A Pretty Sight Read online

  Copyright © David O'Meara, 2013

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  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in publication

  O'Meara, David, 1968-, author

  A pretty sight / David O'Meara.

  Poems.

  eISBN 978-1-77056-359-9

  I. Title.

  PS8579.M359P74 2013 cC811′.54 C2013-904124-9

  For Dorothy

  Spoiler Alert

  Wood warps.

  Glass cracks.

  The whole estate

  goes for a song.

  The cardboard

  we used

  to box up the sun

  didn’t last long.

  Table of Contents

  Occasional

  Background Noise

  Socrates at Delium

  The Afterlives of Hans and Sophie Scholl

  Vicious

  Dance

  Umbrage

  Drought Journal

  Terms

  Hare

  Memento Mori

  Circa Now

  ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’

  In Kosovo

  Ten Years

  The Tennis Courts in Winter

  So Far, So Stupid

  Somewhere, Nowhere

  No One

  Reclining Figures

  Loot

  Impagliato

  Talk

  Silkworms

  ‘There’s Where the American Helicopters Landed’

  End Times

  Sing Song

  How I Wrote

  Memento Mori

  Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn, 1886

  Fruit Fly

  Close All Tabs

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Occasional

  As Poet Laureate of the Moon

  I’d like to welcome you

  to the opening of the Armstrong Centre

  for the Performing Arts. I was asked to prepare

  a special verse to mark

  this important occasion. And I’d be the first

  to confess: the assignment

  stumped me. Glancing around my workspace’s

  dials and gauges, and the moonscape

  through triple hermetic Plexiglas,

  I struggled to settle on the proper content

  to hard-text into the glow of my thought-screen.

  In the progress of art and literature, the moon’s

  been as constant a theme as rivers or the glare

  of the sun, though even after several bowls

  of potent plum wine, a T’ang poet would never

  have guessed, addressing this satellite across

  the darkness, that someone would ever write back.

  The Centre itself, I know, isn’t much;

  a duct-lined node bolted to the laboratory,

  powered by sectional solar panels mounted

  on trusses, parked not far from the first

  Apollo landing. We live with bare minimum:

  cramped, nutrient-deprived, atrophying

  like versions of our perishables

  in vacuum-pack. The lack’s made my sleep

  more vivid. Last night I dreamt I was in

  a pool where cattle hydrated, then

  fell tenderly apart in perfect lops of meat.

  (I see a few of you nodding there in the back.)

  So what good will one room do us? Maybe

  none. Maybe this streamlined aluminum

  will become our Lascaux, discovered by aliens

  ages hence, pressing them to wonder what

  our rituals meant, what they said of our hopes and fears.

  Somewhere in this lunar grind, in the cratered gap

  between survival and any outside meaning,

  must be the clue to our humanity, the way

  Camus once argued the trouble for Sisyphus

  wasn’t the endless failure to prop

  a rock atop some hill, but the thoughts

  he had on the way back down.

  Which brings me to the astronauts of Apollo 11.

  After snapping the horizon through the lens

  of a single Hasselblad, knowing every boot tread

  they left was eternal, they’d squeezed

  through the hatch of their landing module, shut

  and resealed it for return to Earth,

  then discovered, due to cramped space

  and the bulk of their spacesuits, they’d crushed

  the switch for the ascent engine. The rockets failed

  to activate. So Buzz Aldrin used part of a pen

  to trigger the damaged breaker, toggling until

  it fired the sequence for launch. This

  was the quiet work of his engineer’s mind.

  He kept the pen for the rest of his years,

  which is another kind of thinking, akin to that

  slight pivoting, as Camus would call it,

  when we glance backward over our lives.

  What we keep in the pause between facts

  might be the beginning of art. Which is where

  we are in this room tonight. I’ll have to stop there;

  the teleprompter is flashing for wrap-up. Following

  tonight’s program, I’m happy to announce

  an extra ration of Natural Form and H2O

  will be served by the airlock. I think

  you’re in for quite a show. So hold on

  to your flight diapers as we cue the dancers

  who’ve timed their performance to the backdrop

  of Earthrise. There it is now in the tinted

  north viewpoint. Look at that, folks. To think

  they still find bones of dinosaurs there.

  Background Noise

  Home, my coat just off, the back room

  murky and static, like the side altar of a church, so at first

  I don’t know what I hear:

  one low, sustained, electronic note

  keening across my ear. I spot

  the stereo glow, on all morning, the cd

  at rest since its final track, just empty signal now,

  an electromagnetic aria of frequency backed

  by the wall clock’s whirr, the dryer droning in the basement,

  wind, a lawn mower, the rev and hum of rush hour

  pushing down the parkway. I hit the panel’s power button,

  pull the plug on clock and fridge, throw some switches,

  trip the main breaker, position fluorescent cones to stop traffic.

  Still that singing at the edge of things.

  I slash overhead power lines, bleed the radiator dry,

  lower flags, strangle the cat

  so nothing buzzes, knocks, snaps or cries.

  I lock the factories, ban mass

  gatherings, building projects and roadwork,

  any h
obbies that require scissors, shears, knitting needles, cheers,

  chopping blocks, drums or power saws. It’s not enough.

  I staple streets with rows of egg cartons. I close

  the airports, sabotage wind farms, lobby

  for cotton wool to be installed on every coast. No luck.

  I build a six-metre-wide horn-shaped antenna, climb

  the gantry to the control tower, and listen in.

  I pick up eras of news reports, Motown, Vera Lynn, Hockey

  Night in Canada, attempt to eliminate all interference,

  pulsing heat or cooing pigeons, and yet there it is:

  that bass, uniform, residual hum from all directions,

  no single radio source but a resonance left over

  from the beginning of the universe. Does it mean

  I’m getting closer or further away? It helps to know

  whether we’re particle, wave or string, if time

  and distance expand or circle, which is why

  I need to learn to listen, even while I’m listening.

  Socrates at Delium

  What do I know? At least these

  last two mornings since the Boeotian

  ranks massed. The whole lot of us

  had been camped inside their border, sea

  at our backs. We thought we’d soon

  be home in Athens. A set of cooking fires

  still smoked behind the earthworks, evidence

  of a hurried defence at the temple we’d occupied,

  an obvious insult. The old seer took

  the ram and made a lattice of its throat,

  our counter-prayer

  for the terror we hoped to inspire.

  Across the dawn fields, the enemy trod

  through the stripped orchards and wheat,

  farmers like us, setting out cold in linen

  and cloaks, the well-to-do armoured

  for glory out front. After weeks of marching,

  the suddenness of it: the general’s shouts,

  his interrupted speech passed down the lines,

  our pipe marking the pace, and far off,

  their war cry rending the November air

  like a thousand sickles. The black doors

  of each empty farmhouse watched our lines

  clatter through stubbled stalks,

  my arm already heavy from the shield.

  ‘Stay tight, stay tight,’ we called across

  the bronze rims, cursing and half out of breath.

  Then a new shout went out

  and we spilled up the ridge at a run

  into the Thebans’ spear thrusts.

  In the push, there’s little room for a view;

  dust scuffed up by thousands of men

  gagged the air. Best to trust in detail,

  watch for sharp jabs at your throat,

  stay flush with the column, and above all else

  don’t fall. Not so easy with the friendly shields

  pressing behind, and reaped furrows

  snatching your balance. Our phalanx

  held, shoving, and forced the Thebans

  back over ground they’d claimed at midday.

  But there was a too-easy feel to it,

  as if we expected they’d break, and we’d slide

  through their lines like lava from Hades.

  Word spread of horsemen on the hill.

  A trick? Who knew? We were servants

  to rumour. A few turned and ran,

  then the rest. Then I did too.

  ‘Don’t show them your backs,’ I cried

  to a group, shopkeepers from the look

  of them. ‘Do you want wounds there

  when your corpse is exchanged?’

  That turned them around.

  We still had our swords. Scavenging cracked

  spear-lengths to keep the cavalry off,

  we backpedalled over corpses, boulders

  and olive roots into dusk. That was two days ago.

  More rumours follow us to Attica: Hippocrates

  dead, how we were outnumbered,

  whispers of the slaughter chittering in our ears

  like broken cart wheels. Though we know the direction

  home, we stall, not from plague that still strays

  in its streets, but the shame of retreat.

  Night, the cooking fires again.

  We who are left, battered stragglers, scoop gruel

  and wait for orders to seek out our dead.

  Now, on the edge of the firelight, a rhapsode

  recites an ancient passage, his voice recalling Troy,

  the dark-beaked ships and grief for Patroclus.

  We were brave enough, but couldn’t hold.

  What use is a story or a song?

  The Afterlives of Hans and Sophie Scholl

  ‘Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten’

  ‘Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up’

  – Goethe

  After the war, he stays underground,

  still wary of the necessary

  horse trades and occupying powers.

  Le Monde, Die Zeit, New York

  Times; Vietnam, Rwanda, Srebrenica:

  years go by. In the stone arch of a busy

  coffee house, Sophie is waving him over

  past the billiards table, unfazed, looking

  for all the world like she’s just

  breezed in from 1933

  and there’s no nightmare to come.

  But the picture’s all wrong, her face

  unaged, and where are Alex,

  Willi or Christoph?

  Sophie sighs, presses

  a hand against her brother’s cheek.

  ‘Hans, it’s because we died.’

  She describes the trial,

  its forgone verdict, the bulbs

  that burned all night in their cells,

  the shared last cigarette

  in the courtyard. Hans has turned

  the details over again,

  his memory tightening the blurs

  like a Leica lens while the tension

  in his face subsides

  in the respite of knowing

  at least they tried. They’re even laughing,

  aping the parrot shrieks

  of Friesler’s indignation,

  gossiping over the Führer’s last pose,

  Hans with a finger

  cocked against his temple.

  They order café viennois.

  Sophie pokes at the dollops of whip

  while ordered traffic crawls

  past the painted glass

  of the window. The newest papers

  in wooden clips

  fanned across

  the billiard nap. Skinhead rallies,

  latest dictatorships. Hans makes

  another hopeless gesture.

  Did everything change, or nothing?

  Coffees done, they consider the years

  like doors they never entered,

  as if history’s just a lot

  of people trying

  to get from one room

  to another. Outside, Hans

  mounts the steps of a slowing tram.

  Sophie ties her hair back

  with an abalone barrette

  as she turns

  down Leopoldstrasse

  and waves, looking for all the world

  like she’s going to haunt it.

  Vicious

  (or, On Dissent)

  CHARACTERS

  Socrates

  Sid Vicious

  SOC.

  Wait, stranger! Why the rush? This place

  just turns upon itself, so to leave is only a step

  to hurrying back. What’s the difference

  if you pause and talk? Those scars

  across your chest and face: did you once march

  with spear and shield? I fought

  at Potidaea and Delium. I’m So
crates, of Athens.

  SID.

  Yeah, I’ve heard that bit. Righteous bastard

  with all the questions. I must be dead,

  to run into the likes of you.

  SOC.

  Was it an accident? A sudden

  fall from craggy heights? Or did you disturb

  some starving animal in its sleep?

  Who gave you those injuries?

  SID.

  I did.

  SOC.

  You?

  SID.

  I cut my chest with broken glass.

  SOC.

  And the scabs on the back of your hands,

  were they not left by spear tips?

  SID.

  That was just a laugh with a cigarette, some game

  we’d play in the Hampstead bedsit.

  SOC.

  What was the purpose?

  SID.

  It was funny. It was supposed to give

  them second thoughts about trying to smack me.

  Show them that anything they’d try

  isn’t half of what I’ve had already.

  SOC.

  Who are they who’d seek to harm you?

  SID.

  Suits and coppers. Punters in the audience. The fucking lot.

  SOC.

  What were the reasons for their enmity?

  SID.

  They didn’t like us. We were wasters

  and fuck-ups who wouldn’t settle for what they

  stood for: blind acceptance, apathy and moderation.