Glasfryn Project

Silent Inferno

 

Through a bird mask what runs sweet
over the bridge
comes to taste metallic

tell me grafter, would you lick that dragonzello
you gave someone else, bulging yellow or hectic red

a guy like you can walk through any speech backwards—
it’s just a molestation in the pit
before the real junket

when/done/load/before/each/cell
to test if it rages

the swabs will make a catch

* * * * *

But why play the geometer and rummage
to nail a demon
making tears in squinted eyes

this scheme could be a skit, bobbing slowly on silver

whose fault can be pinned
in flashes
magnate to beggar
with babble from each gaping throat

are you nobody, hiding with the contracts out

ledger on ledge, coin in casino boat, proctor by spangles
darn me I can’t tell, here in pale blue smoke

a thousand forms I didn’t file or assign

* * * * *

At the funnel base all denominations mix
in red-hot rock or ice

no helicopters blink signals, no sirens whine

just a fragment of fear remains
as every package left at the door
starts to gurgle

oh Fontella, this wickerwork of nerves
is like a twig bleeding

she so far-off, mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm
voice like a fooork in nevery balba
aching charms

elsewheretic (the message floats)

* * * * *

Hello from the inside, I’m pressed to the wall
an almond-eyed mosaic
unreachable

did we dance, yes, no—maybe

in a touch passing kin you’d lift me
thigh to head as a waterspout

gypsy swung, volgarizzamento
a shimmer of flesh
sprung from lines dropped on the library floor

you see, breath itself entraps

choked in a side chamber
they judge us who don’t harm

tracing our fate in a twisted spill
when really we glide, wrapped in a snow-flame cocoon

* * * * *

Follow the evidence to keep from losing
your smell and taste

who ever listens to conjurers—we’re not
picking each other’s scabs like the scales of a bream,
we’re not stretched on a slab in an underground corridor

Mr or Mrs God in chemtrail verse
is trying to set you right with a rhubarby stick

come-close, go-away, clap and sack

a glass of wine is the brim of the whole world,
only then can you wring consent

* * * * *

Goldenmouth’s grease yields to a cluster of cases
that can’t be concealed

his eleven-mile pouch is one ghostly theremin,
a foreboding of what is known—
the dead lining up to mosey and zigzag
with not a saint to swear by

in another take it’s a forest of lampposts with hanging bulbs

a club under the railway arch
will let you dance if you get a wristband
rave-tranced with a fog machine

uniform is king behind a padlocked door

you’ll wear a trench in the ground
swirling—what was first, the noun or the verb
moiling why others should do it—
steal a kiss with numb lips

if the shutters are down
do we have to fuck with our coats on

never, ever, no never, no

* * * * *

Leaders squeeze chums through any defile,
their swish of gold turning to a trudge of lead

just a misdemeanour will lift you to the other house
and no printer will print it

if one partied hard telling people to keep apart,
if one chose wallpaper with a favour wiped,
if one crossed borders telling people to stay put

could they say
what a tree means or a pool
inscribed in biro with a coffee stain
under a cloud of banknotes

start-up saviours for a sausage roll
or a punk pint
have absent fingers to build the rescue model

* * * * *

Can you read the way as your face melts

plodding with a guide to the last bound, or maybe
the closest

there to finger a lancet in grey rock
and climb through

(I strive to make blighted speech work again)

is this what we knew when it wasn’t an act
and things just existed

a chain of gold threaded through the air,
streets and stairs peaking in a parade of planets
which fire livelier than a devil or middle spirit’s show

now we soul-search the dawn
remembering how each watch changes

a scar in a lilac leaf, almost whole

as in nitrate gaps
the credits roll

 

 

‘Silent Inferno’ is from an ongoing pandemic sequence, as yet untitled. Other pieces have appeared in Stride magazine, Blackbox Manifold and Tears in the Fence. The work draws extensively on plague literature.

Gavin Selerie was born in London, where he still lives. Books include Azimuth (1984), Roxy (1996), Le Fanu’s Ghost (2006) and Hariot Double (2016)—all long sequences with linked units. Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems 1972-2008 was published in 2009 and Collected Sonnets in 2019 (both from Shearsman). These texts often have a concrete aspect, as discussed in the essay ‘Ekphrasis and Beyond: Visual Art in Poetry’ (Junction Box 2). Cinema is a recurring reference point. Selerie is known particularly for poems about landscape and romantic love, utilizing traditional and experimental form. His texts layer and loop aspects of history, with a strong vocal dynamic. A related essay, ‘Long Haul Voices: The Book Length Poem’, was published in Long Poem Magazine 25 (Spring 2021). A book-length interview, Into the Labyrinth, is available online at https://www.argotistonline.co.uk › INTO THE LA...

 

 

Click here to go back to: Contributors and Links to Pages 1 – 4

 

 

Dante does not always allocate souls a place in the afterlife strictly according to their deserts, as many have pointed out. Not only does he vengefully visit torments on his personal enemies, but he will locate souls to suit his symbolic and narrative requirements rather than those of divine justice. So, Manfred, a hardened libertine who repents with his last breath, makes it to Purgatory, while the inoffensive Francesca di Rimini, who slipped just once, and seems the kind of woman who said her prayers every day of her life, is damned forever. As a result, the Commedia is riddled with contradictions, although they never quite destroy it; indeed, it’s arguable that these contradictions, and the genuine doubts Dante allows for, such as the justice of condemning virtuous pagans, actually strengthen his work for modern readers.

Dante allowed for such doubts and disagreements even in Paradise, the best example being the figure of Siger of Brabant (?1226-?1284), a philosopher who taught at the University of Paris. Siger was indebted to the Arabic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rush, 1126-1198) and defended logical method. He was ferociously attacked by Thomas Aquinas, condemned by the Church in 1277, and murdered in 1283. Nevertheless, in Canto X, in the sphere of the Sun, Siger appears as one of the twelve souls of the Wise and Learned who present themselves to Dante as a circle of whirling lights. This may be Dante celebrating the joys of scholarship and theology, one of his own great pleasures, but like much else it makes this canto unsual. Although Aquinas is the presiding figure of the sphere (and he gets the next canto all to himself), here he has to share equal billing with one who was his bitter opponent in life. Commentators have accounted for his presence by arguing that among Siger’s condemned syllogisms Dante suspected there were some that even Aquinas secretly coveted, or that Dante approved of Siger’s Averroist emphasis on the value of political justice in the secular world – or that he recruited him merely to confound Siger’s rejection of the immortality of the soul.

My own reading inclines towards the positive motives, and in addition to Siger’s attractive abberrancy, I was drawn by the way at the close of the canto Dante compares the sound and motion of the shining souls to the movement of a great clock – this, incidentally, is one of the first ever references to mechanically chiming clocks in Europe, and I imagine Siger and Aquinas to be like the figures found on a giant medieval timepiece, who whirr and slide forward on the hour to strike the bell in unison. As one of his Penguin editors, Mark Musa, notes, Bride (Church) and Bridegroom (Christ) are entirely appropriate in the religious context, but Dante goes out of his way to sexualise them; ‘the terms used to suggest the physical workings of the clock carry strongly erotic overtones’ and the theological and sensual aspects ‘create surprising interplay within the metaphor’. For Musa, this is ‘the most spiritually erotic closing to all of the one hundred cantos of the Divine Comedy’, and it seems to me to realise and instantiate the erotic potentials hinted at in passing or invoked only to be dismissed elsewhere in the Commedia, time and eternity fused together as in the sexual act.

 

Paradiso X 133-148

 

i.

 

so: passing out of the night-shadow cast by the earth

perfectly epicentred in its Ptolemaic space

because now arisen to the sphere of the Sun

suddenly            to be surrounded by 2 rings of lights

12 rotating lights more dazzling-bright

      themselves than the Sun

            clockwise ((( & counter-clockwise )))

alternately together horizontal vertical &

dazzling as Spectrolab nitesun XPMs slung from circling Apaches

         singing & turning like pedagogo girls in precise ballata

so that Beatrice was driven for the 1st & only time from my mind

which was                   smilingly just                              as she wished

I heard the voice        held      beheld            the radiance of the Wise

& bedazzled light-blind I saw among them finally

that spirit who taught in the Alley of Straw

subtle Averroean       defender

of philosophical method

Siger de Brabant

who dared doubt the immortality of the soul

who believed the world had existed from eternity

who stressed political justice in the secular world

exposing or is it espousing

 insidiously logical truths

silogizzó invidiosi veri  who earned the wrath

& Dante suggests       the likely envy too

of the holy dottore

himself his 219 propositions condemned as heretical

who was besieged on all sides

who mourned that death should be so slow to come

and was murdered by his secretary

probably some kind of put-up job

& who Dante eclectically sets side by side with Aquinas

his old adversary

on top of his clock

to strike

ding-dong

 

ii.

 

& now as the tower-clock summons us will call

at the hour when the Bride is roused from her bed

mussed with her matin/g song her Bridegroom love

 

woos as one part pulls & other part pushes in

chiming not a tin note but soul-sweet tingel-tangel

that now the spirit (s)well & ready does tumesce–

 

so in its full splendour I was witness to that wheel

gyring & rendering voice to voice ply on play

& in a sweet conchord that never can be grasped

 

except there               where ecstasy in-evers all

 

 

John Goodby recently became  Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. He is a poet, critic, and translator, and an authority on the work of Dylan Thomas, whose Collected Poems he edited in 2014. His poetry books include Illennium (Shearsman, 2010) and The No Breath (Red Ceilings, 2017), and he has published translations of Soleiman Adel Guemar (with Tom Cheesman), Heine, Pasolini and Reverdy. With Lyndon Davies he ran the Hay Poetry Jamborees 2009-12 and edited the anthology The Edge of Necessary: innovative Welsh poetry 1966-2018 (Aquifer, 2018).

 

 

Click here to go back to: Contributors and Links to Pages 1 – 4