David Nash

Poetry

1. / Nettle

   

   

   ENGENG

   I’d like to bring my grandfather back to life just to get him stoned,

   the good kind, the thirst and laughter kind. He had, I think, kind laughter.

   My plan is this: I’d tell him the weed was nettle seeds I’d honed

   to be smokeable, we’d use his pipe. I hope twon’t kill me, he’d say, and me just after

   dying. But I am his. People of his don’t do him harm, we’re reliable as clothing.

   I’d watch him reinhabit his trout-skin, retake stock of his own mouth,

   suck his false tooth like he used, laugh about this. I need to know some things.

   Did being called Gaga put in or put out on him? Is it true that in this part of the south

    

   they used to make known their love by whipping the object of it with a nettle?

   True, Gaga would tell me, the grasping of the stinger was the pain that proved it.

   Here he’d open his big bready hands and stroke out the lines where the leaves should settle.

   Gentleness won’t work. It should be in your hand before it knows you’ve moved it.

   He’d fix his bloodshot eyes on Granny’s masscard, curling on the shelf.

   He’d tell me all of this. I wouldn’t have to find out for myself.

2. / The Plastic Bag Full of Plastic Bags under the Sink

   

   

   ENGENG

   You know you’re Irish if you have one of these,

   though you’ll also find you’re Armenian

   or Hispanic or Jewish or Czech, because thrift

   is universal. What, then, is Irish? Is it Dansk

    

   biscuit tins full of sewing detritus? Not ours

   either? Stew is also out – it isn’t really an

   innovation to boil all the food that you have left,

   or at least not one so easily claimed. To ask

    

   an old lad on the road directions, shoot the breeze

   and end up drinking with him? #onlyinireland?

   The past is better everywhere, and there’s no craft

   in protesting so much difference. But there is risk.

3. / river(s)

   

   

   ENGENG

   Should any of us drown (our young, our best even) the river must be considered to have carried out its duty.

    

   When the river has had it up to here with us, it will point out to sea.

    

   If a river is cold, it does not know it is cold. Only we know that.  

    

   Between the flower picked and the flower given: this is the length of a river.

    

   These are the colours a river can be: blue; black; off-blue; universe blue; the colour of an orange; rain black; rain brown; home-, love-, folksong blue.

    

   The river doesn’t laugh from the mouth. It laughs from the mountain.

    

   What if the river, after all this time, would really rather not be water?

    

   Wake me, world, when you’ve decided on one word for river; on the grading of a river; on what sex a river is.

    

   Falling is the lot of rivers. 

    

   By the dam on the river they purify water. Think: to bring water back to itself; every day to say water, and write water. Not just to imply it.

    

   I am a river, and I have undertaken to say so in words: I am a work of translation.

    

   Life is a river. Time is a river. Love? Love is a river. Achievement? People? Rivers.

   The river as metaphor is metaphor.

    

   Do you pass the last bend and forget, river, or must you know it and know it again?

    

   The curriculum of the river is this, in no particular order: geography, music, its own country’s language, physics, history, classics, foreign languages, religion. 

    

   If there were a hierarchy of waters, the river would be king and serf in one – calling the shots, and doing the shooting.

    

   The first word is water, and the last word is water. What the river says, goes.

4. / Changeling

   

   

   ENGENG

   Easier than getting into

   what sex was, I guess,

   was to tell the cagier 

   children that the new baby

   had washed up on the beach

   with the seaweed.

    

   Easier, and no less true:

   even now, I don’t sleep well at all

   and my go-to is to play dead

   on a bed of egg-wrack

   and wait for that night’s sea

   to drag me back where I belong.

5. / A Butterfly Struggles Against Coastal Winds, 5 Metres Offshore

   

   

   ENGENG

   Whatever the before

               (how had it flown out so far?

               what for?)

   and whatever the after

               (Did one of those circling seagulls

               pluck it out of clean air

               when we weren’t looking?

               Did it stop beating its wings

               briefly enough to thud like

               a closed book on the ceiling of the sea?),

   I think that for however short a moment

               (on a Wednesday, 4ish, 

               in spite of all that fucking wind,

               and in spite of an ocean 

               the sound of shredding pages)

   we made it hold its place in the sky

   just by wanting it to.

   Something one of us, I know, 

               could not have done alone.

6. / Magpie

   

   

   ENGENG

   Some creatures value the human, take

   a shine to the colour blue, for example, even though blue

   things neither nourish nor preserve them; even so, make

    

   blue their life’s work, seek it out, build keepsake

   shrines from scraps of denim, spearmint wrappers, For You From Corfu

   tat, the marzipan balloons on a gender reveal cake;

    

   some creatures mean boy, some more mean girl; some mean earthquake

   when seen on higher ground, which means they have abandoned you;

   some hold funerals for their dead, some undertake

    

   to divvy up the dead one’s blue things; some would call you snowflake

   if you flinched at this, since some are so inured to death that death is déjà vu;

   some know ritual for bullshit, but perform it anyway, for performance sake;

    

   some consume as performance: whatever bread there is to break, they break, 

   no matter if it’s steak or carrion, songless bug or songbird – nothing’s off the menu

   for some creatures; some creatures would sooner bite the hand than bear the handshake;

    

   some themselves are blue; they might not break

   this news until they’re seen in flight, a sky-tattoo;

   some creatures, like tattoos, are a mistake.

   Take the magpie for example. Take it.

7. / Blueballs

   

   

   ENGENG

   I have to bite my lip when he asks me 

   – 5 hours, an ocean, a split-second

   delay, and half a language behind – 

   what this idiom means, but I think I get it across by

   using the politest terms I have to hand:

   the words relieve and appetite, 

   the merest hint of a fist gesture.

    

   Turns out he meant the flowers,

   but the basic principle still stands – 

   imagine, Jorge, that you’re dead.

   The earth has eaten you, your beautiful eyes.

   You’re in blackness, not just darkness, 

   clenched tight as a blood-clot, 

   when, I don’t know, through photosynthesis

   or pheromones I guess, a message gets down to you:

   Up here is a warm place. Something in you says

   yes, and you stalk upwards, easing into

   open-air display. The warm hand of light

   draws out a pale bud, then a caravan, more brightly. 

    

   It’s downhill from there

   and you slip like the flag of an old country

   back into pastel, flecked with dirt,

   quite a bit more than just a penny spent.

8. / The Opposite of a Cow

   

   

   ENGENG

   Io – as far as I have gathered from the myth –

   was turned into a cow for being too beautiful.

   Avarice like this I shouldn’t understand, but do:

   the grasses in the high field this evening are

   graceful, stentorian, fine, and unified in movement,

   a school of air-mackerel. Cultures love gold because

   it’s pliant and brilliant; my grasses here comply with gold.

   Whatever’s green comes only to foot-height; hand-height

   I am palming the beards of grass-heads, sleepy and seed-heavy.

   They are, as a whole, untouchable: as one too much,

   as many too many, the peacock’s hundred eyes 

   and my human two are unworthy of witness. Better

   that the grass of this dusk be made cud of; better

   it pass through, better it turn into, the cow which is its opposite.

9. / Bog Butter

   

   

   ENGENG

   Uncle John in his bachelor’s plot, some time in the ’70s,

   slicing out turf enough to do him for the winter, a little

   extra maybe that he’d sell down in Purteen harbour. 

   His peat-spade hits on a softness different 

   from the normal softness: bog butter

   in a slab, the imprint of muslin still on the tell-tale pale

   like sock elastic, had been lurking mute as a planet

   since the Bronze Age. Hauls his butter-baby home,

   catches whiting to fry in a slick of it (Mighty! apparently),

   then donates what’s left to the National Museum. 

   The island, they tell him, is likely studded

   with hundreds of these, but actually to find one

   is like catching a balloon launched upwards from history.

   They put it in a glass box, museum lamplight,

   little placard explaining the discovery, though not

   the discoverer. At his shoulders tourists and schoolgroups,

   John anonymous among them, and the great albino tuna 

   that had swum into his life suspended forever, mighty,

   so very briefly his, but once his.