Up late, p.5
Up Late, page 5
the pith and stare at that man watching from behind the glass. Sip
water from the birdbath and step so lightly on the parched grass
of this tiny patch in Kilburn, each blade might yet remain upright.
Vespers at Pacifico’s
The others have no interest
in the slightest
but those are swifts
dipping down
to lift off milli-sips
of kinking noon-light
on the surface now
re-rippled by the beak
one forks at the closest
interstitial moment
to snip the pool minutely.
The tail is short
compared to the swallow
and a swift has scythe-like
wings – it cannot land
so spends its life aloft,
declining, sometimes,
into mine. A woodpecker
makes itself distinct
from a distance.
Its brisk retort
on dead oak trunk
is instinct, and this
its district, and this
its call to order,
its palate cleanser.
Nothing but a woodpecker
organises so much
personal force in such
a tiny space, then quits.
It flits again, is gone
quick and then alights
high in the cedars
behind the pavilion.
There is this energy.
Bewildering.
Abruptly cicadas
in concert switch
off, and it’s only
endless till it’s not,
till the sun consents
and bats come.
Privilege
I was working as a lawyer in Poland for a large firm trying to cash in on the deregulation of the Eastern European markets when I visited the brush shop.
It was on a side street in the shadow of our skyscraper, the first in Warsaw. I didn’t spend much time in the office, especially in the afternoons. I liked to wander past an empty woman’s boutique called Troll, an empty sports shoe store called Athlete’s Foot.
I’d walked past the brush shop – no sign – several times before I entered, ringing the bell on the door. Wooden counter. Wooden floor. Three assistants in shopcoats talking, and continuing to talk. The shop sold only brushes, but brushes of all kinds: toothbrush, bottlebrush, hairbrush, broom. A bristle brush for fur. A shaving brush. A universe of brushes hung on nails on the back wall. The assistants persisted in ignoring me but in a way that was not, it felt, purposeful: their lack of interest was entirely genuine. I decided to buy a dustpan and brush, and I gestured. They could sell me the brush, but they couldn’t sell me a dustpan, no. For the dustpan I would need a pan shop.
When I went home the fever started. I sweated through the sheets and grew delirious and sat up once, convinced there was a large black scorpion on my chest crawling up towards my neck. I screamed and leapt out of bed and kept trying to brush it off my chest. I sat out on the balcony at night, smoking, wrapped in a duvet. Ulica Bonifraterska.
I’d lived in that street for almost a year before Bartosz mentioned the wall had run down the middle of it, enclosing the ghetto I’d been walking out of every morning.
Ode on the Adult SoulUrn
I possess now approximately a fourth of each of my parents
standing in massive mostly empty pewter canisters
from Amazon on the edge of the lowest bookshelf by my bed.
It is only the usual universal deeply particular normal
sad ridiculous basic absurd. I didn’t check the size
before I ordered them, the urns,1 for next-day delivery
to the undertaker in Cookstown, Bryan Steenson,
a few years below me in school, whose own father
was the undertaker before him, Robin, and also a driving
instructor, my driving instructor, and my sister’s before
that, and Bryan said, coming through from the back room,
they’re rather large, and indeed they were.2 Torpedoes
cradled in his arms. Military shells. Slightly fascistic-looking,
futuristic-looking huge steel urns3 I set on the back seat
of the Focus and, having fastened their seat belts,
drove back to the Malone Lodge on Eglantine Avenue,
having determined to decant them – my parents –
into Tupperware containers I’d stopped and bought in Asda
in Cookstown, since I would never fit a pair of urns4 this
enormous in my carry-on, and as I kneeled in the empty bath,
as I kneeled down fully clothed in the bath and arranged
my mother’s Tupperware, and started shaking out her urn,
the nitty gritty, the silt, the slick kibble, the salt and pepper,
it was awful – so I stopped that and decided to abandon
my running shoes instead to fit the urns in the case.
At security in Aldegrove I was pulled aside, though the fact
that they were tactful, the security men, I don’t mention
before I like to describe how they swabbed both my parents
for drugs was it or explosives. I wish she had smoked some
weed, my mother, or taken mushrooms or a line of coke.5
You could see her old high school from the big window
of the hospice room in Newry, and when the pain became
really just unbearable, the lovely nurse had told her to think
about some other place entirely, a landscape meaning peace,
just an absolute happiness and feeling of calm,
and she said she’d picked as hers a field of lavender,
and you could see that she was helped by that, was happier,
and had she ever seen such a thing in real life,
some summer night driving up for the ferry through France,
warm air streaming from the passenger window wound
a few inches down, the dusk beginning, us children asleep
in the back and the green fields giving way to a sudden dark,
these lanes of lavender, waves of lavender shadow growing
darker in their blueness, into their blue darkness, layers
of darkness, I don’t know, and won’t now, and I lay there
in the empty bathtub thinking about that for a fair while
with the urns, heavy old things, hugging them to me.
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5. THIS URN WILL LEAVE YOU COMPLETELY SATISFIED OR FULL REFUND – SoulUrns is a Brand who cares for you, your family, and your late loved one. If for any reason you are not completely satisfied, just return it for a full refund.
The Call
I’m registered dead
but the man on the line
is called Maurice
and lives in Bangladesh.
I’m registered dead
but Maurice explains
that the company running
the site is a third party
and I’ve reached him
at the company that set it up,
which is very different,
and I must speak to someone else.
I’m registered dead
but Alison in Belfast tells me
I need the second and fifth
letters of a password
I don’t remember having set
in order to enter
the kingdom, and also
a memorable date
I cannot guess although
I suggest the date of my
death, which is today,
they say, and just then
my dead mother
comes on the line
and tells me to quit
with all that yapping.
Feedback
Hidden by the froth of apple blossom the squirrel chirps at some affront,
and at the skylight a bee is trying to get out by going up, which won’t do;
the sun is staring down hard from the bluest sky, and all the trees and plants
strain outwards, upwards, as they must, and sanity perhaps is just ability
to punctuate, and the poem a simple way of saying something complicated,
or the other way around, and anyhow is tantamount to happiness, to be only
where I am – and if I do not love the rock doves strutting mindlessly about,
cooing stupidly, forever looking at me with the side-eye, well, pigeons will be
pigeons always and coming to my lawn, and if I focus on their neckerchiefs
of purple tinged with emerald, there is something there to be connected, plus
something in the way the hose in ever-wider yellow loops negotiates the grass
is how I might extend myself, extend what’s meant by ‘us’, that word the poet
Oppen thought each person must define, alone, and the grass is dead and brown,
and everything is happening much faster than expected, but my work is seasonal,
and this is the kind one does in spring, when everything is meant to be returning,
and the experts were all right, and then were not alright; concerned, worried,
stunned, aghast – despairing – and I read once flabbergasted, all the experts
flabbergasted at how the losses multiply, and wait to devastate, and the wheels
are coming off the thing even if this bee persists against the glass, and the squirrel
shakes the blossom as it moves through, still sore, but it is I that am nothing today,
it is I that put away my grief, and reader, as you go about your afternoon or evening
be sure to send my best – please give my love I mean – to everyone, to every thing.
About the Author
Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His collections are To A Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants and Feel Free. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake and Modern Gods. His awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is on faculty at New York University, and is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.
By the Same Author
poetry
to a fault
on purpose
go giants
feel free
prose
utterly monkey
glover’s mistake
modern gods
as editor
the zoo of the new
(with Don Paterson)
for children
weirdo
(with Zadie Smith and illustrations by Magenta Fox)
Copyright
First published in 2023
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2023
All rights reserved
© Nick Laird, 2023
The right of Nick Laird to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–37869–2
Nick Laird, Up Late
