Alex Wylie is a poet and critic who lives in Leeds. His debut collection, Secular Games, was published by Eyewear in 2018, and a book on the later work of Geoffrey Hill, entitled Radiance of Apprehension, is forthcoming shortly.
ALIEN POWERS
‘Have I really been in a battle?’ wondered Stendhal’s hero
after many hours blundering around the field of Waterloo,
and many people today share a similar perplexity.
Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers
I.
Alien powers: the vague forms of government
baffling the distance in-between
us like condensed breath. You are not alien
but your smile of greeting wafts into a grin
by that fumy air. You are all intent.
(Holding one’s breath becomes the absolute,
the passive study of the other’s face,
each mirror to a studied artifice,
in the pure, clear air; dirempt of force:
each mimicking the other’s off-the-cuff salute.)
We meet underneath the spreading chestnut-tree
monographed by Eric Arthur Blair –
G.O. – so frequently a symbol for
spontaneous order; and for nature
as meaningful, ultimate: smooth, planetary
fruits, webs, galactic with dew; the roots
a fretwork of dark-matter-arteries
reaching down through terrifying space
morphing infinitesimally into branches:
Jörgmungandr, the world-snake, swallowing its
own star-spangled tail. A fateful mistake.
I meet you in the Big House public bar
where you buy me… where you buy me a beer.
Cúchulainn to my luckless Conchobar,
the alcohol enhances your mystique.
I see through ever-thickening goggles
the gold bling gangling all about your person,
possessed of a sudden, biblical passion
to flee the stony wilderness of Goshen
in a stretch limousine. The spirit boggles.
II.
It’s hard to see, now, admittedly… But
who, or what, does daylight represent?
Nothing but itself. Ah… how convenient:
something which is something and yet isn’t –
the politics of God. You appear bright.
It’s light, light, light with poets nowadays:
formless, colourless, weightless: a special plea
for state immunity. The thing’s the play.
Hang your convex mirrors accordingly.
Cultivated in those daytime fantasies,
you are as honest as the day is long.
It’s winter, though; hence the light is thin.
Consider the day-star. Piotr Kropotkin
broods on the morality of prison
finding it everywhere around him, wanting –
the world as universal gulag
(terribly political, these Russians)
forcing strange, unwarranted confessions
from the faithful; pathetic conditions
held up against the horrors of the stalag.
You’re not so green as you’re cabbage-looking.
I’m speaking to you, not to some god –
though even anarchists, as soon as they’re dead,
are taken up, like sun into a thundercloud.
There’s a town in southern Russia called Kropotkin.
III.
So then, did we fight at Waterloo?
Or was it all a simulation, a demon’s
video game – poor pixelated humans
thinking themselves players on an immense
three-dimensional stage? I want to tell you
it was all just a bad dream… But I can’t.
I was bored shitless by Stendhal’s novels.
A mirror walking down the road? That reveals
only the warm smiles of the stylish devils
you knew already, you absolute saint.
And did I meet you under the spreading chestnut tree?
Was it only my imagination?
Justice may be the ultimate illusion,
like God, I admit that; yet still you shine
judiciously and all you say is true.
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit
to them that have none. Here, shake my hand;
be my neoliberal confidant and friend,
a powerless friendship, sound as a pound.
Maybe nobody will really get it.
Midwinter sun erupts like a phoenix’
egg in the trees’ dense nest of branches.
But that’s by the by. Escape those clutches.
Whatever germinates and hatches
hatches into the blind, chirruping hunger of fanatics.
