Feel Free Read online

  NICK LAIRD

  Feel Free

  In memory of CML

  (1950–2017)

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the editors of Poetry, New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Poetry Review, Well Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, Bristol Festival of Ideas, Poem-a-Day, Looking at the Stars anthology, Reading the Future: New Writing from Ireland.

  Many thanks to Alan Gillis, Vona Groarke, Zadie Smith, Don Paterson and Matthew Hollis.

  Love and thanks to Z., and our children, Katherine and Harvey.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  i

  Glitch

  To the Woman at the United Airlines Check-in Desk at Newark

  Fathers

  The Good Son

  Feel Free

  Grenfell

  Parenthesis

  Silk Cut

  Manners

  Autocomplete

  The Vehicle and the Tenor

  ii

  Parable of the Arrow

  The Good Son

  Coppa Italia

  User

  On Not Having Children

  Watermelon Seed

  La Méditerranée

  Chronos

  XY

  The Cartoons

  Team Me

  Incantation

  iii

  Cinna the Poet

  The Folding

  New York ElastiCity

  Getting Out the White Vote

  The Good Son

  Temple of Last Resort

  Crunch

  Horizontal Fall

  Extra Life

  To His Soul

  Notes

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  FEEL FREE

  i

  Glitch

  More than ample, a deadfall of one metre eighty

  to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet,

  and crash the OS, tripping an automated shutdown

  in this specific case and halting all external workings

  of the heated, moist robot I currently inhabit.

  I am out cold for some time, and when my eyes roll in

  you’re there to help me over to our bed, as I explain

  at length how taken I am with the place I’d been,

  had been compelled to leave, airlifted out mid-gesture,

  mid-sentence, risen of a sudden like a bubble

  to the surface, a victim snatched and bundled out,

  helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day, and all

  particulars of my other life fled except the sense

  that lasts for hours of being wanted somewhere else.

  To the Woman at the United Airlines

  Check-in Desk at Newark

  Shonique, I am in time, and I know your fight

  is hard: the fight is hard for everyone alive

  and all those bodies in Departures

  are naked under clothes and scarred –

  that granted, even deeper scratches welt

  and heal in days though still they smart

  on contact, and I never really cared

  for the terms I struck with earth,

  more total war than limited skirmish.

  I seethe, Shonique; I drink; I smoke weed

  and seek relief from mental anguish;

  the peopled life, car horns sounding down

  on Houston. All three kinds of knowledge

  fox me: outer, inner, pure mathematics –

  but I understand your relatives are dying also

  and I know the days are slow, the years fast,

  that these are facts, however surprising.

  Like you, I think the worst is yet to come;

  plus, there’s time lifting everything in sight,

  Shonique, pocketing orchids and mothers,

  the little white pebbledashed bungalows –

  you in your small corner and me in mine.

  Let me be clear and accommodative, more like

  water than ice; and raise my hands to show

  I mean no harm, and that I’m stupid,

  and malicious, and if I’m trying to be fearless

  I know it gives me no right to act like this.

  What’s understood is I’ll be filed beneath

  The Pricks, and fair enough. Very seldom

  do I note the world wears a single face

  with endless variations, and even then,

  Shonique, it tends to be a face like yours,

  one particularly fine. Speaking of which,

  your fluorescent orange lipsticked lip

  curls up at me with such distaste I have to sit

  down now on my case at the rush of shame I feel:

  and also love; and of course lust, hate, remorse.

  Fathers

  We set a saucerful of water on the kitchen sill

  and check it before breakfast for three days straight

  until it’s all evaporated. I think it’s more like that.

  But don’t you understand that Jesus lives in the sky?

  I think the moon is blown out, and the trees plucked

  off the birthday cake and put back with the batteries,

  and all the country of you divided up into the tiniest

  of slices. But what I’ve got is microwave popcorn

  and this ability to whistle every number one single

  from 1987 onwards. There’s no use getting all het

  up: I give you a bed for your tiredness: I give you

  some bread I have toasted and buttered: I give you

  a stretch of the earth, baked hard, where we follow

  the shiny beetle hauling the shield of himself into noon.

  I can tuck a cloud under your chin. If it’s an advert

  the product is love. If it’s an element, water. If it’s

  not consistent, that’s part of its charm. If it’s a bomb,

  it’s a beautiful dud, and I love you, she says, this much.

  The Good Son

  in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep

  i

  Remember me! demands the father’s ghost,

  and the deconstructionists gloss

  that last request as ‘Bring back my phallus’ –

  re-member me, as it were – and even after

  Hamlet Sr stage-whispers his Adieu!

  he hesitates, and asks his son again –

  Remember me – since he can’t help himself –

  and Hamlet swears it on heaven and earth,

  and is, by convention, meant there and then

  to whip out his sword and avenge – but instead

  he sits at the desk and unfastens his satchel

  and takes out a pad and a quill to begin

  getting it down in all its squalid detail,

  which the Elizabethans deem a scandal.

  ii

  But we did. We paid upfront and understood

  that all accounts would soon be met

  and every tab discharged in full.

  Every loss incurred a debt

  and hard to get the registers to balance.

  This side of Cookstown Gospel Hall attests

  in foot-long gothic font –

  For the Wages of Sin is Death …

  and a few yards round the corner,

  nailed up in Monrush to a telegraph pole,

  unfaded in its crude red,

  white and blue lettering on plywood –

  Murder in Texas gets the electric chair.

  In Magherafelt you get chair of the council.

  iii

  The rigour functioni
ng in Sophocles as justice

  we cannot retrofit with peace:

  our animal language inadequate

  to state in this state the state of the state.

  Hard to think some companies

  were simply unafraid

  to leave aside

  the long soliloquies:

  natural, simple, affecting

  Garrick had the whole fifth act rewritten

  so when Claudius orders Hamlet

  to set sail for England, his reaction

  is to draw his blade, and let him have it.

  I mean that Hamlet stabs him.

  Feel Free

  i

  To deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface

  with Earth. I like to do this in a number of ways.

  I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,

  the weight of my person refigured, and I like to hang

  above the ground, thus; snorkelling, hammocks, alcohol.

  I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy

  and to that end I set aside a day a week, Shabbat,

  to not act. Having ceded independence to the sunset

  I will not be shaving, illuminating rooms or raising

  the temperature of food. If occasionally I like to feel

  the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural

  tension, I walk off a Sunday through the high fields

  of blanket bog, saxifrage, a few thin belted Galloways,

  rounding Lough Mallon to stand by the form of beauty

  upheld in a scrubby acre at Creggandevsky, where I do

  duck and enter under a capstone mapped by rival empires

  of yellow feather-moss and powdery white lichen: I like

  then to stop, crouched, and press my back on a housing

  of actual rock, coldness which lives for a while on the skin.

  And I like when I give you the nightfeed, Harvey, how you’re

  concentrating on it: fists clenched, eyes shut, like this is bliss.

  ii

  I like a steady disruption. I like it when the solid mantle turns

  to shingle and water rushes up it over and over, in love.

  My white-noise machine from Argos is set to Crashing Wave

  but I’m not averse to the presence of numerous and minute

  quanta moving very fast in unison; occasions when a light

  wind undulates the ears of wheat, or a hessian sack of pearl

  barley seed is sliced with a pocket knife and pours. I like

  the way it sounds pattering on stone. I like how the starlings

  over Monti cohere and separate their bodies into one cyclonic

  symphony, and I like that the hawk of the mind catches at

  their purse, pulse, caul, arc. I like the excitation passing as

  as a shadow-ripple back and how the bag is snatched, rolls

  slack; straight; falciform; mouthing; bulbing; a pumping

  heart. I like to interface with millions of coloured pixels

  depicting attractive people procreating on a screen itself

  dependent on rare metals mined by mud-grey children

  who trudge up bamboo scaffolding above a greyish-red lake

  of belching mud. I like how the furnace burning earth instils

  in me reflexive gestures of timidity, self-pity and deference

  as I walk across the kinder surfaces, grass, say, or sand,

  unable ever to meet with my eyes the gaze of the sun.

  iii

  I can imagine that my first and fifth marriages will be

  to the same human, a woman, the first marriage working

  well enough that we decide to try again as soon as it’s,

  you know, mutually convenient. I can see that. I like the fact

  we’re ‘supercooled starmatter’, even if I can’t envisage you

  as anything other than warm and bleating. The thing is

  I can be persuaded fairly easily to initiate immune responses

  by the fake safety signals of national anthems, cleavage, family

  photographs, country lanes, large-eyed mammals, fireworks,

  the King James Bible, Nina Simone singing ‘The Twelfth of Never’,

  cave paintings, coffins, dolphins, dolmens. But I like it also

  when the fat impasto of the canvas gets slashed by a tourist

  with a claw hammer, and a glimpse is caught of what you couldn’t

  say. Entanglement I like, spooky action at a distance analogising

  some little thing including this long glance across the escalators

  or how you know the song before you switch the station on.

  When a photon of light meets a half-silvered mirror and splits

  one meets the superposition of two, being twinned: and this repeats.

  Tickling your back, Katherine, to get you to sleep, I like to lie here

  with my eyes closed and think about my schoolfriends’ houses before

  choosing one to walk through slowly, room by sunlit room.

  Grenfell

  i.m.

  Please rate your experience of your experience.

  Overall, would you say you’re pleased; mostly

  pleased; neutral; displeased; or not pleased at all?

  Would you recommend our business to a friend?

  Would you say this evening light falls against

  the tower in a manner conducive to your happiness

  or not that at all? Would you say all members

  of the union are rotten with despair? Priced in

  hours, how far from there do you think we are?

  If you can, please provide a detailed description

  of the structure you were born in, the early drafts,

  the texture, the facilities of selves who go about

  their day in you, and if indicating age and race

  and gender, a sexual preference, a religion,

  educational attainment and household income,

  I think we know each other well enough by now

  to take it that we understand those purely as

  contingent states, one’s desires being mappable

  on strangers, always. All the bodies are bodies

  of water, regardless of terms and conditions,

  of energy ordered to what is the matter.

  Please rate your last real day on a scale of one

  to ten where one is utter dullsville and ten

  adjusts the contrast setting permanently upwards.

  How satisfied are you with customer support?

  Please evaluate the final minutes for how one

  might account for it. Any additional comments

  should be left in the space at the foot of this page

  and all of the following pages.

  Parenthesis

  I lie here like the closing bracket on the ledger of the mattress.

  Asleep between us the children are hyphens – one hyphen, one underscore –

  and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight that

  what I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet snoring.

  Asleep between us, the children, our hyphens (one hyphen, one underscore),

  know love is a paragraph lacking an ending and typeset by hand in italics.

  What I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet snoring

  and it’s alright to collapse like that, like a marquee gone into its final sigh.

  No love is a paragraph lacking an ending and typeset by hand in italics.

  It is an ellipsis of three drops of Night Nurse that leaves the pillow sticky

  and it’s alright to collapse like that, like a marquee gone into its final sigh,

  like my mother in the hard return of a long death and the stanza break.

  It is an ellipsis of three drops of Night Nurse that leaves the pillow sticky.

  I lie here like the closing bracket on
the ledger of the mattress,

  like my mother in the hard return of a long death and the stanza break,

  and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight, that.

  Silk Cut

  Iwas five and stood beside my dad

  at a junction somewhere in Dublin

  when I slipped my hand in his

  and met the red end of a cigarette

  but now our hearts are broken

  we walk down to the Braeside

  where we can get a proper pint

  and his voice tears up a bit

  about the emptiness in the house

  and we are going home, waiting

  at the turn for the traffic, when I find

  I have to stop my hand from taking his

  Manners

  I am interested in the possibility of reasonable conduct.

  Reasonable conduct is part of the ordinary course of things.

  Also violence, though one must resist this. Death is only life

  at one remove, hanging from a metal hook, wrapped around

  with tissue paper and a forty long and waves of sound

  and waves of light and graduating waves. The small engines