Poem

John Tranter

Side by side

RIMBAUD AND THE MODERNIST HERESY

11

Departure into new affection:
Find yourself another boy-friend!
A towering cultural edifice: twenty poets
in a heap. And they were all –
just a minute ago – polishing their
metrical instruments, based on a device
that folds up into your waistcoat pocket
and, when extended, measures alexandrines
quickly, to an accuracy of a single syllable!
The child father to the man finds
suicide. The scout rambles far ahead
of the platoon . . . cut the line, forge on,
treaties of surrender pushed through,
then the bargains go rotten
and the natives rise, foaming . . . honour,
a very colonial concept. The profit motive
is modern, direct, and very attractive.
The lonely sniper broadcasts
information in a foreign tongue, and
the rabble bring a tardy homage
to the grave. A rich young painter
posed naked, hiding his face behind
a photograph of your face, while
half a world away a rich woman
laughed at the joke. You have
seen these people before, eating you up,
it is like a nightmare.

12

Some have built a theory on the ashes
lacking native resolution, and now a paste of
bullshit obscures the surface of the legend
that cast out flattery and took rhetoric
and wrung its neck.
To follow you we must abandon you,
or suffer Santayana’s condemnation
of those who fail to profit from the
lessons of history. I’d like to talk about
that ghost waiting in the garden
in the rain. A dozen critics are thrusting
different tickets at him, the young President
of the Media Poetry Action Group is asking
the ghost to come to the party, a ruck of editors
need his endorsement, and will forge it
if he declines. And the rain dissolves
the group photo of the Chinese Poetry Team –
Li Po back left, the one with the Rolex –
into a grey sludge; the ghost
scribbles a quick autograph, and fades away.

13

Let’s invent cubism! Let’s invent
dynamite! They did. Modernism
floats out onto the quiet flood.
A new century begins. Machinery
lays waste to the winter landscape,
but the poets are all in the brothels
mixing technicolor drinks and winning prizes.
Out of that testing flame . . . it’s as though
a fine legend were scorched in a radiation storm
and Superman awakes – not the Prince,
but the Slime Machine, the Monster
from the Black Lagoon. And then
the legions of the walking dead
move out in mutilated sleep
across the face of Europe. No book
has ever changed the destiny of stupid men.

14

It’s like this: ‘Having a good time
is not as easy as you think, when you’re
living out a living death.’
At your distance from the human
no one’s having fun. At the beach
young men bake their skin, the tide pulls out . . .
a child wears horror and humiliation,
a jewelled manacle, for twenty years of exile
into pointless death. Why did you do it?
Brutal, extravagant, pretty,
face like a peasant – no, an angel,
hands like a peasant – what a
nasty shit you must have been. Sodomy! Lice!
I have crossed a different desert
under the same sky, the landscape
waiting like an empty glove. Arthur!
Give it up! Come back! Another
day begins, and the traffic.

15

One hundred and eight years
since he told Banville to adopt
the telephone pole as his iron-voiced lyre –
you thought yours was the Century of Hell!
You hadn’t lived! Fifty bloody wars
have stained our sleep, and poetry
has sickened in the face of economics.
I’ve loved and hated you
for twenty long years. I’ve had enough.
I’ve drunk enough of your beautiful deceit.
‘I have lived between the covers of a book.’
I’ve never been a philosopher – except
briefly, at seventeen, when I broke down
and made a choice: saint, lunatic or poet,
but not a front-row forward – and picked myself up
and went on with the business of excitement.
Arthur! We needed you in ’68! – you
cannot accept this burden of pity.
Learning, where the deeply human
is the object of a fierce knowledge,
can reach an imitation of the style of love,
but in that future under whose arrogant
banner we have laboured for our own rewards
we shall both be gone into that
unforgiving darkness.