’t expected.

    Byrne pivoted his head to look at me for a minute, before snapping it back towards the windshield. “Ned, how far off are we?”

    “Five miles to go, sir. I doubt the heat’ll let up anytime soon.”

    “Ah, stop. Last thing I need is more fuckin’ mosquitoes comin’ between me and my sleep.”

    “That’s true enough, sir.”

    Since leaving HQ in Nicosia, I’d been on edge. All of us were. We’d plenty of ammo and supplies. Our radios were all in working order. But even with every strategic position dotted around Cyprus, none of us really knew what to expect. So far, we hadn’t fired a single shot, but we knew the guerrillas were out there, crouched in wait of unwary targets. Snipers kept cover in eucalyptus groves and the vineyards. Gunfire might erupt on us from a roadside gully; there was nothing we could rule out. Turkish or Greek, it didn’t matter. How were we to know the difference between ambush and accidental discharge?

    On top of that, it was our stop-off point had us worried. We were briefed that while Lefka was a Turkish enclave, Greek-Cypriot cadres ranged the surrounding hills; we’d have to be especially vigilant passing through.

    Everything we needed to know was relayed to us the day before deployment. I remember being briefed with the entire battalion in the departure lounge of Dublin Airport by a stocky drill sergeant from the US Air Force. A tour of duty in Cyprus, he said. Peacekeeping operation for the UN. Troops from other nations taking part. Fatalities to be expected. For most of us, it’d be our first time leaving Ireland. Might as well have been the other side of the world to me, or Shangri-la, for all I knew about it. I remember boarding the Globemaster, the first time I’d ever set foot on an aircraft. Ann, my wife, had blinked back tears at the viewing lounge by the terminal. Maggie and Nicola, our two eldest daughters, held her hand and watched me leave. All around us, the lads were saying similar goodbyes. All of us were in uniform, as crisp as we could hope to be for the entire mission.

    “Look after yourself,” Anne whispered to me as I held her. I assured her I would, not really believing it. I kissed her and our daughters, promised them they’d see me soon. We’d five nippers by then; our sixth was on the way, shortly. I knew I wouldn’t be home in time to hear its first gurgles. I hoped that whatever apprehension I felt wasn’t showing.

    We’d been married for nearly a decade by then. Ann had had to leave her job after we got together, as the law dictated at the time. Whatever money we had came out of my army pay.

     

    The Land Rover moved quietly enough, but I was worried about giving away our position. Every so often, we’d pass through farming country. No checkpoints or OPs, no need for papers or passports, no furnishings of order we could resort to. The only people we saw were the hunched, black-clad figures of women at work in the vineyards. Men rarely ventured out in broad daylight, for fear of being shot; they’d stay indoors, drinking coffee. Only the women could move freely outside, picking grapes off stalks, their scythes flashing in the heat. I noticed they didn’t stop working, even when our convoy trundled past. A few would glance up and stare after us until we had vanished from sight, but none waved, or even stopped what they were doing. The sight of an armoured lorry, bristling with artillery and fatigue-clad men, didn’t seem to faze them. The few children we saw sat on the roadside, watching us wheel by without fear or amazement, their faces stretched down to hungry, staring masks.

    Our first time out on patrol was during harvest season. We took our position just outside Pergamos, setting up a small base-camp on the vineyard’s edge. Throughout the night we kept watch, scanning the dark horizon on all sides, until the order to head back to base came through.

    “Should we not be looking after them?” I’d asked Byrne, nodding at the hunched, slow moving figures that shuffled amid the grapevines at dawn. “We might save more if we hang on here.”

    “Save ’em from what, Private?” Byrne replied. “Have y’heard any shots since we arrived?”      “No, sir, I haven’t.”

    “No, well then. We’re not here to save anyone, Ned. We’re to keep an eye things. And you’ve to just keep your eye on drivin.”

    I didn’t reply, and closed my fingers around the small gold ring in my pocket. It was my wedding ring; I took it off whenever I was off base. I was too afraid of getting wounded or killed, and havin it stolen. Both me and Byrne were two of the few married men in the entire squad; most of the troops weren’t even shaving yet. At night, Ann swirled through my dreams, her dark hair brushing her shoulders, her eyes sea-green and inviting, her voice a soothing whisper in my ears. The longer I was away, the more she’d visit me in my sleep, until I swore I could smell her perfume and tasted the soft curl of her lips long after I awoke, surrounded by the wheezy snores of the others. The ring was the first thing I made sure I had on me, before my rifle or bullets or dog tags, every morning at parade. And I kept seeing her everywhere. In the rear-view mirror, on the roadside, amongst the women in the fields.

    A mile off, I saw the asphalt coil away into a tangled cluster of fields. The mosquitoes were out in force. I cursed to myself. For all the heat, I noticed the grass was far lighter than in Ireland. White dust swirled on the roadside, whisked by wind. Heat fumes wriggled a mile off. Roads snaked every which way, as though trying to confuse me or render the map superfluous. Sunlight glinted off gunmetal. Beside me, Byrne grunted.  “Them mosquitoes must be takin’ orders from the Greeks. Fuckin’ relentless so they are, Ned.”

    “Yes, Sir. I suppose.”

    “Like rats in the desert, wha’? Fucked from here to there, says you.”

    “Sir?”

    “We’ll be grand, sure. ’Nother five miles never killed anyone.”

    “Yes, Sir.”

    I wasn’t in the humour for small talk. In my head I was thinking of what I’d put into my next letter to Ann, my wife. I’d be seeing her and our children soon, once the month was out. I wrote her every week, detailing everything as best I could in a way that didn’t get her worried. There was plenty I kept out. Mostly I talked about the sea’s lustrous aquamarine, the roads, faces of people I saw. In every letter, I was careful not to call Cyprus a battle zone. Right now, there was nothing to tell her.

     

    For all the Cypriot heat, it was a relief to finally be away from Dublin’s grey brickwork. I didn’t miss much about the old town. Beggars flung crumbs for the seagulls like feed, before shuffling off to drink the few bob they had in the early houses. Roadsweepers hauled refuse laden carts down the sidestreets; steam and coal dust choked the air around Britain Quay where the ships offloaded. On the Liffey, Guinness barges steamed to and from the brewery; slimy green strips of algae smeared the quay walls at low tide. Every second building seemed marked for demolition; the knock-down gang swarmed over them with shovels and pickaxes. On O’Connell Street, Nelson’s statue gazed skyward from its column; a year after I got back from Cyrus, it’d be blown to kingdom come.  Before signing up, I’d worked as a busman, driving Leylands for the CIE; City Hall to Dame Street, Phoenix Park to Dun Laoghaire. Mini cars and lorries swarmed around me as I stopped and started on the morning drive, all the way from depot to terminus. I saw so many faces on my routes and got to know the city so well, the rooftops and the lampposts, that I just got sick of it all. People were reckless crossing the streets then.  And before we tried keeping the peace in Cyprus, a different sort of peace was being bartered back in Dublin. The unions were on the warpath. I’d marched at the front of each picket line. Better pay for a better job. We’d earned it.

    In the end, the unions felt I was strong enough to speak on their behalf. I knew I was not. I’m not John Wayne, much and all as I wished I was then. In the end, it was me they wanted to be General Secretary. I said I wouldn’t do it. I’m not a leader. I never have been. The men needed someone who could stand for them, and wouldn’t be converted by bribery or coercion. I’m just not that kind of man. I could only be so outspoken until I’d be looking at the sack.

    Every man has an enemy against whom he’ll never win. That’s a lesson that never comes easily. If you’re anything like me, kindness is the enemy you know you’ll never beat. I’d heard and seen enough union men killed off with kindness, sniped by possibility of a better job, better pay, more decent living for them and theirs. And they always took it. They abandoned their men very quickly. I knew that I’d be going down that road as well, if I became general secretary. And my son had only just been born. It couldn’t be abandonment for him. Where we lived in Dublin, there were plenty of young fellas who grew up never knowing their fathers. A boy needs his da, I’ve always believed. Walking out the door to go and play soldiers out in Cyprus was a hard choice. He needed me there, to see my face every day and know who I was.

    Then again, Cyprus was the only choice I had left. After the Union, the jobs I could easily have taken seemed to vanish. Maybe I’d more certainty back then. Didn’t seriously think I would die out there. But the ten bob I made with my busman’s pay wasn’t enough. And now I wanted to see my son’s face again. In dreams, in the Land Rover’s rear-view mirror, in the faces of the starving children of that country, children the same age as him. Some of them did wave, mind, but they were far and few between. It was around then that I started having nightmares of my son, naked and bleeding, and chained to a paling post in a deserted field, crying. Crying with a child’s distraught frenzy, for me to come and rescue him, to cut him loose and keep him safe. I’d see his face, red and swollen with tears, and I’d lose sleep, wondering why I’d ever left Ireland. I should be at home, I’d repeat constantly to myself. I should be watching over my son.

    If there was a message to be found in any of the dreams I had, it was this: why did you leave him? Why did you leave your boy? He’s suffering now and you can’t help him. A father helps his son while he’s able.

    When I finally applied to re-join the army, one of the questions on the form held the caveat that I may very well die if sent into a battle zone. Was I willing to make that sacrifice for Ireland, they asked. Far as I was concerned, Ireland was a grey-green boil on Europe’s left arse-cheek. But I needed the work. So I went on basic training – seventeen weeks of hell in Wicklow, firearm drills at barracks, orienteering. I was able for it all. The only Irish I learned to speak or understand were the drill commands at the barracks: “Deas iompaig!” (Turn right). “Cle iompaig!” (Turn left). “Iompaig thart!” (Turn around).” “Seasaig ar ais.” (Stand at ease).

    Like all the others, I was stationed at the Cathal Brugha Barracks in Portobello. Of course, our actual experience in combat was negligible. It wasn’t until after I entered the barracks that I actually held and fired a gun for the first time. The weight of it in my hands was a shock. By the time I finished up, I was a top-notcher, instructing the newest recruits in weaponry. You name a gun, I was the man to talk to. I could give you detailed specs on an MK 4’s muzzle flash, a Gustav m/45’s blowback, or the recoil of a Browning semi.

    Before that, though, there was basic training. I’d my own induction among the lads. It was in the barracks barber shop. My name was barked out as I stood in line.

    “Private N. Wade, you’re up next!”

    I sat in the chair, while your man got his clippers ready. He grazed it over my skull, my locks fell to the floor. The fella in the next chair caught my eye.

    “Here, what did he say your name was?”

    I glanced over. “Eh, Private Nick Wade, sir. HQ Company. You?”

    “John McCormack. They call me the Count.”

    “Yeah? Y’much of a singer?”

    He smirked. “Am I fuck. Voice on me like a bleedin’ engine, so I do.” He peered at me.

    “Wade? Do I have tha’ righ’?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Like Ned Wade? The hurler?”

    “Eh, yeah. No relation, though.”

    “Ever seen him on the pitch? My jaysus, can he do damage. Rakes in the silver, he does.”

    His rapt expression told me I was already in his good graces. My surname could shore me up, come whatever may.

    “I don’t really follow the GAA. But I know of him.”

    “Well, they’ll find somethin’ for you right enough. A fella by the name of Wade does be needin’ somethin’ to keep himself occupied.”

    And that was that. I was Ned now, no longer Nick. Whenever I was introduced to one of the lads, or called on to give my name at parade, I called myself Ned. Some of the Gaeltacht lads even called me Eamonn. But most of the battalion never even found out my real name. The entire time we were in Cyprus, I went by a name that wasn’t my own.  After a while, I stopped being annoyed and just got used to it. Byrne told me I was better off calling myself Ned, anyway. “It’s good for morale,” he’d say. “Some of the lads used t’play hurlin’ before they signed up. If they know Ned Wade’s on their team, it’ll keep their spirits up.” But I’d never swung a hurley or hit a sliotar in my life.  I was an oddball, detached from the run-around nature of army life and yet oddly respected for it. Of course, I chatted and laughed with the others, engaged in the jokes and slagging, but on the whole, I kept quiet. The reason being that, during training, it was discovered that I was an excellent marksman. Snipers would be sorely needed in Cyprus.

     

    The water hurdled past my ribs as I plunged in, cold and heavy, soaking my fatigues. I dug my boot-heels into riverbed, waited for my balance to return against the current. Wind hissed through the grassy bank. Heavy grey clouds drifted overhead, grazing the shoulder of Lugnaquilla’s foothill. My weapon, which I’d slung to my shoulder, was a 7.62 FN MAG, an open bolt, long-range sniper gun with its own folding bipod, capable of taking a man’s head off a mile and a half away. If it was aimed right. Even in a high wind blowing downward, my eyeline smudged with dust and my target a thousand or so yards off and moving fast, I’d still manage to take it down.

    But it wasn’t a man I was scoping for, not today. The target was hidden amongst the trees, on the far bank. You needed a hawk’s eye to see it. I could just make it out through the scope, a skeletal little carving of a Celtic Cross, its silhouette black amongst the fronds. A thousand yards off, I heard a buzzard squawk.

    There was a rock mound jutting up further upstream. I sloshed a little deeper into the flow, until it lapped at my chest, clenching my teeth against the cold. The rock mound came up to my shoulders. I leaned forward, close enough for the water to brush my jaw, and shut my left eye to get a better look. Fastening the bipod to the gun barrel, I propped it on the rock. Before aiming the FN downrange, I put my eye to the scope.

    The world shrunk into a single, black-rimmed sphere. For a second, nothing existed but the curve of the trigger off my fingertip, the fine crosshairs and the target’s tiny outline. It lurked amidst a knot of gorse, nailed crudely to a tree, its nimbus spread wide. If I fired now, the bullet would zip through the air for a good half-mile before it hit anything. If the target moved, even the slightest motion would give it away. I always pulled that trigger slowly. Once I locked on it, I’d relax. Under those clouds, the surface of the water looked pitch-black. Despite the river’s heavy flow, there was barely a breath of wind. I was lucky to have kept the FN dry and above water. I took a breath, and squeezed the trigger back.

    The bullet spat from the barrel, a flurry of white smoke wafted over me, and through the scope’s ringed lens, I saw the cross fracture and drop before the echo faded away. It was a near-perfect hit, the nimbus cracked right down the middle. Lowering the FN, I trudged back upstream and into declared my headset: “That’s a hit, boss.”

    “Affirmative. Right under the crossbar. Ned Wade strikes again.”

    After that, I couldn’t ever look at a Celtic Cross, or any cross for that matter, and not think of a target.

     

    By the time we reached Lefka, the stench was unbearable, even with the windows open. I slowed to a halt at the checkpoint by the village entrance, which was nothing more than a long, striped pole extending across the road. Beside it was a makeshift medical depot, its grey walls riddled with cracks, while in the distance the golden-brown mountains loomed. Byrne signed us in to the sentry, who lifted the pole in the air, and the convoy snaked down the bumpy road into Lefka. Once we reached the centre, I parked and killed the engine outside a small cafe.

     

    “We’re not stayin’ here long,” growled Byrne, and he spat out the window. I’d gotten used to deserted streets, but Lefka was thronging. It was market day. Stalls were set up in the main plaza, and a steady stream of people, women mainly, drifted from street to street, haggling loudly. Dogs slept in the long, jagged shade of palm trees. Every building was boxy and whitewashed, coated in stucco. Depending which side of the border we were on, we usually saw either the Greek white-and-blue stripes, or the scarlet, star-and-crescent emblem of Turkey. Here, there were no flags, not even outside the depot or the mosques. Soldiers in UN stripes were dotted around, standing their posts or else pacing about absentmindedly, their rifles cradled. Guns and fatigues were now part of normal life in this village, it seemed. In the cafe, a group of men sat in the terraced shade, arguing amongst themselves. When they saw our uniforms, they waved us over.

    “You hang on here, Ned,” said Byrne. “I’ll find yeh a min’ral or somethin’. He climbed out of the Land Rover, sloped into the cafe. He’d be in there for a good while, I knew, downing cup after cup of dark coffee with the local head man. It was a show of hospitality that he, as patrol commander, couldn’t refuse.

    I lay back against the headrest and shut my eyes. I thought about my wife, mouthed the first words I’d say to her when I got back to Dublin.

    A screech came piercing up from the plaza, jolting me upright. I could tell when I saw the woman, from the way she moved, something was wrong. I would have noticed her anyway, had she not been wailing to the heavens. The sun’s glare stopped me seeing her properly, but even at a distance I saw she was groping for something to grab onto. The street was crowded enough, but everyone, soldier and civilian alike, walked right past her, without even turning their heads. As she neared, I saw she was young, about my wife’s age, with dark hair. Her threadbare shawl, drawn up like a monk’s, told me she was Turkish. Only when she reached my passenger door did I see why she was stumbling. Her eyes were covered in cuts. She was blinded and bleeding heavily.

    My fingers closed instinctively around my wedding ring in my pocket; my spine tensed. Had there been an attack? We’d been briefed not to interact with Turkish women; their culture forbade them from talking with us. But I had to do something. I flung the door open and sprinted round the front of the Land Rover. She had tottered rearward and was now sloping against the café terrace, gasping for breath. None of the men took any notice. Almost as if they didn’t hear her. A part of me hoped Byrne would step out of the café to see what the noise was. Her wails still soared over the noise of the street. I approached her as I would a small animal caught in a snare. She flailed her arms limply, trying to grab hold of anything she could. I reached out, managed to grip her hand and shoulder, and hold her steady. She fell to me, huddled tight against my shoulder, squeezing my hand.

    She smelled of eucalyptus.

    “Can… can I help you, Miss? Hospital?”

    Once she heard my voice, her howls quieted to a scared whimper. Her free hand reached up, fingertips brushing over my nose, lips and jaw. Both her hands and wrists, I saw, were crisscrossed in deep scratches. I glanced up and saw several of the men in the cafe watching me, curious to see what I might do. Their expressions were blank. One of them blew smoke. Another swished around the coffee in his cup.

    I’m not one to disobey orders. But the medical depot was only a mile back up the road. I took a breath and lifted the woman into my passenger seat. Then I bolted back behind the wheel, and revved the engine up.

    She kept whimpering, heaving out words I didn’t understand. I think she was praying. But she also quietened a little once I shut the door, sensing now that she was shielded. I pulled out of the parking space and drove for the checkpoint, where the medical depot was. If any of the lads saw, or if Byrne ran from the cafe, bellowing at me to get back, I didn’t hear or notice. I kept one hand on the steering wheel while she held onto my free one. Her hands felt small and coarse on mine, and with her head resting on my shoulder, I saw and felt the blood more clearly. It oozed into her shawl and dress, and over my sleeve.

    It was then that I started wondering what colour her eyes had been. What was the last thing on earth she had a good look at, before her eyes were taken? Did she see a wayward eucalyptus branch snap back and plunge the world into stinging darkness? Or worse, a blade, swung at her? There was no telling what had happened to her.

    The soldier at the checkpoint flagged me down and, as I pulled up, looked ready to tell me off for speeding. But his expression changed the moment he saw her huddled beside me. All he did was nod and let me park at the depot entrance. One or two of the other sentries watched us climb out, but they made nothing of it.

    All this time, she didn’t let go of my hand. I led her under the low canopy, into a crumbling foyer. Stretchers were laid out in rows on the hard stone floor. A young medic, also wearing the UN beret, rushed over to us. He pointed me to the nearest mat, and filled a bucket of water. I knelt and tried to guide the woman down but she flailed madly, her hand still clenching mine. The blood on her cheeks was starting to crust. She tugged at my sleeve, until she was sure she lay on solid ground. It took me a moment to let her go. When I turned to leave, I saw the medic place the bucket of water next to her, and kneel down. The last I heard of her was the sound of her wails, echoing off the flaked wall.

    Outside, the sentry offered me a cigarette, which I declined. I was going to drive back to the village, I said, and he needn’t worry about any more irregularities. He gave a wordless nod and let me climb back into the driver’s seat. I turned the key once more and headed back down the ramp into Lefka. I hoped I hadn’t put the 42nd Battalion too far behind schedule.

    I turned down the main street. Byrne, his lips stained with coffee, stood outside the cafe. He glared at me behind his sunglasses as I got out and saluted. A few of the others were with him, some carrying sacks and boxes of supplies. “Nice day for it,” he said. “Enjoy yourself up there?”

    “Sorry, Sir.”

    He took off his shades. “I’m not havin’ you flutin’ around without my leave. That’s not what we’re here for.”

    “No, Sir.”

    “Make sure y’don’t do that again.” He turned to address the lads. “Right, men, let’s go. ’Mon, hurry!”

    There was a scramble as everyone piled back into the trucks. Byrne climbed into the passenger seat beside me.

    “Tell me why y’took the vehicle without notifyin’ me.”

    “Sir, with respect, a woman was badly hurt, and no-one else seemed to be helping. I acted on instinct.”

    “Ned, I’m only lettin’ y’away with this once. Pull another stroke like that, and you’re on half rations. From now on, y’don’t do a thing without my say-so. Am I clear?”

    “Yes, Sir. Crystal.”

    “Good. Then let no more be said about it. Get us out of here, Ned.”

    “Yes, sir.”

    I turned the Land Rover out of the gate and drove us west, out into the mountains. The lads went back to whispering in Irish, or sleeping. Byrne drank from his canteen and stared straight ahead. The radio crackled with static and blurry updates. An hour later, we’d reached our compound, and would be settled in by sundown.

    Image by Michael Klajban of Forest road in Troodos Mountains, Cyprus (wikicommons).

    Daniel Wade is a Dublin-based author. He was awarded the Hennessy prize New Irish Writing in 2015, and his poetry has appeared in over two dozen publications. Follow his progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.