Oils z5e44

PRAISE FOR OILS

‘The Choice for this quarter is Stephen Sexton’s Oils: a series of finely crafted and vibrant poems, playing out central concerns of loss and dislocation.’ Luke Kennard and Denise Saul’s Selectors’ Comment in the PBS Bulletin

‘These are poems to make you ponder – to read and re-read, savouring the language and reflecting on the mysterious subjects at hand as you go.’ Claire Savage, Culture Northern Ireland

‘I am always convinced there is something interesting going on, some depth of thought, some originality of observation and expression. [...] The language is slightly elevated, and the emotional punch hits dead centre.’ Stephen Payne, Sabotage Reviews

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‘If you’re for bed, not to leave any bread or milk on the table; it attracts the dead.’

Sonnet I.6, lines 5-6, The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. David Cook)

THE EMMA PRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by the Emma Press Ltd

Reprinted in 2015, 2017, 2018

Poems copyright © Stephen Sexton 2014 Introduction copyright © Annie Freud 2014

All rights reserved.

The right of Stephen Sexton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-910139-03-5

EPUB ISBN 978-1-912915-65-1

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Impact Print, Hereford.

The Emma Press theemmapress.com [email protected] Birmingham, UK

INTRODUCTION

The first thing that strikes the reader about Oils, Stephen Sexton’s sixteen-poem pamphlet, is that it reads like a full and mature collection. This may be due in part to its marvellous evocation of ancient civilisations, its ingenious use of myth and folktale, its unabashed immersion in the arts, the scope and seriousness of its subject matter, its sheer ambition... But for me, it’s rather that in almost every poem, a kind of living self-portraiture is at work: at times anguished and morbid, at others tender and full of longing, elsewhere playful and satirical – but always engaging for the reader.

Secondly, in many of these poems one is brought face-to-face with a sense of the supremacy of the dream. What’s more, it’s a dream taken to a very high degree of resolution – an unusual feat in contemporary poetry. I sense that Dante and Keats are not far away. Speaking of influences, the intense wroughtness of these poems brings some of Yeats’s poems to mind.

A sequence of three poems, ‘The Deaths of Orpheus’, ‘Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus’ and ‘Red’, demand particular comment. It’s not just that they skilfully and lovingly fulfil the requirements of ekphrasis, that of honouring the works that inspired them (look them up!) while bringing the reader’s attention to new and exciting insights about matters beyond the scope of the original. They also reveal another remarkable aspect of Sexton’s poetry: its extraordinary richness of meaning – inviting, requiring the reader to explore these meanings. In Yeats’s words, ‘the fascination of what’s difficult.’ And yet nowhere is there any obfuscation, or sense of laboured research.

These are poems to read and reread. This is a poet to get excited about.

Annie Freud SEPTEMBER 2014

CONTENTS

On Betrayal

Young Bean Farmer

The Death of Horses

Long Reach

The Deaths of Orpheus

Subimago

Slip

An English Teacher Leaves the Room

Schematic for Atheism from a Child’s Watch

John’s HiFi

Dead Cat Bounce

Credit History

Because

Ekaterinburg

House without a Face

Elegy for Olive Oyl

Notes and acknowledgements

About the poet

About the Emma Press

On Betrayal

I’m thinking of when prophesies shone like promises about to be broken, when it might be treason not to bring to the Senate

your unsolved dreams as little Isaacs to the mountain, thinking men turning over in the light the counterfeit coins

of sleeping. I would tell them that in my dream the neighbour’s daughter said she hadn’t seen it when she had –

moving on the crest of the hill in its short patterns making the village tremble behind each bolted, double-bolted door.

At four, three, two hundred yards you could see it with the sheen of crude oil; lustre that means to me

a kind of reflection but – closer than that – it was

unknowable like fencing off a square foot of night. I’d tell them I think it was a panther but I’ve never seen one look back down the trough

of the hill, its stare unmaking my bed, weakening the walls, lengthening night Morning brought the neighbour’s daughter and what she itted in the kitchen spilt

milk and brought the panther down from its hilltop in careful, vicious footsteps. We shrank behind the countertops, but it came in

opening her side like a curtain, and I was up the stairs and out the window and I say It is my dream and she is well

twice and I ask what it means when even in my dream I’m a coward.

Young Bean Farmer after Peter Doig

Some days it seems everything comes from the soil or belongs to the soil. As though even the sun farms light from the earth and – like me and my brothers –

goes to ground when the oil lamp hurries us indoors. Other days, our farmhouse worries off its white coat while the crop shivers through deepening snowdrifts,

sometimes blizzards, always frost. Sometimes every day is one day in which chestnut trees sit like mushrooms sprouting on the scorched soil and our bedroom simmers

a mirage and the snow and heat can be two things and one.

A farmhouse

doesn’t make me a farmer the way that wood doesn’t make a fence.

At night my head goes down and all days have become the next day. At night the pods turn their heads and I dream of noon and of me through the boundary

and of me at the boundary and turning back. I feel the blaze of soil on my brothers’ heads. I go and never come back and then I come back.

The Death of Horses

The death of horses haunts the horses, sours gallons of parochial milk, and rots the berries on the cane. The bones of horses keep arranged

largely in their living shape. A rib or thighbone missing here, carrion clumped around a hoof as though death was elsewhere overthrown: a skeleton

growing back its flesh – the pastern, gaskin, stifle, loin. Those horses left to fly-graze a hillock of granite, weed, and ankle-break

have died a death of intervals. The mind boggles, that is to say the mind is full of ghosts which is

to say the mind haunts itself,

its own black mane, its obsidian. Iron chimes at intervals on the stone as coronets fester and one by one the shoes drop off.

Iron echoes piecemeal across the valley, its memory strides home past maggots in the ditch, through some farmer’s skelfing floorboards,

up through his son’s shivering bones whom he tries again to coax to sleep. The river curses TV static. It’s too dark and not dark enough.

Long Reach after Anne Sexton, after ‘The Starry Night’, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

The town does not exist because you live there now. The black, septic tree – the drowned woman you wanted – does not exist in its almost-reach into the evening. Land in the patchwork town and forget that vortex’s crook-armed hold above the steeple, tavern, grocer, which don’t exist.

None of these things exist, even the A-frame houses you might live in. The fresh-yolk-moon has managed to hold them in its gaze. For you, moon wasn’t a woman but a god. There’s too much moon in this town. Absence makes the heart grow out of reach.

Brushes and canvas within reach, with the sun up instead, he painted what doesn’t exist from the margins of his asylum; the margins of town.

Anne, now that you’ve settled in, what’s it like to live there? Have you met the doctor and has the woman next door introduced herself? Did she hold

forth about how nothing changes? Did you hold your tongue? Did you mention Vincent and reach for his letters and quote “Sometimes, young woman, it’s both expensive and impossible to change.” Do letters exist, or only the short-range burst of live rumour from parlour to parlour across town?

If there is no such town, why don’t we change it? Not much can really hold, so how about motor cars? How about Wi-Fi and live streaming? After all, it puts these paintings within reach. I mean, you have a Facebook page. That wouldn’t exist otherwise. I suspect it isn’t really you, though, the woman

you were is dead. In 1974, that woman had a drink with the engine switched on in the town of Weston, Massachusetts, which does exist.

In this Stendhal Syndrome of the internet, I hold all the cards, the letters, the work – the long reach back into the small French town where we could live.

I can’t hold onto anything, Anne. Because it doesn’t exist, I’ll meet you in town. Borrow some wine from the woman next door, reach for glasses. Live, then show me what I got wrong.

The Deaths of Orpheus

1. A FLATTERING LOOK

Look when my head washed up on the shore I was singing through the salt – they seem sure, and it’s mostly true – but by then I was mostly salt, I meaning head and what remained of my throat.

When my eyes opened, finally out of that wine fucking dark sea, pipers commanded the battered coves in a moon-shaped bay, though by moonshaped, we mean only a part of it. Clouds were squandered by the coastal gales. Evening. I realised where I was in the arms of a woman in whose arms the roll and loll of my head ceased its hymn. She carried me on the strings of my lyre and though I couldn’t see it, you’ll know it’s noted for nacre inlays on spruce and willow, my signature

in pearl on the rosewood tailpiece. They evicted a tortoise for his hollowed resonator, for the tone. And – I should settle this – three strings, though I could have made you weep with one. My hostess, with her dark-ringed eyes, had been weeping. Her pinafore was the green of hunters and olives, ferns and forestry, patterned with viburnum, haltered by copper brooches at the shoulder over a rather suave gainsboro undershirt the unlovely shade of the underworld. She wore lilacs, mint, fennel in a bunch at her solar plexus and I smelt the brightness of lemons from under me and the broad freshness of their leaves. I sensed tortoises on the ground. It made me so sad knowing she was going to bury me here among the lemons and the olives, with my lyre, in some lonely adventureless grave. I’ve become the death again in every glance backwards. I’m brave enough to do it twice.

2. NYMPHS FINDING THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS

Always becoming, always becoming, instar to instar, the salmon-pink sky runs a jealous parallel along the mountaintops, the mountaintops envy the scum of the sky –

each is envied by the black ash trees swooning in their gothic copse which only for context sharpens as a spear the narrower birch with its adolescent rings

of years which longs for touch and hands and more touch than the hands of nymphs in rockeries and nymphs in the stream with their torso-sized bronze water jug filled

and the opening covered by one girl’s hand which is envied by waterlilies and peonies and aconite for its transport – they itch to work

their frenzy of medicine elsewhere than this fresh pool

which seethes at everything other than itself for being various and loathes in its algal green flotage that depends on sunlight resented by the accumulating moon

whose caprice impulses the currents around whose currents I ire for their powerlessness which is me half-drowned at the bottom and jealous, O insects, jealous is what death is.

3. RED

the tenses of my was streak like thinned paint. My body resigns itself on this plinth as a treasure for the vultures. My gorgeous body is divorcing itself from itself. My chest grotesquely arches. It is curved like the lopped-off top of a circle, the rusty chord drawn through. I’m Christ-wounded in the side. I hadn’t imagined death this red roar, but a slalom of light outpoured. I had imagined not stasis nor the language of my hands stopped, but my thought becoming advisor to the order of things – the invisible reminder yearly to the deaf, innocent wonders of the world to start again to remake.

Subimago

I have been well prepared for small endings. At eight years old, my first poem killed a mayfly.

My first poem rhymed nothing with nothing. From that flash; seek endings every few minutes.

Stop at kerbs on quiet roads, stop at traffic lights, stopping nothing. Let’s take the longest way to your house.

Telling the long story short takes longer than the long story. Study each red man with hands by his sides at each crossing.

I will your house (I’ve never seen) to pull further away. I will the frozen avenues longer.

I will each small ending into one unendable. Imagine your doorstep at the end of the long story short.

Imagine turning back on your doorstep, endless green lights. Newer flies tumbling from the knots of trees.

Slip

There’s a sound that’s lust or boredom or both which is a fingertip sounding a note plaintively on the edge of a wineglass.

There’s also the bright assent of two glasses clinking protesting one to the other that I mean you no harm that I mean you no harm. There’s no sound I know for contentment.

An English Teacher Leaves the Room Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Curtains drawn: laughter from the dark classroom. The children are howling in the flames from the candelabra and the camellias, have forgotten Paris. The children are watching the woman load the gun – the sword – find the temple, pull the trigger. Some girls are soft, damp bruises under the eyes and one boy rewinds the tape – pulls the bullet back in the hot chamber, reloads, fires again and again and again and again. I see them through the door’s glass embrasure and you – Stephen – thinking about Paul Rudd’s acting career, doing nothing. I’ll snap the TV off and what will it matter? The children think love is hell and Juliet’s dead again. What does it matter?

Schematic for Atheism from a Child’s Watch

I almost had God out of my language and this happens – really. A watch is laid out in rings and frames like a sliced boiled egg on the walnut table. What do I do with it? Only one thing: I don’t succeed. Bezel, crown, lug, stegosaurus face-piece – like opening a drawer of ticket stubs or receipts of romantic meals, God comes blushing back from our trial separation. I’ll tell him these things don’t interest me! Watches, dinosaurs, eggs; old tests, I say. You’re a test; your middling beauty against my grain of loneliness at night. Real things, he says – the ticking clock, the double bed.

John’s HiFi

John’s HiFi is the picture of clarity. He gives listening parties: small affairs to show off to pilgrims how it renders Kind of Blue, for example – its high notes are suspended handfuls of crystals. The bass thumps like a sperm whale’s heart. In one record a siren panned from the right left and summoned steel-toed boots in the hall, then chains of command, hand signals, tear gas… I wept myself underwater, into the chatter and clicks and codas of all the oceans. Once, the hiss of the stylus was the hiss of soldering irons and blistered fingers, resistors, and pearls of solder like tears, or rain.

Dead Cat Bounce Is this the real Economic Problem – shortage of money? IGCSE Business Studies (2006)

If I had a single bright penny for each nodding semitonal beep from our electricity meter…

In the dark, when the power’s coughed out and electric light has hailed then surrendered to sound, we build an obelisk of piercing alarm.

We in turn concede to dark’s demands for pencil tapers and black candles in the bedroom.

We make amends for poor debt-management. Someone puts his ear to a guitar and with the expertise of a safe-cracker

or a cardiologist, finds in matching those shrill notes the complexities of desire. We rebuild western harmony – instead

of a confluence of melodies, their needling allergic divorce grows nauseously ornate. We caress the sad-excitement, our adequacy,

like a kitten. We arpeggiate ourselves. At the core of our song, under the weaves of mordents and fluent legato,

submerged, this alarm’s enduring pulse. Light will return and switch the books back on: Make a list of your needs and wants.

We pray that our unreasonable art might unfix slates from the winter of our house.

Credit History

Because you work in money I think I should ring. It might mean a bonus to win my custom. Your voice could zoom from the telephone exchange and we could charade for a bit – I’d relent. Your professionalism would sell me something I want – maybe a loan. I don’t call, though, because it doesn’t work that way: a few years from now my name will stand for unlit roads at night and the emptied units of closed restaurants. By then I’ll be no one.

Ergonomically, there’ll be a solution for lovers surfacing. If paper doesn’t constitute attempted fraud, you’ll be reading Wuthering Heights, or Gatsby again at your glossy desk. You won’t close the book

when you hear my voice, instead glancing east out the window at the starlings over the rowers on the river. I see the odd way you hold books: index finger tucked under the page at hand as though your body is bored of the plot your brain forgets. Your marvellous brain full of the Data Protection Act (1998), APR, the Bank of England’s interest rate.

Because

of the idea of Annie Hall as a verb, because of the spider that isn’t there, because of the phone that doesn’t ring, because of that phone call as one gull flying over the city dreaming from my high window to yours, stretching in its beak its elastic voice as a tether, because of my love for you which is large and unmanageable, because of that fact, and the fact of that bird’s voice linking us like a tin-can telephone, because of what I whisper along its degrading line: because of my love for you which is large and unmanageable,

because to the question can anyone hear me? any sound can be a response in the affirmative, because of my fear of being heard or anything, because of our voices and their failures, because of the transatlantic telegraph cable and its several operations, because of the job of finding the break in it when and where the transmission fails, because of distress signals sent a hundred years ago from the belly of the North Atlantic, because of me waving, yes, waving to you in the green voice of this gull for three miles and its voice as an olive branch, which, if dropped is heavy as a ship falling from the sky with all the decked engers waving,

because of the joke about eggs, because of my love for you which is large and unmanageable and, importantly, because of my love for you which is large and unmanageable.

Ekaterinburg

With the slow ripples of the Blue Ridge Mountains softened through her picture window, Anna Anderson sits turning the gold band inches – thumb and index – round her finger.

With her eyes closed, she tries to cordite snaking around the low ceiling of the basement room, the weight of her clothes like kimberlite hung with a chain-mail of diamonds.

She strains to the flurry of gunshots – echoic bouncing into the darkness of the morning, and the years that follow one such carom to Charlottesville, Virginia. She does not yet know that the ribbon

of intestine she’ll have removed in ten years, glittering with DNA, will close the tunnel she opened in 1922 like a collapsed mine,

and find Anastasia back at the entrance.

House without a Face

With all the window frames plastered over, stuck with stucco, abandoned priory,

immaculate cast, four square windows, one oblong door

like a child’s line-drawing that has no emphasis on through.

The house without a face glows at night, is obdurate.

It says in its low voice, which is September’s ankle-deep

sussurate of leaves, that over time doing nothing

is just as destructive as anything else.

The house without a face winks the parched socket where its eye

should be, invites us who are exhausted by each other. It says, look what’s in

a word like bedroom – not a bed, but a moult of years, a fleecing

autumn years long, a reign of bees, a tyranny of spiders, a density

of voices running a river along the flue. Once an avalanche of touch shook

for nights to days to nights then was pulled glacial back to the rafters with all its latent

power melting in the walls to damp, waiting for one of our low voices to loose

it again, to say the word. There’s no seeing inside, no actual knowing.

We go to our separate houses into years of doing nothing. One June leaf grows

towards and until its broken stem, and might flutter onto our heads, fracture

the baffled snowpack, turn our bedroom windows white, opaque, and of no use.

Elegy for Olive Oyl

I’ll go back to painters and whistles, shipwreck gardens, Turk’s Heads, leaden hearts and let the winds their revels keep.

I’ll go back to the water for something to put the ghost back in me, as no one says. Your body gestured commensurate with

mastheads asway blindingly against the sun, sowing sunspots on the horizon: I bears this image in mind. You, and you

knowing all your dazzled life that nothing always haunts at its edges something, being much larger and altogether more convincing.

I bears in mind your grey camisole the morning we almost married. I singing into your sleep like a pebble lobbed at your bedroom window.

I sang up a work song, you threw me a dresser. I sang up a work song I’m working to finish.

My first language was Sailortown pidgin, my palette’s on fire with salt. My sweetest voice still is vinegared plums, a thousand tobacco plugs

stiffen my tongue. The sad-sackery of all this doesn’t escape me. My posy wilts at the cold milk bottle: spilling is in its essence so it spills.

The knot weakens the rope. If we won’t marry, retell me the dream of twins – each of them was me you said their breaths rattled your clapboard walls

you said their forearms were the size of melons you said. I haven’t thrown a punch in years now the old buffoon is underground.

I can’t put my arms to work, my chest is tight as frozen oak. There’s nothing here for me to haunt – I bears this in mind.

I anticipate better weather but there’s no sea change – the sea being always water. Once, I folded

a ship’s overbite over itself; propellers twirled like pinwheels. Laugh like that again! & let the winds their revels keep.

I want to be light as every floating thing. I’m ready to shove off. I’m ready, I promise.

I’ve been trying to eat more spinach.

NOTES

‘The Death of Horses’ was written after the discovery of a mass grave in Co. Tyrone.

‘Long Reach’ uses a line from Vincent Van Gogh’s letter of 19th September 1889 to his brother Theo.

‘The Deaths of Orpheus’ is based on three paintings: Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on His Lyre by Gustave Moreau, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus by John William Waterhouse, and The Death of Orpheus by Antonio Garcia Vega.

‘Elegy for Olive Oyl’ uses a line from ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ by Epes Sargent, 1838.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared: Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Glenn Patterson and the Ulster Tatler, and The Lifeboat.

I’m grateful to the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry and particularly to Sinéad Morrissey and Ciaran Carson for their unsurable guidance. Also to Paul Maddern, Medbh McGuckian, Leontia Flynn, Darran McCann, Jeffrey Thomson, Connie Voisine, and Wayne Miller. Thanks to Damian Smyth and Arts Council Northern Ireland.

I would like to think Annie Freud for an introduction of such kindness and thoughtful attention, and Rachel Piercey for her magnificent editorial eye, her advice and her .

Most importantly, my thanks are to the workshop groups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of, to Emma Must for her long and patient help, and to Stephen Connolly and Manuela Moser for their generosities, intelligences, and existences.

Thank you to Emma Wright for making this pamphlet possible and for working so hard on it. Thank you for your enthusiasm, encouragement. It is not possible to thank you enough.

ABOUT THE POET

Stephen Sexton lives in Belfast. He was the winner of the inaugural Funeral Services Northern Ireland National Poetry Competition and he was the recipient of an ACES award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2016. His poems have appeared in The Open Ear, Abridged, and as part of the Lifeboat series of readings. His poem ‘The Curfew’ was the winner of the 2016 National Poetry Competition and his collection The animals, moon won an Eric Gregory Award at the 2018 Author Awards.

THE EMMA PRESS

small press, big dreams

The Emma Press is an independent publisher dedicated to producing beautiful, thought-provoking books. It was founded in 2012 by Emma Wright in Winnersh, UK, and is now based in Birmingham. Having been shortlisted in both 2014 and 2015, the Emma Press won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlet Publishers in 2016.

The Emma Press is ionate about making poetry welcoming and accessible. In 2015 they received a grant from Arts Council England to travel around the country with Myths and Monsters, a tour of poetry readings and workshops for children. They are often on the lookout for new writing and run regular calls for submissions to their themed poetry anthologies and poetry pamphlet series.

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