Poetry

Eel

The spark that says it all starts, this time, was not
the news that Amen was the Pope's last word
and thus his life a prayer but the fish-flash response
but they would say that that zipped unbidden
as a wet dream through the tissues of my brain.
Watch me dodge the urge to eisegesis on that,
treat it as a monad fact.  Also on the fact
the shame tastes somehow willed, or sentimental.

Another monad: I had just seen a penitent's hand
nailed to a cross in Santa Lucia, Philippines,
in an unofficial Easter ritual, and another,
that I cannot recall whether where is the blood?
or where can that faith be found? came first.
That this seemed a warm siren sounding out my Baltic.

Or a silent klaxon driving this week dogwhistle mad,
a semi-secular week in which faith calls out
and, within, something I thought lost or jellied
flicks, shocks, in common time to whatever
sings in that Sargasso voice so like faith.
Go on, prise the brainpan up to peek
at elvers like electrons, all motion no presence
choreographed to this inaudible call.

Like faith, and like fear. I do not want a god through fear.
There's the word, then, are you brave enough
to leave it lowercased? So far, second voice.
Are you out of monads then? you're drifting
back to lyric. Thought I ought to warn you.
You're never out of monads. Here's another:

That I read about his silver crozier
stolen by a journalist with a typo,
leaving somewhere deafened a silver crow.
And that elsewhere I saw a comedian kick off
with So, the pope walks into a bar -
is it too early for that? That I felt no eel stir
for laughing at these. No Vatican victory roll
just yet, anyway. But what the eel has turned up:

That I have this image of my eyes coming clear
like angelic cheerleaders whisking off their pompoms;
and an image of what had seemed proof when faced
with this evangelical eyedrop mouldering to sophistry
in mouth-of-ashes weeks. I miss that dawning.
That I remember these like plot-points, not experience.

One I do remember - image of a logic class
and Cantor's theorem making clear that infinities
can be bigger than each other. Logician cheerleaders
this time. And all I recall is the clearing, not proof.
That this leaves me free of ashy mouthfuls,
but uncertain of my argument or premises
and thus reduced to absurd thoughts of souls

that must be infinite and infinitely divisible, hurrah.

Andrew Bailey, Alumni Poet

Andrew Bailey was at Sheffield from 1998 to 1999 on the MA in Contemporary Poetry; he now works for the Poetry Society, the Poetry Archive and Poetry International Web.  Poems have appeared in magazines including Ambit, Stride, Brittle Star and Poetry Review, and he won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2005