Stephen O'Connor

From YELLOW VALLEY


1. Uz

Help yourself to the blond fields, to the tractor rattle.
A querulous jay was placed on that fire-stripped oak
just for you. Likewise, the clouds were inflated
and that jet trail scratched across the empty blue
this very morning. Do you like the hint of woodsmoke?
And those telephone poles at the horizon?
Nice touches, I think. They make it all true.
Listen to that ragged cock’s crow—that was my idea.
Doesn’t it bring everything into balance?
And those shovels—if you dig under any rock,
you will find we have created mysteries:
bits of bone and bead that don’t belong,
hieroglyphs in languages more than dead,
idols to a very cleverly conceived array of gods,
if I do say so myself. You could spend a lifetime
decoding the suggestions we have left behind,
and I assure you it would be worth it.
Of course, we have taken signs off some
of the roads, and made the odd stair step
uneven. And one day, when you least expect it,
you will find that leaf-covered body
in the woods, dent in the skull, underwear
around the neck. But absolutely nothing
has been left to chance. There is no randomness
here, nothing less than eighty-seven percent
meaningful. Every dragonfly and hailstone
has been calibrated precisely to your taste.

5. Song of Songs

Sixty years after, and it was all the same:
There, the low stone wall where she sat and wept.
And there, the hibiscus flowers rocking outside
the kitchen door, the mimosa blushing in the fog,
and even the piano, although its keys were pillowed in dust,
and made sounds like coins rolling down a pipe.
Sixty years of nightmares had made no difference:
The one in which she buried him alive,
the whole village standing around the rain-slick pit,
indifferent, saying nothing, watching;
the one in which he slit her mother’s throat.
He had played Chopin for her, and brought her handfuls of coal.
You must read Seneca, he had said, when you are older.
And Marcus Aurelius. His evergreen uniform,
his cropped blond hair, the commanding officer who shouted,
Put out your lights or I will shoot through your windows.
Her dolls had been sent back to Düsseldorf,
the dining room chairs burnt in the fireplace.
Henri, her brother’s classmate, shot in the woods,
driven through the village in the back of a truck,
never blinking, even as his head bounced against
the metal bed. And leaflets dropping from the sky
(possessing one was death; she had hundreds),
pink and green tracer bullets rising into rumbling black.
There had been other men, other deaths, children,
a city of glass and ash, a house under an enormous maple.
But still, she had sat on the floor in the room over the garage
while he played Chopin, sunlight glinting in the hairs on his hands.


10. Promises

When you don’t know what the words mean,
are you saying anything at all? So that’s one way
of looking at it: All our solemnity was foolish,
and our fear. Only the sunlight was real,
and our fantastically orange eyes, our furled wings.
And so we launched ourselves into the air,
believing our falling was flight. And so we hit
the road, trusting our phrasebooks and our maps.
Does it matter that the hills we tapped across
with our sticks and boots were not in fact France,
that the chapels were only vats of coolness and shadow?
That’s another way of looking at it: trust and belief.
We stumbled through the impossible sounds
in our little books, and we were given rooms,
we were welcomed into echoing spaces and served
plates of exotic meat. And so there we were,
grinding up the gravel road with a black dog
on our flatbed. And so I set a cup of coffee
on the floor beside your pillow. And so: Your eyes
orange in the sunrise. Purple blossoms scattered
in bitterness. Block of loneliness. Infant laughter.
And so: just this morning, your glance across
the croissants, our knees touching under the table.
The black dog is gone now, but still the dust rises.
And still that wind in our hair—although
perhaps it never meant we were falling. Perhaps
we have stayed true to our dim promises all along,
because the words were never more than ghosts
we had to bring to life by living.


15. Eternal Return

We have set up our rickety slings of aluminum and strap,
but the parade is not coming: the shouters, the vulvic dancers,
the somersaulting dogs—nothing but phantasms of memory
and hope. And everywhere around us the wreckage of our erased
life: paper palms wilting over ruptured hull spines, police cars
in twisted pylons, faux emeralds glinting along evacuated boulevards.
All this, and still: our beers in their foam overcoats, our feet up,
flip-flops in the dust, our tremors of anticipation and yearning.
We know, we know, we know, we know—No one has to tell us.
The Persian howlers have been driven off, the goddesses and kings,
the cello thumpers and public masturbators—all equal exactly
to the shadows of dust motes, the scent of obliteration, the exhortations
of rain-pelted butterflies. We have been found insubstantial,
flattened by a global fist, our poetry redacted to prepositions
by a committee of the forgetful, our dreams retooled for maximum
productivity, then junked. When it comes, it will be the desert
of Nothing-doing! It will be the vacuum of Stop-I-said! We will be
forbidden to return to our domestic romps. But still we ride
on our straps above the pavement, still we toot our paper horns.
All of our waiting, all of our yearning won’t budge an electron,
and yet here we are: millions of us, expectant, eyes open.


16. Idolatry

Death was entirely obsolete those nights
we lay down in the fields and felt the sun’s
heat coming back out of the dark earth.
There were so many stars we had to invent
new constellations. God, too. And sin.
One could discuss such things until the candles
guttered and the darkness was complete.
But if you noticed the scent rising from beneath
her shirt, the unidentifiable finch in the mimosa,
even the lean, French hooligan zipping his moped
back into town, and, of course, the flighty wind
in the fig leaves—Well, disbelief was not denial then,
it was life. You could be forgiven anything
merely for the slope between belly and pelvis,
or for bringing out the next bottle of wine.
And so we would lie on our backs in that glossy hay
looking up into all those stars. We never knew
what was going to happen next. We seemed so small,
and the odor of rose—even when it was the soap—
or the lacewings shuttling over the mown fields,
or that glance you just couldn’t make sense of—
It was all what Simone Weil called prayer.
Unconscious, but wholly sincere. The casual
crushing of an ant. Gasp into a pillow. Sunlight
in a water glass. Loneliness under the eaves. Shadows
lunging under an orange sky. We gave our lives to it.


18. Dust and Ashes

I am going to give you everything, and then
I am going to take it away, beginning with this morning
of steam in the yellow valley. It is already half over,
isn’t it? The crows’ raucous yammer from the oak
by the frog pond; that will be the first thing to disappear,
because I have given it to you so often, not just wherever
I have gathered two or three trees, but glancing off
the brick flanks of airshafts, and in the narrow zone
between blue snow and dank sky. You value it
at nothing, so you let it slip by, and soon it will be lost.
The sunlight on bleached grass, the reflected heat
on your cheeks, the mustiness of crushed limestone
—these will last longer, but the day will come
when you think of them no more. And so you will help me,
as you always have. I have given you the entire valley,
but you want only the girl latching the pigeon coops.
I have given you the whole girl, but you want only
her bitten nails as she pushes in the rusty hooks,
and those strands of hennaed hair caught at her lips’ edge.
You have rejected almost everything. You have never
had a choice. You are a spider building a web in the wind;
all of your gossamer explorations anchor on moving air.
Soon it will be worse. One, drunk, fell backwards
into the bath, and lay there a day, never shifting
his open eyes, even when the super broke down
his door. Another simply tore off on a motorcycle:
A post card from Sri Lanka. Nothing more.
There have been others. And there will be more
than you can count. I shall surround you with strange
alphabets. The speech of check-out clerks will become
a rippling across lips and eyes. And when you speak,
you will be shunned. You will be the farmer’s mad
spaniel turning circles in the cow parsley, pursued
by his own deformed yowl. The sun will have done
with blood and gold. One by one the stars will fall
from the sky (I shall grant you such beauty)
and you will awake in the night that follows night,
alone with the beast you should never have become,
wanting all you have wasted and I have taken away.
One bottle will contain bitterness, another fear—
all the rest, nausea and pain. Yet, even these
you will want. And I shall take them away.