Prologue (to Blackwater Quartet)

Decorative Initials for a Book of Hours
(‘The Tenth Satire’ of Juvenal, after Samuel Johnson)
 

The stars trade orbits with our satellites,
obliging lens and data-streams new rights,
new horoscopes and rising signs, and we
survey this atlas of anxiety
and are content in our detachment, made
whole, supplicants to GM bud and blade.
The fires above the mud brick cities, sheikhs
in armoured Mercs, and video out-takes
of smart-bomb guidance to Koran HQ,
exchange the slogan for the Semtex queue
and blackened buses for a lake of oil.
The ensign dollars sanctify the soil,
incorporate the clouds, then pass from sight
below the Stealth craft on the recon flight.
This place is anvil-struck with ordinance,
a nation predicted, clairvoyance
from desert wind sandblasting wrecks of tanks,
insouciant to rust and broken ranks,
the bully’s bait: Pentagon, Al-Qaeda,
from London to the ruins of Nineveh.
The markets quickstep, sidelong to the Cruise
trajectories, a winnowed, dial-up fuse
for mosques enamelled in the cold, hard faith
the currency allows. Cash, blear-eyed wraith,
informs the brief, each share a wet clay slip
that’s fingered hard until the subtle lip
appears, a glaze to decorate desire
and lubricate the momentary fire.
The surgeons continue their rounds, and buck
up amputees with morphine, saying luck
was good, through the interpreters, say ‘luck
was with them’; when the minefield caught the truck
say even then some luck, a little, some
intervention, the little things that home
on kingly traits, nobility at least,
to separate the wounded from deceased.

The road, a desolation between camps,
defines the route of refugees, their lamps
and cook stoves winking by the gradient.
In mortar pits, by blasted palms, a tent
contrives to quantify a sky of stars
that seems to fall and fall, with only Mars
remaining as a tyrant testament
to older gods, their faceless firmament.

Avenging angels need not disappoint.
Afghanistan to Washington, anoint
the arsenal of saving grace with plans
for CIA designer astrakhans.
‘Once more, Democritus, arise on Earth’,
engage these covert ops, reveal the worth
of ringtone detonations, shallow graves
of citizens who fell in bitter waves
before Kalashnikovs and gas. A child
looks down into the hole, a look of mild
reproach at dirty trainers and the rags
that raised her once. The digger pauses, tags
remains of flyblown kingdoms, totes the wins
and losses down his fliptop phone, and grins.

Above the dusty work, the contrails braid
the uncontested skies into a shade
where winners congregate, and stow unreal
employments into clauses that will seal
a generation into subterfuge
and tempered steel, to ratify the stooge.
The strategy is gainful, staking waste
with fences, while the spy-sat, primly placed
to monitor these lost horizons, toys
with information salted with decoys.

The television banks, a salesroom row
of blinking blanks, catch images that flow
along the neural path, a brick-straw raw
reminder of the bleak arrondissement.
And standing firm against the blood brigade
we took our losses. Towns back home displayed
the photos, half-mast flags in memory
of something lifted from uncertainty
into heroic spheres; and we were ghosts
ourselves, just dreaming we had died, the boasts
of our recruitment bagged with body parts.
A transport larger than the world departs
as it arrived, with us, with others too,
but faceless, broken in the burning blue.

What news of earth, a new apocalypse
predicted on the turn of each eclipse?

The catwalk’s cut-glass, anorexic slink
of waifs stares out, a look with just the wink
of recognition to the treadmill dark,
Allah, and lessons of the patriarch.
Unless foretold, all news is old. It mocks
the sundial and the winding of the clocks.
In parliaments, with fairy dust and air
guitars, the lobbies network for their share
of glutton ore, and ether licensed for
the masts that settle gold flake to the floor.

The patriot prefers the palace to
the damp fatigues; to cave retreats, adieu.
We died for nothing. Here’s nothing new: fat
in furnaces our own, and that was that.
The names we named are gone, the votes they rode
now mist before the sun. When bombs explode,
the Minister regrets… the soundbite, twee
before the Terror, the emergency
of spent dispatches and the hearsay lead,
in Earls Court Road and Hotel al-Rashid;
the mountain range, the rivers and their banks
detained for questioning, the peacenik cranks
and marches in the Mall, all sink or swim
with Everyman, The Sun, the headline’s whim.
The place is a republic, else it’s not,
and sours with sniper factions, the hot
heads, hot blood— flagpoles needy of a scrap
of fabric to salute, a ready map
of borders bounded by the poppy field
and stoked reactors buzzing to their yield.

The stripes across the flag are coded, read
as oaths, as payback where the colours bled
into a haze of off-set loans, of rents
inflated by the barrel-price, of armaments.
The limos at the Grosvenor mix and match
the guests. Each passport trips a trigger catch.
Here’s fortune, racking and exact, a wheel
of rounding days and circumstantial zeal.

The Georgian window opens to a view
of river meadow, beech woods, and a few
monastic ruins fenced by against the flocks.
The corner transept of the Greyfriars’ rocks
remainders ewes, strayed, lambing in the Choir,
a Tudor résumé of pitch and fire.
Redeem, redeem, redeem. A closing stare
into the hellfire dark, and then a prayer
the living swallow with the bread and wine,
insinuates a hankering divine
refuted where amino acids chase
the comet’s tail through ice and empty space.

Uncertainty’s the rule. It’s Heisenberg
who doped the present, trading Nuremberg
for states less prone to cyanide, to steer
where here-and-there is either, neither clear
of time nor servant to the timely rule,
as lab rats mark a maze route once with drool
to fix the place, then seek themselves well met
by what they are, or were, or will be, yet
the hours insist on resolutions, go-betweens
that peak to time’s fellatio.

The Genome’s shoal of chromosomes, its bank
of traits, of probabilities that rank
the syndromes of our danger of demise,
promotes perfection at a cost. The prize
of living by default, the slipknot ease
of choices rescued from the random pleas
of brethren with a lazy eye, the foot
that drags, implies solutions in a soot
electrified to simply float, or swim,
and wait millennia for pools to brim.
The hopscotch chalk of integers, appraised
for private means, now patented, now raised
to metamorphose wastrel DNA
from spent personae into consommé,
confirms a randomness not left to chance.
The swab that’s registered as true romance
indemnifies our future selves, to seek
the bottom line, and loot it from the meek.

A genealogy of altered states
appears, with warning looks it replicates.
Ancestral totems dominate, a flux
of cryogenic heads in their deluxe
environment of gauges, stainless vats
and fluid rates to stabilise the stats.
The cheek is monitored for mould, the nook
of sockets for a contemplative look.

A bloodstock is invented, or repaired
of its anomalies, the twitch of shared
compassion, touch responding to a touch
through eggs engendered in the Petri clutch.
The silhouettes that feed the festive blaze;
the flickering of ransacked streets that plays
along the starburst glass; a telephone
that rings and rings; the sniper, prone-positioned,
rags amid a pile of rags,
interprets body language, pace, and tags
the lives of strangers, firming the technique
with sweep-sight musings on the cold critique.
It’s evolution, stalled in hideout caves
forever off the radar, dugout graves
reconnaissance provides the F-16,
that certifies the nitro glycerine
and primes the ambush of assault brigades,
the decades of silos, Cold War parades
of intercontinental punch, passé
where time-bomb luggage clears the last x-ray.

The garrison is terraced houses, fenced
between with gardens. Newlyweds, convinced
they’ll get their leave this time, together rain
or sun no worries— bad form to complain,
disloyal somehow— it’s the Regiment
they follow, town by town of army rent,
her flower beds for digging. Orders break.
Routines of practiced force that raise the stake
attend the call to grub, full kit, airlift.
She scrubs and scrubs a stain that will not shift,
or sets the garden gnome against the rooks,
positioned by the window with the books
of happy endings, half in dreams and half
uncertain wakefulness. She blames the RAF,
but then relents, ashamed of doubt, its nail
scratch scratching at the door; still no email.
Somewhere, the gothic standards fly, and where
they fly hot metals coalesce, and bare
the rib and skull to molten weather. Name
each face. The independent contours tame
the balls-up and the hype, to stand beyond
the pulp and ropes of blood and not be conned.

The beret rakish in the photograph he
sent— tufted red insignia, NAAFI
beer, mates she knows or knew there with him— gave
back something. Petty fortress, cold realm, brave
in operations, censors took the rest.
There are no barricades. The living blessed
the dead, then prayed a little for themselves;
considered time’s corrosion as it shelves
against the picnic beaches, brassy braids,
the hint of acid in the lemonades.

The marsh patrol reported losses, first
out, last in: beefy fire, a killing burst
between the contact and the falling short
before the heavy calibre report,
and still, before the blood was set the news
was data bouncing between dishes, views
debated between plugs for Miller Lite.
It’s always happy hour, somewhere, night
without a definition of its own
except in coils of boa neon, zone
by zone of seeping regularity
enforcing the estrangement. The salty sea,
its briny neatness lifting all, and all
the depth of it before, with nights that fall
along this ruined peninsula and here,
this silent place of reeds and wicker weir
and sky rehearsed in stars, evaporates
with lives some ancient law abbreviates.

In luckless hours, the coalitions cling
for shame, for praise, for plunder of the king
whose sinews run through desert rocks. The fate
of each is weighed, then Fates obliterate
the mad, the murderous, the good gone bad
in others’ names, the crimes the Hasselblad
blew up to centre pages. Cabinets
in camera review dispatches: threats,
the aftermath of warnings some ignored,
commuter routes the targets of the stored
device, innocuous beneath the seat.
A hasty greatness puffs each passing feat
of arms, and flattens trader and bazaar
with everything we evidently are.

Across Karuma bridge the red dirt road
disintegrates. Uganda Railways stowed
Mombassa cotton for the British in
the 30s, but beneath the mildewed skin
of Gulu’s Pearle Afrique Hotel, the Nile
divides Uganda “A” and “B”, a mile
of filthy water separating each.
From here, it’s north and flat; savannahs reach
Sudan, but tricky then near Atiak
where rebel soldiers twelve years old attack
what moves. The Lord’s Resistance Army (L
RA), of boys abducted to the hell
of ammunition porterage, of sex-slave
huts and soldiering, recruits from wrecks
of villages in Lira province. Edged
by bandit country, frontier towns, some wedged
between the pitch of Displaced Persons camps,
accept the burials unblessed, the lamps
too weak and oily for attention. Day
and night, uncertain which is which, just stray
into the line of fire, a little, just
enough to cut the twilight into rust
of moonlight’s million pieces, aping swung
machetes, children and the necks they’ve wrung.
Atala waits— Barlonyo’s refugees,
survivors here for now, speak Portuguese
to Red Cross workers— gesturing around,
explains her madness as a madness found.

A sickness burrows in the marrow, gold,
this land, the voices of the daughters cold
against the knowledge and the warning notes
of pharmaceutical provision, stoats
of pain that rummage gut and gristle. Wills,
the testate brunching of survivors, frills
of tithe and testament, avoid the core
of poisoned testes and the worms that bore.

The crocus jostles colours on the lawn,
the birches’ catkins plumping April. Sawn
oak staggered on the wet wall’s weathered frame
advises seasons in their craft, the name
they take, the baby’s breath of it, as yet
humanity, the human tête à tête,
retains its chorus conscience in an age
subsumed in blood feuds and a septic rage.

With death, its long unknowing, all comply
and note, with nothing now to simplify,
this last conclusion least complex, where prayer,
glazed, circumnavigates the jardinière,
an ivy orbiting the ashes. It’s time
that stakes the memory between us, time
persuading, time that reconnects these lives
to what they were, where memory survives
with others, photographs and voices stilled
in certainty, as emblems that were willed
into a world those theories redefined,
a lost acoustic fetched into the mind.

The pandemonium of states concludes
with effigies on horseback, marble moods
of butchery set coolly in the parks.
The plinths are stone-cut, Latinate remarks
attributed to charge or broken siege.
The other figures, cowed before their liege,
acknowledge the endeavours. Sword steel beds
in upturned throats. The lightest touch beheads.
Exquisite creatures promenade. The gloss
invigorates, instils, defies the loss
attending mongrel chromosomes; sublime,
the stitch of these select contracting time
to shorthand nomenclature, to enhance
the odds of Homo sapiens' advance.
In beauty’s soft varieties, desire,
reverberations of a quantum fire,
upstages all. The nymphs, their bellies’ slip
of unguents warming sweetly to the lip,
expose their art to slow release, the wise
in turn made rivals in this compromise.

The battered banners, maxims faded, twitch
above the crowd that guillotined the rich.
The prisoners were anyone, a coat
-of-arms an entertainment for the groat
the executioner was paid. Not all
were victims of their livery, servant hall
and stable. Ladies-of-the-Chamber cried,
‘It’s not our fault we’re pretty’, then they died.

The centuries are named for those betrayed
to killing fields, the bus ride hand grenade,
the minefield path the children took, and take,
through shifting sands of borders on the make.
The rest is history, a pause between
the heaps of corpses soaked in gasoline.

Imagine choices, marketing brochures
where life and death are underwritten, cures
for each complaint amended where the germ
divides, divides, as though to reaffirm
its rightful place as talisman, check
the chemistry that knits the human wreck
to its alarms. A mischief, merciless,
abides, contractual, a politesse
of small print, patent masquerade and spleen.
The gods are elsewhere, fools in April green
with little time or sense of our distress.
They laze along the rivers, and address
themselves to sobriquets of charmed rebirth,
but not for us, here, truant in the earth.
Our palms are cupped for water. Ritual
knife work… a tending towards the visceral…
we sacrifice our own to seeded fields
to disenchant the winter with our yields,
a blood spring at the equinox, the pull
of seasons, shoots we drink to from a skull.

A circling machinery descends
in wistful arcs. Its orbit apprehends
the atmosphere, and flares in parts across
the evening sky and Stations of the Cross.
The desert wind is law. A fine dust, south
from Leptis Magna, settles in the mouth.


Copyright 2004, 2014 Estill Pollock