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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum POETRY _____________________ JAMES LIDDY * Prayer of a Pagan Voluptuousness torturer of bodies Do not lessen your flames Warm up my numbed heart Goddess hear my prayer Goddess burning in the air Torch for us in the underground Melt this frozen soul Who dedicates to you a song of bronze. Voluptuousness Be my queen Take the mask of a Siren Made of flesh and velvet Pour over me rich sleep In formless mystic wine Voluptuousness resilient ghost. [97]
The Death of Mathematicians They brood through vaults of notebooks To try to figure what Abandons itself to the music of that country Above ours which shames us. From the room in the little house Descending to the verbal history And midnight potions of their friends They go out to the street to listen. What is the truth that fills their May morning? “The cries of the curlews tear you to pieces.” An Angel simply restating You have to be the agent of the sacrifice That makes Death the most beautiful Reality Like Eskimos in the snow or the hearts of the Aztecs. [98]
Letter to Sainte-Beuve Beardless then on the old oak benches Huddled under a square patch of solitude I drank the bitter milk of lessons It was in the memorable and stupid time That professors made to widen the courses Gave way to our crazy pressure to read you. Which of us in those pale days of adolescence Did not know the torpor of being locked up [Our eye lost in summer or snow dazzle] Did not wait to rush on the distant Echo of a book or the shout of a riot. Specially in summer when the leads melted And the high blackened walls were sad And the yapping falcons (the dove’s terror) Doze in the turrets under a blazing sky Season of the Muse in a pealing bell And Melancholy at midday when all sleep With an eye more blue than the Religiuse Drags herself with precocious boredoms Her forehead moist with midnight languors And the bad evenings the feverish nights Which make girls love their own bodies And makes them see (sterile voluptuousness) The fruits of their nubility in the mirror Italian evening of lazy casualness Which introduce us to deviate pleasures When the dark Venus from high black balconies Sends down waves of musk from cool censors. In this decadent scene taught by your poems I took the story of Amaury upon my heart The poison drugged me drop by drop Who from fifteen was swept towards Hell I parched with strange tastes for the unknown Readily understood Renè’s sighs And since then whether in a garden sanctuary Or beneath suns of different hemispheres The perpetual lolling of the drunken swell The reborn look of horizons without end Carry my heart to the divine dream. In the heavy leisure hours of a hot day Or in the shivery smoke which hides the ceiling [99]
Everywhere I have followed the mystery Of this book so dear to numbed souls Whose destiny marks them with the same sickness And before the mirror I have practised The perverse art a demon gave me At birth—to discover a true voluptuousness From pain—scratching one’s wound. Poet, as regards you I am as a lover Towards a ghost who is full of kisses Whose hand and eye have unknown charms To drain away virility. All adored creatures Are vessels of venom we drink with closed eyes And the pierced heart loving its pain Dies every day blessing its arrow. [100]
Death of the Poor It is Death that consoles us and keeps us alive The aim of life and the unique hope The elixir that wakes us and lets us drink And gives us the heart to go till evening. Through the blizzard snow and hoarfrost It is the light trembling on our black horizon The wonderful Inn written in the Book Where a man may eat sleep and sit It is an Angel who holds in his erotic fingers The dream and the gift of decadent moments Who brings a lover to poor and naked men It is our fatherland The joy of Gods The blissful barn The stock exchange of bohemians The airport for the unknown Heavens. [101]
The Price Man in order to be erotic And a artist must pay the price Of breeding two kinds of roses The yellow rose of madness The blue rose of the impossible To be grown by your tears You will have to show God Your secret garden that few have seen And then the angels Will approve the colours and shapes And he will say: “You are beautiful enough to join.” [102]
The Debt Dear Arthur Symons, a lily For you because you loved him Best in English and said, “The Poet of Evil is not dead.” Your Inverness cape and sombrero Dining alone in his hotels Taking photographs of thirty Of the houses he wept in. Satan like smoke behind you Serving with intense luxury Abhorrence and the ardent Fires that stir the dead. Your beautiful mind blown To a thousand lilies floating Down the green waters Of Salvation in Lethe. [103]
Wearing a Millstone How easy for us who knew truth like the sunrise To spread our convictions as merchandise Before inexperienced buying eyes. Eloquence was our trading partner; Our instinct to be the revolutionary martyr To lead the more intransigent astray Meant merely use of exceptional powers And that was easy when you sincerely teach. Of course they will be seduced anyway By much less interesting ironies than ours But we held no licence to preach. [104]
Blue Mountain Blue mountains are of themselves blue mountains And white clouds are of themselves white clouds And there is a blue mountain, Croghan Kinsella, And around it there are often white clouds. Whether all things are accurately themselves Or modifications of each other I do not know But clear mornings from my bathroom window I see white clouds and a blue mountain. [105]
A Father — to the friend of my school days, — John Fennessy The Psalmist speaks of love Between father and child as a fearful thing. We remember Absalom swinging in the trees And his father, a vigorous man, Spent in the cry of an upper chamber. A father is a precipice dweller For through history fathers have wished their kingdoms Or the contents of their hovels on their sons Whether they be strong as trees or weaklings Yet have never known whether they will inherit And some have put their own in the grave. If a child disappoints wretchedly or dies A parent born once dies twice. The father drives the highway to work Thinking about his children. What will happen to them later, now protected By the simplicities of the good home? All that can do harm to them plagues him: Bullied by the neighbourhood toughs Or being close to the wrong boy or girl for long. (Yeats heard the storm on Gregory’s wood and feared.) Anything may occur, that is the future. A father knows this hapless before the fact Ever denying himself the luxury of overt advice. He knows he must be discarded His the seed that fructified and then had to die In order to give abundance to the new. His love trying to be perfect must disappear But his dilemma is that it continues By its very nature unable to cease. Who rears offspring sharpens a sword for himself. Vigo [106]
On a Protestant Mystic Through grass again I am bound to the Lord He intoned but he didn’t really mean it. How could he when he lived in the city Where every morning he took a tram To relentlessly edit the economics journal So influential in the new emergent nation? On Sundays instead of praying on the mountains He kept open house (tea and buns but no drink) For poetasters who flocked for his wisdom. Though a saint and helpful to the young No wonder his verses got woollier and woollier And his pictures progressively vaguer Until they were willowy figures in a mist. To find the God he talked about through his beard He should have left his proofs unread On the table and the letters unanswered, Gone to a quiet spot further than the mountains, Taken off quickly his cumbersome clothes, And lain in the wavy blue-green grass. [107]
El Fervor de Palma —for Elaine Kerrigan It is warm and blue coming to Christmas. Flowerpots on balconies bloom to sea. Enredadera hangs its purple tangle On walls, and smells of Wicklow. To stay in a minor key is religious, To pray a little within the self And finding it not a temple But a terrace of drowsy flora. [108]
▀ My disease brilliant attacks of exaggeration. If one has been fairly well-paid pied piper for half a century one is always a piper. First day: The Beat generation, fifty-five strong in the daised classroom. I come in and tell them the scene is true: “I am an old King of the Beats weary in my bones. Exercise is the kindness of ageing. You could leave it here. Let me say, ‘Why don’t you just relax and enjoy God?’ That’s what’s printed In the first text I teach, Dharma Bums.” [109]
▀ All the journeys To be made For instance, over the seas. The bars of Salamanca Or Third Avenue Or flying over the Styx In a cloud of unreason and whiskies I sit on a bench on Christmas Eve (the fog was thick) and think of Jameson Rose in the mud. [110]
▀ For all who trod Golden North American streets An internal immigrant. Seller From a cart seen at the kitchen door In childhood. Death in summer What we did not see and can never imagine The garden and the dew on his Shoes (we cannot wear them) George takes down the photo Graph and kisses it meaning more than what we saw in childhood, our fates and fortunes, our works and ways. [111]
The Necessity Of Writing In This Tongue A closed then an open meeting. We speak in a language about to be written, once it was a language we thought in. It is the 19th c. on the page: lyricism, lunch time. Tribal speech at the door with a drink. Kmen the word for tribe: the circumstance of a body, the lightning of a tongue. We start slowly, at first using Slovak in private correspondence: Koine. It shines like a drink or a kiss in a room of professors. These sounds in the right landscape, for curing. Let us label it burnt offering, a burnt language from the hides of the tribe, offered from the fields through the ploughs, from the rocks the piling of stone hedges, Slovakia, the mud of your beautiful face. [112]
After Kraske There were those who spoke and listened who said mercy, forgiveness so they became temples—not temples of the Holy Ghost, that sick joke told by Christians who want to have nothing to do with Christ’s body, His body holy only to those who know what bodies are. Blessed are those that so speak, who did no more than what they would do on an ordinary day. All right, I have brought Christ into it, what did He say: “They shall be saved who also did nothing, they shall be last who said more than they should have on an ordinary day, no forgiveness inside their tongue or mercy hidden in their cheek. Besides they did not get going during the festival.” To which I add my tuppenny ha’penny worth: blessed are those who heard grasshoppers in the yard, who smoked dope in the VW bus, who had beer cans on the garage roof, and no clothes on in the wood, who passed St. Joseph’s Church on Sunday to the beach humming the idea of God. Blessed are they whose point of blessedness is rapture. [113]
The Saadians, Marbled, Tile, And Flower Small spurts of green, flowers like lavender, large forget-me-knots, hundreds of dwarf palms. The sprinkle of peace in the garden beyond the horseshoe arches of the Mihrab carpets. Flowers around tombs. The guide in Fez says they are “serviteurs,” in fact princesses of princesses. The Kashbah Mosque, deep ochre, olive trees steady everywhere. There is not God but God and Mohammed is married—praise to God as I repeat the prayers of rosewater heaven, stalactites . . . for building a rendezvous, a “date-house” for the dead. White pillars under the painted horseshoes cool, a tool for knowing dream-death, Under the shadowy walls mother of petal in the garden with her class the well-aired fortunettes. The tombs a second invitation: a pale willow a silver poplar the single cypress sounding in the sky. Prince princess in high ochre enclosure: share the resurrection from the sick. In the mountains none of this happens the seven spheres plunge without illumination the columns of glory without a break each court person needs peacefulness that after perusal becomes an island. Pearl on tile dew of death in a sweet hidden way indulged from view. Yes, choose the point of the soul that can linger on the zellig-covered colours (where death-in-life is generous), lying out in the open outside secondary princes, [114]
children maybe whom Exit clad in the earth robes of the garden. Over a basin with green tiled roof yellow bills of blackbirds coo solitary tree green ladder into space. Plumbago slicing along wall greyish-blue or violet tongues a broader bluer flower of a boxed shrub the path circles around, roses down the side not near the tombs stems leaves delicate unreal shades prospecting the alternative beauty the artificial . . . salmon-coloured roses, a burst of purpose in a few bushes. Out of vast redness red tower of the Koutoubia, range after range of the snow-covered Atlases, blue sky on evening tide will turn yellow at the base orange in the middle. Snow music the muzzein’s microphoned fireword doesn’t disturb the scents, the tiles go in different directions at angles or into diamond cards. You did not accomplish works of peace yet you entered and left a holy garden. A long-billed stork flies in, a nest on royal palace chimney. The mountains are built of crystal rather than rock. Surfeited with rosemary, no foreigner to luxury, Mother your soul carried beyond the wall. — April 1987, Marrakesh [115]
Last Light in Clare’s Mind It has rained like showers of arrows a warm day in the yard. Pansy clips up the drive for dinner, the red Fiat muddy before the shed. Come let’s sit in the sun on the white garden seat under a pear tree; Clare’s wearing a black dressing gown with faded gold buttons. Big trees drowse beyond the Dairy wall. Wind performs a small peacock on pear boughs. The wings of the angel of death have a soft landing, no glaring. The notes of Chopin etudes on the piano reply from the study window, the golden cocker spaniels “Ginger” and “Mi Wadi” materialise. Buzz of insect summer. A last setting outside the kitchen door and death shall have its Scotch and soda. The Mass priest says: Jesus is no magician. He whispers in no ones’ ears, he works through people. So it is but this morning he whispered in both our ears: I shall officiate right here. [116]
Requiem For A Non-Croppy Speak, God of visions, plead for me and tell me why violence answers love. There are only two reasons for travelling: restaurants and neglected public monuments. There are two reasons for keeping alive: being in love and ambiguity. At the top of Gorey blossoms Gorey Hill unfavoured by garden flowers. Somewhere on it lies a monument to a curate caught between the boys of a hot summer. Out of respect for his bishop he refused the Host to rebels in the chapel; he rushed to check the looting of Camolin Park—but he was summoned to stony Mountnorris standing on the courthouse step. . . We ask the people where the monument on the hill is, they confuse it with ninety-eight cross at the foot. An overgrown lane with no gravel, mid-ridge of grass, past two houses to stop at a gate: out of the corner of an eye a concrete mass topped by a cross. A way through thick flies, bees, the pandering butterfly. “On this spot Fr. John Redmond was hanged by the British in the year seventeen ninety-eight.” The past is not out of date, the future has been born. Forlorn saggart shade on the green slope knocked and dragged up here by yeos to this dilemma in history. The bright sun of freedom burns above the vapour of North Wexford farms; Lord of Hosts, immerse my life in the passionate heat of all. We have travelled come to look at the place of a skull. [117]
Warm Mountain Poem For Matt Liban Out to the yard a faintest blush tinge I come inside and look at a yellow wagtail out the window. Lights on the mountain, are there farmer-lovers at work? Is there a dairy of hands? On the gold-bearing mountainside, ringed by farms like a fort, do they close their eyes? Standing stones on top of Hart’s Hill is a trysting place in white frost. A Land League stone, hidden by trees from the White Heaps, tells farmers: keep a grip on your lands. A swan white breast in the pines’ resin-dark? The time shall come when the mountain turns again to gold (desire that radiates from first models and mothers). Carve these metaphors to guard your time chatting in the bar, among the irregular singing. Fasten a grip on this hearth so both may place our hand in the gold rivulet, so each of us fishes out a raying nimbus. [118]
Tray-Carrier of Laurels, Liam Miller The star-eyes of books he elaborated on a background he wanted remembered steal down to us. Father of print, he has gone away, and the tills will go on wrangling; and the place with its green walls, and white urinal, will stand. Each night the barman will call time in his bell tower. To attend his agenda he could leave his family and duties and I could resist a need to work. Even those printed by him will be shredded. He will sit alone on a bench without the humour of a sentence out of Synge. He will try to whisper through shut lips to the beautiful pages he made on an endless Baggot St. summer. He will imagine a stage with kegs of porter like a picture book of wings. Go, barter twilight for the first scene. [119]
The Quarter Rue Conti where Jim, Hank, I lived on floor mattresses, boxes, for $135 a month. From the window you could see the spire of the Mortuary Chapel, read with the bell of the French dead. Christ, we drank. A house where Audubon completed The Birds of North America and The Little Club Playhouse around the corner . . . Boys stood on the right-hand side of the street, girls on the left, for rent before the plague, a real hot Calliope. Mary, Mother of Acadians, who makes contrary the wandering waters the feet of Louisiana, I remember your month of May away from pining Mother in the armchair, the sun outside her window. Worship or memory? Memories. August—the sodomised immigrant heat. With such a Rue Bourbon hangover . . . The flowering brick wall, red beans and rice on Mondays, Matassa’s after the Clubhouse, living off Jim, heat-days of shame, shine: Butterflies on my lips before they swing. I need light on flowering bush, morning glories, to see the hummingbird kiss that leaf! I taught Cajuns and blacks at Delgado. Audubon Park was a huge vaporous field, heavy exhalations of soil and leaf in the town that loves to party. [120]
My birthday, Jim brought me the coffee table book on Auden, such rained-on wedding-cake photos. In Hooligan’s I sit at the same table: Killian’s Red, tears, the things of tears. “The end of destiny and lived”—Our Lady waits outside the Mortuary Chapel, a pillar of salt. [121]
Scott Rautmann, Saturday Night Place yes a silver and golden face coaxing by a lake the National Gallery of Screens and Masks and then sweet mouths Deal with broken in health and pocket the lake is a mural American and Irish ghosts gather “These are religious kisses,” he says these Saturdays of our lives We are not told what writers do in heaven surely they kiss three times at a time maybe they play the piano (though heaven is not the Gallery of Pianos and Harps) will the kids like it if it’s only classical? God is saying polkas are nicer than rap Jesus says to the soul trying to enter did you step out of line? If you didn’t how are you going to cross this one? The golden face intervenes writers wearing sweaters by the lake as it flows away silver Saturday moon sees things at the right angle shattered blond angels and daylong men Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark Jesus is the prince of death Oscar Wilde is the prince of dance Louise Bogan is the prince of duet James Joyce is the prince of damp (was the prince of darkness for a moment on the dance card?) [122]
Desperados what steps will we do? immortal full in pocket Kisses surely by the lake with the little boat Scott is approaching the religious ghosts [123]
A White Thought in a White Shade My poems are never tired of these long walks in words that take the turn to the park to the Northern lights railed-in-trees ice-sky filtered with pink filaments a punk snow dazed bleak pink and creams that are fished out twig-branch framed of the lake’s ice bucket dark sounds of a saga passing black lace with blue behind a tablecloth out of nature brain torches yelling out flames and screams the painter Bruce Pattison wears a brown coat half a collar over a sweater into tree-clouds into invisible day-stars poems are invisible day-stars lain on the edge of the path whitened leaves want to see them they rise upon a garden to low or no-bird dusking seasonal waving of the clarity of perfect transition there can be no going no death the Northern lights are that pure so seeing they are god’s eyes god’s eyes destinies perfect-shaped white and we come to the transfiguration Marilyn Monroe high her moon absorbing all earth-ice or a football-like moon kicked sailing between tree-posts berries expanding through cell walls blood blown on snow cakes above a yellow and white Virgin of the Lighthouse fishes for texts to tie together in a non-fade to a white thought in a white shade . . . [124]
Bruce at twilight did we look up and see a man who climbed into a tree and know him Zachary . . . What supper can we have after Lake Park but two sentences of scripture on plates of grass and leaves in the lighting-up apartment. [125]
Postcard to Jimin in Manchuria The first rule in writing postcards is: include the names of four poets. The second: don’t make it sound like a poem by Robert Bly. He thinks Yeats was a Lutheran. No evangelical deep image, here. And name four places. Postcards travel like confetti near the China beaches. They blow into California, they come into my hands like birds; like winter birds who can warble anywhere. Our confetti comes from China, as Wallace Stevens says; blowing westwards like folk smoke. This morning your card of Tiger Beach: is that its name or is it a translation? Whichever, looking at it, it has cliffs like Kilkee. This morning, my card of cliffs to you that used to see as far as New York, that now behold Cathay! There are no trees on these heights to protect birds—to find song you have to lift it out of the sea. You set up on the sheer rock with confetti made from spray and seal sound. The folk warble of a wedding westwards to Tiger Beach. My singing postcard: Anti-Evangelical pro-sealing Fate. — [signed] James [126]
Orpheus as a Christian Scientist I had the most lovely journey through life and death I sat in a rolling double decker bus from the funeral parlour-airport through the early morning forming dark that was tinging and tingling into dawn blue out front of the bus a blue sea of new life Everyone in the city under the age of forty-five —wearing one shining earring in this new world I saw all men were young with the hearts of people like us setting up long powerful love lives and staying on top of everything in love with everything no one making themselves corpse-like with drink as in Boston. [127]
Patrick Kavanagh’s Dublin We travel through Dublin’s wide streets bearing white flowers to throw in bunches to our young friends and sunrise hallos from forgiveness to our unknowing lovers where roof-high breezes out of a green still on the fields pour along our hands which clumsily confess the faithfulness too deep for anything but walking. [128]
To the Memory of Sylvia Plath: A Personal Note By the customs on Baggot bridge I enter my sad kingdom of Parsons bookshop and the dozen bars, buying a newspaper at this counter. Alms for the journey that I may sail safely between mortician and bishop. To the after work pint then, perhaps telephone him: the loneliness of the definable. Arthur Guinness makes me tick before tea; the sunflower look of the street pardons. How five year olds redeem: kneel for salvation when they frog-leap home from games, so candle-eyed, exit of tunnels from silver hearts. No stain-glass, real saints on pavements, I’ll state a new era of sincerity is beginning of love in step with the pure— Opera sky as if a friend was spotlighted near me, on Kavanagh’s canal behind the houses spring rite of swans— I’ll be reckless. [129]
Homage to Conor Cruise O’Brien Muriac, Green (Julian) And others equally industrious So pressing in their quest for God Whom they could not find in Orthodoxy— Thus, they concluded, He hides in sin And went searching for Him there. Illuminating their cerebral footnotes On the techniques of soulwashing. The Anglo-Saxons during this period? Graham Greene stood on Brighton Rock And Evelyn Waugh became a Handful of Rust. [130]
* James Liddy was born on the Night of the Long Knives (1934). His mother’s family ran a famous New York grocery chain, Reeves Stores. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Liddy was called to the Bar in Ireland in the 1950s, having enrolled in the Kings Inns, Dublin; he appeared once before the Irish Supreme Court. The poems, “Correspondences,” “Sympathetic Horror,” “Prayer of a Pagan,” “The Death of Mathematicians,” “Letter to Sainte-Beuve,” “Death of the Poor,” “The Price,” and “The Debt” are drawn from James Liddy, Baudelaire’s Bar Flowers (Capra Press, 1975). “Wearing a Millstone,” “Blue Mountain,” “A Father,” “On a Protestant Mystic,” and “El Fervor de Palma” are from James Liddy, Blue Mountain (Dolmen Press, 1968). The untitled poem, “My disease brilliant . . .” is from James Liddy, Gold Set Dancing (Salmon Publishing, 2000). A second untitled, numbered poem, “All the journeys” is from James Liddy, A Munster Song of Love and War (White Rabbit Press, 1971), as is the untitled, numbered poem, “For all who trod.” “A White Thought in a White Shade,” “Postcard to Jimin in Manchuria,” “Orpheus as a Christian Scientist,” “Patrick Kavanagh’s Dublin,” and “Homage to Conor Cruise O’Brien” are from Liddy’s A White Thought in a White Shade (Kerrs Pinks, 1987). “The Necessity of Writing in this Tongue” and “After Kraske,” were collected in James Liddy, In the Slovak Bowling Alley (Blue Canary Press, 1990). “The Saadians, Marble, Title, and Flower,” “Last Light in Clare’s Mind,” “Requiem For a Non-Croppy,” “Warm Mountain Poem for Matt Liban,” Tray-Carrier of Laurels, Liam Miller,” “The Quarter,” and “Scott Rautmann, Saturday Night” are from Liddy’s Collected Poems (Creighton University Press, 1995). |
