Issue 17: Joey Connolly
First Letter from the Frontier
‘Mearc’, Old English: mark, sign, character, boundary, limit
Our Bishop has stationed us at borders
and on boundaries, to force up a congregation – to find what passes
through these mountains as we can – and has gone into the night.
We plucky few with our taken orders
held out flower-like to these unlettered masses, an information
their crass tongue is proof against. Thus I write,
put down this mark which drives between us,
pressing me into the paper and you
outward from it, to breathe out in the piercing air
of the world, bounded by its skies of bone and water. Thus
I am alone. So much unnamed: the trees, their branches. What’s true
rises from what’s sweet like incense smoke. But here
every written word’s a convoluted signature
and every painting seems a drawing of a picture.
In the Process
The microscopes began proffering all their mad doxological detail
in desperate excess of anything our species was ever likely to survive
long enough to see. It was then all these billionfold trivialities erupted,
immigrated woozily in to our formerly quiet, tidy lands,
all stamping tinily and wildly proclaiming
the randomness of the deal. It’s the blackjack hand
of your mind laid against the cruel pontoon of the world,
all twos and fours but the point
is that it feels as if there were rules,
incapable though the cards are
of specifying the guide for their own interpretation.
Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this:
there’s a timeless fairground to-and-fro
between the reduced and therefore
manageable thing and the sprawling unmappable
backstreets of the actual,
that’s all. In every Western ever seen
the spittoon by the beauty-queen bar-girls
is half-full with what has been
chewed over and jettisoned, obscene and therefore
fascinating. And never a hand of poker played fair.
And although that was then, still the rule-card for bridge
should properly never be shuffled into the pack before dealing:
that’s the trick and the travesty both. It’s our fractional moments
of access to the appropriate software for editing
those rule-cards which make all future rounds
of the tournament so chaotic and also
hilarious: the odds-on favourite,
a former philosopher in a looming nimbus of a hairdo,
clapping a well-read palm to his temple in outrage,
dislodging his prescription spectacles in the process.
Incapable though the Cards Are
of putting paid to the alarming rumours threatening their concept of self and reputation
of enacting the dumb charade of their own explanation
of unseating the tsar who’s refusing their appeal for self-definition
of checking the bizarre ludic explosion of their own plausible interpretations at the hands
of the anarchic cackling deconstructionists
of piecing together the shards of last night’s string of massive revelations
of tuning the guitar on which their anthem will imminently be composed
of bribing the guards to their own typically unmanned control-room
of turning the dive-bar’s increasingly drunken chatter into uninhibited self-confession
of guessing the value of the coins in the cookie-jar of their budget for party political broadcast
of programming the VCR to record the pivotal climax
of what they’re told will be, by far, their next favourite box-set
of unlearning the disarming modesty which so trivialises their social personae
of bribing sufficiently the bards who already are busy recording their legend
of going the whole-nine-yards to a true Buddhistic-style self-realisation
of chairing the seminar tasked with the slow process of their own exegesis
of hacking up conclusively the catarrh from the windpipe through which they will sing themselves
of definitively influencing the pronunciation of their own name c.f. Burma
of waving au-revoir to the charming if unoriginal beau of
just saying so of insisting of telling all of us just what in fact you are.
Last Letter from the Frontier
It’s true the music here is plainsongy and austere
and there is little by way of gunpowder.
But I’ve learned that the fraction of what you will meet
in the world that is capable of requiting
anything is tiny and obscure. We make do. Frequently
I recount this self-destructive, back-biting anecdotal patter,
amid the strange branches I’ve renamed myself. Make
do, and go out with a gag. God, for the tiny requital
of receipt, some relief across the home-made traps
and walls and hokey decoys. Which after all
are all the sign I have that something’s out there.
I know that we have years – perhaps forever – to wait
until the drawling missionaries and the thrill and the skin drums
of pirates. And until then, I am bricking myself in.
Joey Connolly lives in London, where he is the manager of the Poetry Book Fair. His poetry and criticism have appeared in The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry London and The Sunday Times, as well as on BBC Radio 4. He received an Eric Gregory award in 2012 and his first collection, Long Pass, is forthcoming from Carcanet in 2017.
Copyright © 2016 by Joey Connolly, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
