Issue 24: Simon Perril
from THE SLIP
7.
The oracle plotted us
a path in riddle
replete with animal guide
‘take,’ shook the Pythia, ‘a beast
in your midst; one might
use its stealth.’
There are a wealth of tracks
can’t be landed
with the ingenuity of traps;
there are some acts,
slow to unfurl,
that outlive their maps
21.
said things
tread close
behind me.
Said things
in flight
as speargrass
barbs all paths,
and clings
to all my loved things.
Said things catch
that tightening patch
of skin
thrumming back
of the drumming ear.
Said things pry
seek out gaps,
dog the tracks
that route trade
to the mutest parts
of a man’s acts.
Said things seep
’neath all his doings.
Said things
build his ruins
in struts of straw;
stack tinder
for the flammable whispers
of neighbours,
party leaders,
lawgivers
- hang them all.
Mix the matrix of said things
to a squall.
I am at sea
26.
there is seasoning
stink under the song
held thick and fast
as a gust at day’s middle
or an unnecessary breath
trapped
in the un-expanding chest
of a god
29.
Once, approaching Thasos,
night had barely sprung
its trap
whence side-saddled Selene
spilt her silver
over Poseidon’s tray
as a slave boy sang
of home
from our prow
the touch of his sounds
circled fields, surrounded tracks
inclined
steep mountain passes
verses feeling
sparse grass
and rock underfoot
lyre netting all
till it slipped
his voice’s grip
left his frame
leaving its promise
a labyrinth of holes
tunnelling
his bones
his shape
trembled
snapping like a sail
28.
Zeus, so
the lizard
leaves its eyelid
behind a film
the cat
puts back its claws
the fox turns
back into its tracks
thus, I retract
my vote
leave it here
on the perimeter
of the agora
[Note: The Slip is the final volume of Perril’s trilogy excavating a crime scene at the centre of archaic lyric. Archilochus, ancient Greece’s first lyric poet, was a soldier, part slave part aristocrat, who took part in the earliest colonial expeditions. When Lycambes broke off the poet’s engagement to his daughter Neobulé, legend has it that Archilochus wrote such scurrilous poems about the affair that the entire family committed suicide.
In Antiquity and beyond, Archilochus was a by-word for judgements over the acceptability, or otherwise, of indulgence in poetic harm; just as the literary form of Iambic he is famous for practicing is a locus of ethical crises. Here are the last steps of the ‘wolf walker’ Lycambes, undergoing his curse in the Dog Days of summer on the cusp of following the death of his daughters with his own, and reminiscing upon his part in colonial exploits. The book will be published in September 2020, with Shearsman.]
Simon Perril is a poet and collagist. His poetry publications include In the Final Year of my 40s (Shearsman, 2018), Beneath (Shearsman, 2015) Archilochus on the Moon (Shearsman, 2013), Newton’s Splinter (Open House, 2012), Nitrate (Salt, 2010), A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher, 2009), and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing (Salt, 2004).
As a critic he has written widely on contemporary poetry, editing The Salt Companion to John James, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling. He is Professor of Poetic Practice at De Montfort University, in Leicester.
Copyright © 2020 by Simon Perril, 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.
