s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

The Blackbook, Chapter 1
Kelvin Corcoran & David Rees

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1

To translate the black book of praise songs
to engrave she said, my name like Stone
I’m counting the days to zero,
driving the passes for the taste O in my mouth,
the supply dwindles, the life of carbon lost.

And if this is incoherent, below it
only katabasis, the illegible at root,
the gorge of rock-cut tombs for fathers,
all our fathers slotted in shallow tunnels
the roofs blue, a painted sky for all.

Where we sat on the edge of the Libyan Sea
the palace at our backs, the frogs chorusing,
by day only ghost food spread on the table
by night a cuneiform of stars glittered;
when they come ashore, we take them in.

2

(Parabasis steps in.)

Dreaming Orpheus in ICU, haunting the underside of words
three blackbirds in a bare tree
three notes over and over

            Or

us

phe

Fired up the monitors to anthropometric max,
the blood bleeping- and where was the I next morning?
Looking for the literal account – in French, réanimation.

This night script ran for days, for all your staring
not a jot changed, blackened into the wall
the blotched syntax chemistry resists.

If this illegibility means human dispossession
don’t fear it, given its trumpeted antithesis,
see the underside of words thick with roots.

There is a song like accretion
there is the end of memory
the frantic bleeding and glutinous soil.

3

I can’t explain this to you, the medium of night
the first morphology in my hands, shouting in the adyton;
I thought there was a connection between everything.

There’s a theory of intensive relevance said Whitehead
but to escape apophenia became a terrible freedom,
the literal opera everyday of unending emotion.

And I hear my neighbours by the door, their easy talk
running like the river of perfect volume and pitch,
I hesitate to translate a single word, a single breath.

The aria of everything baked in clay tablets,
whatever it means, waits for its Ventris to speak
working from the known to the unknown.

From the high places you see everything,
when they come ashore, we take them in
help them begin another life in a quiet town.

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Unpainted Poems 1,2,3: David Rees.  Poem 1,2,3:  Kelvin Corcoran.

Kelvin Corcoran lives in Brussels. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including most recently including most recently The Republic of Song from Parlor Press Free Verse Editions, 2020, Facing West, 2017, the Medicine Unboxed commissioned Not Much To Say Really, 2017, Article 50, 2018 and Below This Level 2019. The sequence ‘Helen Mania’ was a Poetry Book Society choice and the poem ‘At the Hospital Doors’ was highly commended by the Forward Prize 2017. His work is the subject of a study edited by Professor Andy Brown, The Poetry Occurs as Song, 2013.

David Rees painter, photographer, writer, cartoonist. Born Bethnal Green, East London. Most recent solo exhibition ‘proof of work’ at the Menier Gallery, London Bridge, 2017. Runs the very occasional small poetry press ‘simple vice’ from the riverside at Hampton Wick.