ELEKTRA
dedicated to Kate Bush
‘Adam
is stasis, or conservatism; Eve is kinesis, or progress. Adam
societies are ones in which the man and the father, male gods, exact
strict obedience to established institutions and norms of behaviour,
as during a majority of the periods of history in our era. The
Victorian is a typical such period. Eve societies are those in which
woman and mother, female gods, encourage innovation and experiment,
and fresh definitions, modes of feeling. The Renaissance and our own
are typical such ages.’ John Fowles, The Aristos
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1 HER AGONY
Time’s
Steady State
I’ve seen the leaf
constrained to come
in summer, its foot glued
to the bark,
hedged, sentenced to
anonymous work,
buzz in hundreds, other
times stay dumb.
An upright style stiffens
the chronicler;
fashion ties the children
to cocaine.
I’ve seen the dice, the
scarecrow in the rain,
and female suicides in
mid-career.
I have heard voices stop
at every turn
and faces ask, and if she
tries
she can’t escape those
absolute eyes.
Summer closes in, the
leaves have grown.
I’ve seen what time’s
steady state involves:
it prisons her; it gives
her to the wolves.
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Grand’mère
Usage is what she lives by,
not a cage.
Who wants to be a prisoner
all her life?
Who wants to live in a
psychotic calm
upon the arm of a correct,
stiff groom
that leads her doctor-like
about his grounds?
Inside that towering,
blackened lakeside schloss
she listens to her dusk, a
gramophone
slurring: ‘Although (whirr)
apart you know (whirr)
my heart’s (whirr-)ing
for you.’ There’s no escape
from the acoustics of
inbred despair.
And he will lead her
sometimes, if he cares,
out to the pink and grey,
imperial square,
a montagne music frozen
under the bandstand’s
twiddly baldacchino. How
long ago did she lose
courage? In how many
punctilious gardens?
He is correct and honest
and studies birds
and lives on a
prohibitively high opinion
of her and of himself.
Years long she studied him.
Now he conducts her bones
in a wheelchair.
Her daughter will topple a
statue and squash them flat.
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The god of
the woods
His laugh no refuge, the
safe
doctor so many lies,
his bones squeaking, an
aged
resentment in his eyes,
the god of the wood ushers
the young girl to her
chair;
she falters: ‘You are
changing.’
And fear fringes her hair.
‘Little patient,’ he
answers,
‘the enduring face will
win.
I have shed a hundred
masks.
Your peeling off begins.’
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Her fashion now
He is the victim, speaks
for a perished species:
it cannot be that he will
have long life.
She ties him down. The work
done in her field
is the difference between
their two potentials:
his fossil past, her flight
to yet-to-be.
Wired for feeling, her
batteries of change
charge her electrons
through him. And she flows.
She orchestrates his pain:
jocose vibrato.
And makes him her
conductor: let him feel
her insert finger and her
right-hand rule.
She’ll worship him no
more—this Stephano?
God of the isle? Or of the
jungle city?
This ghastly Tlaloc, lord
of mountains and maize
that they cooked babies
for? She ties him down.
Opens his heart and lets
the sewers out.
His system’s poisoned by
his remedies,
but her great switch is
thrown. Her quick volcano,
rivelled, pursed up, from
its electric core
ejects, and on her slopes
grow oranges.
It is her fashion now—his
dernier cri.
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2 HER
NATURE
Elektra
Fey, unoriginal, refracting
quotations from belittled
canzoni,
she is drawn to those
unlike her.
Among the derivatives of fin-de-siècle
she chooses the stroller
with the black Malacca.
Then see her at evening,
aromatic dance,
as sticky as grenadine, as
orange,
a secular variation of
Earth’s field,
her nipples exchanging
kill-crackle,
her navel the white spot
that roves on Jupiter.
She touches what she will,
turns it on;
gives the pagoda a banal
appearance;
leaves the stroller
mystified; steals his cane.
Come dawn, her magnetic
flux, like a cat,
waits for the milkman, his
cold crates.
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Who goes
Who goes in the electric
wind, vibrating,
who seeks a share in it,
lost dreams,
who has her elements on the
money,
who finds less limitation
in the cold,
who goes back twenty years
to a café chantant,
who remembers his frosty
eyes, sandpipers,
who goes without certain
home,
who does not correct
herself, but alters,
who stayed three weeks and
disturbed a legend,
who pretends to read on a
bad afternoon,
who lies in a mummy case, a
parched river,
who candies the twigs with
frost in autumn,
who has UFO eyes and a
black halo,
who gave the saint his
incredible eyes,
who enters the acid, covers
the plate with silver.
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She flies
The stars are as they are
by accident.
His time is little to their
outward speed.
A tree is nearer to him,
and it feels
less than he does, maybe,
but more than she.
She sees no reason why she
should not leave—
and that’s the story of
his life, or hers?
Whose outward urge, or
inner spin, is more
in conflict with relentless
gravity?
The padlocked atom, the
domestic core
was murdered from her at
birth: she flies
to outswim all the tadpole
galaxies
and taste the frontier of
the brittle dark.
Outstripping, outstripped,
her force will not exist
and from the tree the last
pale leaf will fall
that kept the tree in
motion. He may touch
his tree, her dark, then
die, and that is all.
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3 HER LOVE
Isis
And now the rain is
beginning, and she is
all about us. She is in
love still.
Gutters run pure. Although
she can rip trees,
drown valleys, she is
gentle this evening.
Her moon burns by the twig
in the pool
like an eye’s burning,
hard, honest.
The hills are, like horizon
hills,
a country we may never come
to.
Her rain is measuring
itself against us,
and that is her way: the
shaken water
and two hollows, our shapes
exactly.
The gods can hurt. When
they do not we are grateful.
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The moonstone
I will have no more
fiction. She is
the moonstone on the bed of
the pool,
the transmuting eye in the
psyche,
the one drop of dew drowned
under air,
the coin in the child’s
jar, forgotten,
for decades forgotten, but
seen now.
I am tired of all these
lies. She is
the mouth in the bone cell
that eats me,
the bot-fly that grubs in
my vitals,
the ever rain, the wet in
the stone,
the architecture’s
impediment,
the quick smile that will
bring the house down.
These are the facts, these
only. I am
in charge of my passionate
terrors.
I have trawled in her
sea-change. I have
extirpated the guilt in the
cell.
She is being’s bride, and
non-being’s.
She looks up at me. The
night trembles.
I am tired of creation’s
deceits,
that the blood is red, the
stars beyond me,
and that my dust is
uncountable.
There is only one thing. It
is she.
The hermetic eye. I plunge
my arm
into the water. I grip my
side.
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4 ENVOI
Where are the girls of
yesteryear
Where are
the girls of yesteryear
Who have
illuminated me?
Where Sue
Strap with the college eyes,
where
Madame Krabb, the doyenne of spies,
where the
pilafs of Edith Gear,
Joan
Hasitwell and grave Marie,
Violet
Hyssop, Dol Dare, oh where?
I was
briefly conscious of what you were.
What
happens to electricity?
Where are
the girls of yesteryear
Who rang me
round from ear to ear?
Where Moll
Flanders, the clever dear,
where
Griselda’s uninjured air,
where
Florence (her swabs were regular),
Nell Gwyn,
soft-centred Marjorie,
M. Curie
and Eva Braun, oh where?
You rode
the footlights, caused a stir.
What
happens to electricity?
Where are
the girls of yesteryear
Who ran me
round with coils of hair?
Where Joy,
who’s in Holloway still,
Where La
Gioconda, whose frown could kill,
Where Anne
Frank in her attic lair,
Hedda,
Blanche, Eurydice,
Fiona
Fitz-Pussy in boots, oh where?
You curled
along my wire, bare.
What
happens to electricity?
Where are
the girls of yesteryear
Who are
beyond telepathy?
Where
Keller, who heard what she saw,
Where the
Dickens, that brood she bore,
Where Jane’s
tongue that I used to hear,
Never-Titty,
starved Emily,
Medea and
Albertine, oh where?
You are
white noise in the atmosphere.
What
happens to electricity?
Alan
Marshfield
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