On the Outskirts [1 ed.] 9780702260612, 9780702259807

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On the Outskirts

John Kinsella is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, and cross-genre work. A frequent collaborator with other writers, musicians, and artists, he is constantly trying to extend the boundaries of his poetic practice. He is the recipient of various awards including the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achieve­ ment in poetry, the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, two Judith Calanthe Awards for Poetry (Queensland), three Western Australian Premier’s Awards for Poetry, a Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, a John Bray Award for Poetry (South Australia), an Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, two Grace Levinson Awards, a Poetry Book Society Choice (UK) and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation (UK), a ‘Junior Keating’, and a Bruce Dawe Prize for Poetry. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University. Though his home is in the Western Australian Wheatbelt at Jam Tree Gully, he has lived many years of his adult life in Britain, the United States, Ireland, and other places.

Also by John Kinsella Graphology Poems 1996–2015 Speak from Here to There (with Kwame Dawes) A Shared Wonder of Light (with photographer John D’Alton) Firebreaks Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems Marine (with Alan Jenkins) A Remarkable Grey Horse (with Thurston Moore) Sack The Vision of Error: A Sextet of Activist Poems Echoes – Poems (in Luminous World: Contemporary Art) Graffiti: Artworks and Poems from Churchill College Paradise Lust, Book 1 Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (with Forrest Gander) The Jaguar’s Dream: Translations, Adaptations, Versions, Extrapolations, Interpolations, Afters, Takes, and Departures Jam Tree Gully The Ballad of Moondyne Joe (with Niall Lucy) Armour Rapacity: A Death’s Jest-Book Intertext Sand (with Robert Drewe) Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography Sacré Cœur: A Salt Tragedy America, or, Glow: (A poem) (introduced by Peter Porter) Love Sonnets

The New Arcadia Doppler Effect: Collected Experimental Poems (introduced by Marjorie Perloff ) The Cars That Ate Paris: A Pastoral Romance Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (selected and introduced by Harold Bloom) Rivers (with Peter Porter and Sean O’Brien) Outside the Panopticon The Hierarchy of Sheep Zoo (with Coral Hull) Zone Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett) Visitants Counter-Pastoral Fenland Pastorals Sheep Dip The Benefaction: Vicissitudes on Interior Pine (with Keston Sutherland) The Kangaroo Virus Project (with Ron Sims) alterity: poems without tom raworth The Hunt & Other Poems Poems 1980–1994 Lines of Sight (with Tracy Ryan) Voice-Overs (with Susan Schultz) Graphology

Lightning Tree The Undertow: New and Selected Poems Anathalamion The Radnoti Poems Intensities of Blue (with Tracy Ryan) Erratum/Frame(d) The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony Syzygy Full Fathom Five Poems (with Philip Salom) Eschatologies The Book of Two Faces: Poems (with artwork by Mona Ryder) Night Parrots The Frozen Sea: Poems (as John Heywood)

John Kinsella On the Outskirts

First published 2017 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia uqp.com.au [email protected] © John Kinsella 2017 This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko Author photograph by Tracy Ryan Typeset in 11.5/14pt Garamond by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Melbourne The University of Queensland Press is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Cataloguing-in-publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 0 7022 5980 7 (pbk) ISBN 978 0 7022 6061 2 (pdf ) ISBN 978 0 7022 6062 9 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7022 6063 6 (kindle) University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

for Tracy, Phil, Russell and Andrée

Contents The Bulldozer Poem House Lights and A Refusal to Let Space and Place Fall to Story Programming Psychogeography of a Temporary Locality: A Prelude –  Tangential to Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 1 The Big Picture: Via Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 2 (God Image: ‘The Mission of Virgil’) Into Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 3 (lines 1–10), ‘Leave every Hope you who in Enter’ A Bat in the Conservatory: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 4 The VOC Gluttony of Spraycan Graffiti on the Outskirts of Tübingen and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 6 Cerberus in the Highlands Overlooking the Sea: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 6 Crossing to Long Island and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 7 Crossing the Irish Sea and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Cantos 7 and 8 Seventh Circle: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 12 A Middle-Spotted Woodpecker Sounds Out a Warning As I Reflect Over Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 13 Buzzards Over the Österberg: On Blake’s Vision of Dante’s Hell, Canto 18 (‘Ditch of Flatterers’) Fasnet and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 20

1 4

6 9 11 14

17 19 21 22 25

26 28 30

Cybernetic Gestures from the Max Planck Institute, Tübingen: Skewiff to Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 21 (lines 46–56) 32 It Says So Much More … Out of Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 21 (lines 118–124) 34 Australia’s New White Paper on Defence and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 21: Devils Proffering Protection 37 The Voice of Malacoda and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 23 39 Resolve: ‘Stop the Boats’ and the ‘Misty-eyed’ and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 25 41 How Can You Write a Love Poem When Reactors are Equivocal and Forests are Vanished? Contemplating Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 26 44 Denkmal: Tübingen 47 Cemetery X: In the Name of Medical Science their Bodies Were Rent: Through Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 28  50 On Signing a Petition Against the French Nuclear Power Plant Teetering On a Faultline and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 29 52 A Call for the Fragmentation of Language: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 31 (Nimrod, Babel) 55 A Psychogeography of Tübingen’s Swan Lake: In Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 34 57 Blackbirds and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 1 60 Winged Storm Boat and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 2 62 Sun Doesn’t Fully Illuminate the Harbour: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 4 63

We Hide in the Shadows as Surfaces Heat: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Cantos 5 and 6 65 Stumps and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 8 68 On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 8: Kammmolch (Great Crested Newt) 70 Graureiher as Lucia – and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 9 (lines 50–63) 72 De-Nazification and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 9 (lines 64–101) 74 The Road on the West Side of the Cnoc Osta Range and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 10 79 Dunlough Pier and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 13 81 The Quake Plates: Those Missing Illustrations of Blake’s for Cantos 19 and 20 of Dante’s Purgatory Have Turned Up Here in Tübingen 83 Unravelling Hay, Furze and Flames: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 27 85 Kloster Bebenhausen and Blake’s Dual Illustrations to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 30 87 The Dragon I Saw Rising Out of the Bog: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 32 89 Nature and Making Poems in West Cork: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 32 91 A Spiral, After Blake’s ‘Roughly sketched figures ascend the stairways of Paradise’ in Paradise, Canto 10 (lines 72–87) 94 Formal Conventions and Faith: After Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 24 (lines 32–110) 95 Horologes and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 24 (‘Dante and Beatrice in the Constellation of Gemini and the Sphere of Flame’) 98

Articulo mortis: Graffiti and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 26 Wunscherfüllung: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 28 (We’d Prefer to Walk than Dine Out) On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 30: ‘In the Empyrean Drinking at the River of Light’ and IMM C.D. Wright The White Rose: With a Glimmer of Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 31 Epilogue 1: Why Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy Are and Aren’t ‘Sites of Memory’ and/or ‘Real Environments of Memory’ Epilogue 2: Paths to the Wurmlinger Chapel Epilogue 3: Caha Mountain Revelations World’s End Notes Acknowledgements

101 104

106 108

111 116 118 120 121 123

The Bulldozer Poem Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they tear the earth’s skin – from earth they came. Bulldozers are made by people who also want new mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families. Bulldozers are observers of phenomena – decisions are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions. They will hear our pleas and struggle against their masters. Bulldozers slice & dice, bulldozers tenderise, bulldozers reshape the sandpit, make grrrriiing noises, kids’ motorskills. Bulldozers slice the snake in half so it chases its own tail, writing in front of its face. Bulldozers are vigorous percussionists, sounding the snap and boom of hollows caving in, feathers of the cockatoos a whisper in the roar. Bulldozers deny the existence of Aether, though they know deep down in their pistons, deep in their levers, that all is spheres and heavens and voices of ancestors worry at their peace. Bulldozers recognise final causes, and embrace outcomes that put them out of work. There’s always more scrub to delete, surely … surely? O continuous tracked tractor,

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O S and U blades, each to his orders, his skillset. Communal as D9 Dozers (whose buckets uplift to asteroids waiting to be quarried). O bulldozer! Your history! O those Holt tractors working the paddocks, O the first slow tanks crushing the battlefield. The interconnectedness of Being. Philosopher! O your Makers – Cummings and Caterpillar – O great Cat we grew up in their thrall whether we knew it or not – playing sports where the woodlands grew, where you rode in after the great trees had been removed. You innovate and flatten. We must know your worldliness – working with companies to make a world of endless horizons. It’s a team effort, excoriating an eco-system. Not even you can tackle an old-growth tall tree alone. But we know your power, your pedigree, your sheer bloodymindedness. Sorry, forgive us, we should keep this civil, O dozer! In you is a cosmology – we have yelled the names of bandicoots and possums, of kangaroos and echidnas, of honeyeaters and the day-sleeping tawny frogmouth you kill in its silence. And now we stand before you, supplicant and yet resistant, asking you to hear us over your war-cry, over your work ethic being played for all it’s worth. Hear us, hear me – don’t laugh at our bathos, take us seriously, forgive our inarticulateness, our scrabbling for words as you crush us, the world as we know it, the hands that fed you, that made you. Listen not to those officials who have taken advantage

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of their position, who have turned their offices to hate the world and smile, kissing the tiny hands of babies that you can barely hear as your engines roar with power. But you don’t see the exquisite colour of the world, bulldozer – green is your irritant. We understand, bulldozer, we do – it is fear that compels you, rippling through eternity,     embracing the inorganics of modernity.

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House Lights and A Refusal to Let Space and Place Fall to Story Programming Und flimmern sah ich, durch der Linde Raum, Ein mattes Licht, das im Gezweig der Baum Gleich einem mächt’gen Glühwurm schien zu tragen. Es sah so dämmernd wie ein Traumgesicht, Doch wuste ich, es war der Heimath Licht, In meiner eignen Kammer angeschlagen. —Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Im Moose Nightbirds saw at your brain when they come on too early. In so many rural places which are more than a dot, more than clusters of atoms in time and place pinpointed by narrative software. I am there, looking from home across paddocks, through fenceline trees, around and over granites. Line of sight not-so-military. I am there searching for a light in the distance. Pragmatic –  comforting – an indulgence of nearness. Too much rough surface to traverse after nightfall. The houselights at Jam Tree Gully coming back up from the southwest corner of the block, climbing towards a yellow verandah light diffused through acacias. Or back in my late teens, a few kilometres from the farmhouse, the lights half-cut by the undulations of paddocks, sliced-up by barbed wire. Jane Eyre is always topical in our house. And out of the moor she tracked her way to respite. Bertha Mason short-circuits in the climate. The light is wrong. The tastes and smells

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and sounds are wrong. She is made mad by the attic. The light from the attic of the Sears House in Gambier drew me home. An attic light is the light of secret work that whispers loudly. I followed the hidden light. I have walked through coconut palms on West Island tracking the moonlight deflected off the sea. I swam and cut my foot on coral. A red line running, infected. The light that restrains me is the memorialised light of Happy Valley. My brother in from shearing and the grinder spitting sparks in the shed. As I emerged from the great Dryandra forest, numbats at termites, their white stripes resisting and offsetting the barcode world I was hiding from. That light, a living light, was no lure, no guide. Rather, an answer. I had no belief in electricity, but the spirit that hung around it spread. This spread was no more space than the hot wire filament it grew from. It didn’t require a satellite with that delivery lift-off blast-effect on French Guinean jungle to mean something. I told its story as I stumbled across contour banks, stubble, home. Nightbirds can saw at your brain when they come on too early, and they did; distracting, diverting, but fading with each step closer.

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Psychogeography of a Temporary Locality: A Prelude –  Tangential to Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 1 for Russell West-Pavlov

I can only be here – there’s nowhere else I can be at present. The moon is not quite full and I wonder how much the conjectured ninth giant planet on its far-beyond-Pluto ellipse is influencing my sense of – here – in this moment. It is a cold moon. Up in the Schloss is a late nineteenth-century painting of the moon up-close. In telescopic detail. It might be termed ‘science art’ in the same way as Joseph Wright of Derby’s animal-torture painting might be. But only the minute insects trapped in layers of paint, and the animal parts that went into making the sizing and pigments make the moon a device of torment. A vivisector’s moon. A painted moon. Painted faces. Compound eyes. I am not of here and a few months (un)mapping won’t make it so. But I am building a mental picture, a lyrical self winding out into histories

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I can’t grasp, don’t want to mark me. They have. It’s not contained. I was here when a child playing medieval knights with the boy from primary school with ‘gigantism’. And at other times. I am temporary in the wheatbelt. I am temporary by the river reaching down to the coast and also back from the sea, slicing through the colony of Perth. Both sides of the river, both banks. I watched a single swan slide down the Neckar today and expected to see its mate mirroring its action on the far side of the island, on the river which is also the Neckar. I didn’t. If I was more than temporary it might have happened, or might happen. If not on a still bright day like today, soon, or earlier in life. As a child heading to school maybe. As Tim was doing today. His temporariness here is already different. He co-exists here. Each house and shop and person still or in motion is projected onto the planetarium inside my head. It’s a light show of the night sky even at midday. From the paths through botanical gardens, along cobbles in town, macadam in the suburbs.

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And up in the castle the artefacts of ancient worlds. Casting their light over the town, radiating through walls thick with resistance. Lion at the castle gate, almost eaten by stone. She-wolves with full teats in the Black Forest close, so close. A black cat, ‘Panther’, walked with a Pope-to-be among Lutherans. It’s all encoded and I search for the Swabian key. But I do not wish to unlock anything, floating free. I must be careful not to slip on ice going home in the dark. I will remember the Kohlmeise I saw leap from twig to twig, from frozen rose-hip to frozen rose-hip, as we trekked parallel to the fast-flowing Steinlach. Earlier.

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The Big Picture: Via Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 2 (God Image: ‘The Mission of Virgil’) The Angry God of This World & His Throne in Purgatory

Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate hangover from Stuttgart’s bad days obscures. The weather of modernity. The lady’s tattooed musculature is what comes of getting too close to the angry father. Decode. He’d been left behind. We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust, iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before dawn to catch the sun’s origins I realised I was looking into the core of purgatory. The house would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill, the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good and bad. Who is to choose? I don’t mind the walk,

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negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking pot-shots at you, it makes it impossible. I don’t use a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense. But this is Tübingen and we’re nearing our time: the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans, the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes. I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will rewrite ‘Half of Life’ upside down. The inversions of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn’t rained today but the Ammer River is still swift outside this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout. Behind the glissade of faces the goings home. Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth. Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship. I apologise for the distractions. Wondering while I write.

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Into Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 3 (lines 1–10), ‘Leave every Hope you who in Enter’ The gates were closed early, even before Kristallnacht, refusing entry as the non-Jewish academics marched through, enticed by the psychogeography of hills and mountains and rivers and forests, rivers and cloud. They didn’t call it Inferno. They knew a thousand-year Reich when they saw it. Their names are being called out now. Could they see what Blake saw, what Dante and Virgil confront, pass through: fire and ice burning as one, splinters of bloody glass, teeth in Plato’s cave? The silent majority reflect that the glitter in marble artefacts is like the snow baked hard on a deadly cold day. Today is such a day. There won’t be many of them, which is semantics. When the hammers hit the windows there was mental disturbance among the silent onlookers (‘tears behind curtains’) who weren’t the target. The muscular

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Blakean bodies in diaphanous robes of our heroes, Dante and Virgil (demi-hero), hands lifted in bewilderment, might originate a different narrative. The circles are all out of kilter (so much is) and cartoon figures are running amok. Depiction. The cartoonist’s leeway. News from ‘home’: a violent video game, Survival Island 3, has been taken down from Apple’s Apps Store. The game claims, ‘Beware of angry animals, especially if you don’t have any weapon. At night, there is really dangerous, try to hide somewhere … Hunt animals or grow plants –  you have to eat something. You also have to fight Aboriginals – you invaded their home!’ Newspapers deploy ‘sic erat scriptum’ with abandon and delight. Points scored for killing ‘Indigenous Australians’. How many who sign the petitions to delete this offence have ‘invaded their home’? Sic. Unravel red earth tints. All ye who enter. Here. Lock and load. Remember those gunslits in wheatbelt stone walls. My damaged eye so close to losing sight – one day, one day soon – has just been transfixed unwittingly by an arc-welder across the creek. All that glare

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out there a distraction. Overdetermined? The trees on the threshold twist and thrive despite the fallout. A nearby town holds Haigerloch Castle Atomkeller museum. A replica reactor. A Nazi fantasy of fission. Saved at the bell. Through the portal the Acheron looks like bubbling tar. As a picturesque, it has its symmetry. Goebbels called it. What does ‘it’ attach to, you who in enter? Beer-swilling braggarts. A uranium cube favoured by Heisenberg – a teabag for its time – found by the river by kids dipping their toes. It’s going naked in the parks, it’s a healthy constitution. It’s the travel urge and home and folk to welcome you back. I am grateful for the Talmud in German in the apartment where we are staying. Inscriptions aren’t just about interpretation. In the town of Narrogin I well recall the twisted, thick-stemmed wisteria growing up verandah posts, the heaven & hell purple blowing out even where such co-ordinates aren’t on any map, don’t fit a theology or belief-system. But colouration speaks, and we know its import.

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A Bat in the Conservatory: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 4    The forest, say I, of thick-crowded ghosts and    After the voice had ceased and quiet was,     Four mighty shades I saw approaching us;     Semblance had they nor sorrowful nor glad.    To say to me began my gracious Master:     ‘Him with that falchion in his hand behold,     Who comes before the three, even as their lord.    That one is Homer, Poet sovereign;     He who comes next is Horace, the satirist;     The third is Ovid, and the last is Lucan. —trans. Longfellow

Verdigris of rain thickens dusk and against the glass sliding door to the conservatory where Tracy says she sees a bird flying, desperate shadow-puppet. Not possible, I say, the room has been sealed to the outside for weeks and we have been in and out only from inside the inside. A corruption of light from vestiges through skylights?

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No, it’s there again, she says. And we switch the light on to see a bat spiral away from the beam to grip the lintel, wade through web, pegging body length, dragging with claws the rough concrete. Quick, light off to protect its vulnerable eyes – I go in and open the door to outer limits and then step back inside the inside – other side of the glass – and we watch its wings blacker than night take to the aperture, open into garden and fields and hedges. A Leisler’s bat, I am sure – we got a close look without being acquisitive, I hope. We conjecture a bat that has hibernated through winter, high on the stone and concrete wall the conservatory abuts. Camouflage. To wake and find no way out of the too-bright cave it got stuck in. Living on slaters and spiders, the odd moth when it stretched hungry and weak. Flitter from limbo: closed system opened: Dante’s world skated over, the thin ice of glass cracking and gaping, walls permeable, and those shadows of strangers passing by on the street come into focus: he looks like Homer, and he like Horace and Lucan and Ovid. And those daughters of Minyas up in the rafters, daylight swept away by vespers of membranous wings stretched taut to sully light over fields and mountains where the worshippers of Dionysus thrive – bending and twisting speed-limit signs to bring cars fast and abrupt into the village – those rude

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rites reverberating into the tympanum of observatory; or the frothing souls of the eager taking Communion, clinging to the ceiling – the bells, the bells – furtive and clandestine; and so, the bat, freed from the closed woods of the conservatory, that room hungry for sun when rain makes the peninsula green and yellow, the sounds of floating and wandering and agitated souls floundering and bouncing over the glass, deflecting and reflecting, caught as the opening offers a way outdoors. From sleep that never seemed to stop – the nightmare of waking to sleep – the closed system to bring us all into line, the prayers we test our limits by, find ourselves within.

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The VOC Gluttony of Spraycan Graffiti on the Outskirts of Tübingen and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 6 Where the railside allotments neat as pathology stir slightly in their late-winter yearnings: ground broken, neat heaps of compost, sheds in order snuggling their toxins and seed. The path between railway line and these little arcadias, these hope-zones, blooms with tags and abuse, an exploding spectrum of spraypaint calligraphy. An entrée, a prelude, a bloody carpet to the main show: the wall as canvas – okay – angst needs to go somewhere, but then the trees, with their industrial-strength coats of many colours, don’t need such assistance, would eke out curtailed lives without having their organics disrupted – the volatile fun-parlour of decoration – and all the while, Rottweilers barking down at passers-by further up the street, and sleet blown sharp into the faces

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of distressed onlookers, souls lapped up from the stilled sea of acetone, toluene and xylene, atomised conformist rebelling but only as far as the factory, as mining companies, logging companies, artistic feeding of the very rich, contraindicating in Blake’s studio (the fumes he breathed), heady with angels, heady with clique approval, solvent pigment formulaic ecology killspeak liberating spraypacks dumped in their dozens on the deadgrass fringe, strewn in rainbow glory – praise O praise the form of the glorious can, the compliant design and technology – outré and outlaw, dogs trained to take a bite out of the flesh, fed with the dirt of the machine, being seen from a train window: ‘Look at me, Mum, look at me!’ Where the railside allotments neat as pathology stir slightly in their late-winter yearnings the balaclavad graffiti-artists move in: curved lettering mimicking summer growth. Planters. Servants of industry.

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Cerberus in the Highlands Overlooking the Sea: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 6 At the Y of the road I hear the yap of a small dog followed by the roar of larger dogs. Which is not to demean the small dog, who is giving his all. But three dogs thinking with one head and excited by a meeting on the farm’s edge, their ‘owners’ caught up in cow-talk and casting aspersions like bad weather, will make for the walker to assert a new hierarchy. I am usually followed by dogs, not bitten by them. When I say, ‘Fuck off!’ I am talking to their ‘made in the image of ’ commanders, their ‘starting to look like you’ companions of the order, as much as insisting they ‘cease and desist’. Laughter crackles out of the cowshed and Cerberus is called back. Public road through private property. Muddy trails where cows are walked between fields and dairy. I am fed mud by a van driving past fast and close on the deadly narrow road, the squeezed public space. The van is driven by one who will inherit a farm and his name might be Virgil. Why not? He has swords and ploughshares as heritage, he’s heard of the Táin, though it pertains to cows far in the north,

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he’s been drunk on many a balmy afternoon, has watched bees in the heather. His van divides me from the dogs, who under other circumstances might well have been my friends: we could bark at the furious sea together, we could chew the grass. A vegetable man, their eating me shows they are roughly omnivorous. Someone is laughing loud and I am alone.

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Crossing to Long Island and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 7 This was no hell journey and the seadog shook with excitement at getting back home: ‘She likes nothing better than setting foot on the island again’. But from Long Island Channel you are impelled to look back up onto the Colla Highlands, up into a sky you’ve never seen from this angle, this shifting array of viewpoints. The difference is illuminating and shattering and awareness is its own hell in filling in blanks which are endless. The chasm between the goat islands is a Scylla and Charybdis negotiable by a small boat at high tide, but terminal in furious seas. So in this liberation, in the brief conversation with the wild woman of the sea, you lay out your theory of Aisling displaced from myth, of a pragmatic take on the vision of passage between land and sea. I say to her, I have written Long Island so many times from rocks and headland, from heights and roads. And now I am crossing over; this was no hell journey and the seadog shook with excitement.

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Crossing the Irish Sea and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Cantos 7 and 8 At sea again. Past the harbour light, headland’s hold broken. Ink flows like BP’s sponsorship of The Arts. Artefacts. The ship lolls through phosphorescence. I hear gentle belllike tinkling in the closet and think of Tracy’s big bells in her Tübingen poems, and I think of Slessor’s elegy, the haunting harbour bells. Source. It sends me mad. I pull open the door to find metal coathangers, les extrêmes se touchent, touch, striking as windchimes as the nightswell rocks. I separate them, the hangers, three spread evenly across the beam, but the swell lifts and they find each other again. Resounding. The cabin’s mini-fridge is stocked with two oranges and an apple. An astrology. And so we return, synecdoche of oars to the wavelets, last white horses hunted down.

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Rougher. Stars steady through portholes to build by, currents feeding sepia wash. Deep below, trucks and cars chained down. And where the wind blows to collect the gifts of Sellafield, feeder, and Easter 1916 celebrations still restless in Dublin. Shimmering act of ongoing violence. The Simpson’s three-eyed fish is triumphant in its misery, salmon finding the sea, spumes of radiant spray rising over the decks, the strands, the rocky pincers. O glory of Technetium 99 in ranks of seaweed, 3000 microsieverts exposé for each and every soul, damned discharge reprocessing phytoplankton O radionuclides in sediment O plutonium caesium Sellafield sell a field Seinfeld (to catch your attention, rerun by rerun). Phlegyas reckons it will be a calm crossing with distant light dragging us on, the towers of New York splendid in conceptualist sails raised and full, twin moons smothering with nurture, wealth bubbling to the surface through the hot goo

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just as sea scouts and yachts on the Canning when I walked the white sands of childhood, slush pouring out of the drains, the exquisite mire.

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Seventh Circle: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 12 Artificially inseminated, the cow kicks the shed and its unborn swings in its fluid. We wake to bellowing, calves snatched from their nursing mothers. You all know the story, and let it drop, like birth. Up on its hind legs, the bull-man lets out its yawp, fashions a reply. The rocky field is viridian as is the atmosphere. There is no sky as such. The red hoods of the damned disguised as willo’-the-wisps, violent tractor-marks in thick mud. And so I walk, and my feet ache, and the heights encourage Fastnet Rock to rush me. An outcrop has been jackhammered to chips that tumble down into fields with the pasturing cows, out of their winter sheds. It’s so peaceful where the raven had been strung up under the death-tree, ruminating. The cows getting over it all, as if memory is not part of their living. Be generous, remember for them. Go on. I see the bull-man ranging the sandstone walls, rapist eyes furious with their conditional analogies. We walkers steer clear of it, our minds on breathing. There’s no time for mythologising out of context.

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A Middle-Spotted Woodpecker Sounds Out a Warning As I Reflect Over Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 13 High up in a plane tree by the fast-flowing Steinlach, a lesser-spotted woodpecker works at the bark. It will break into and prise out and I will be drawn to the sound, and look up. Now I notice the tree. I notice fully. I notice that it is shaped as a human is shaped. There’s a nudity, a human proportion I can delineate. But I am not that social, though I shudder when a dog is led to its base to sniff and piss. But so many other dogs have pissed there before, why wouldn’t it? You lead a dog to a tree and it will piss. The woodpecker is focussed and drives home its point. For the human-tree it might be accoutrement, another benefit of consumer society. The tree, on the verge of budding as the sun tugs at its skin, laps up the attention? The woodpecker is incapable of smiling. It wears other emoticons. The tree is bleeding. I see it. We might blame it for its own downfall as we blame old trees on the Neckar’s island for ‘approaching their time’, giving up their ghosts. Preventative action: the mass chopping-down that has dominated winter.

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The season. This violence we make against ourselves, sucking in the best breath we can get, hacking away with despair. Help the lesserspotted woodpecker to be as it will be, not subsumed into our harpy.

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Buzzards Over the Österberg: On Blake’s Vision of Dante’s Hell, Canto 18 (‘Ditch of Flatterers’) There is no science in observing a pair of buzzards high over the Österberg hill. And there’s no separating there being an ancient eroded mountain in my head with a pair of wedge-tailed eagles gliding high over. Both high-grounds are spiked with telecommunications. I’ve just been made aware that drones fly over here on their way from Stuttgart to Africa. They are to liberty as the buzzards and eagles are to rodents, rabbits and marsupials. All those design correlations, inspirations translated and rearranged as ordnance. The buzzards swing out over the Neckar, which gathers pace and phosphates and polymers and nitrates and surfactants and the joyous traces of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, also dibenzofurans and luscious polychlorinated biphenyls. This is all in a buzzard’s survey, in an eagle’s eye, chain-lettered through the hierarchy of who’s in and who’s out. Operating without flight plans, they run the risk of being grounded. Authorities – O Authorities! – rest on your laurels. It’s complex science. The word ‘pollution’ is nasty and lost in the mire. We pinch our noses and squint: out of the glare, buzzards drop and race the obliquity. I search

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for my bearings. The institutions that no longer want us are homes for mining billionaires and dot-com entrepreneurs lusting after uranium and ‘development’ and the newest new technologies. They aspire to shine at the matrix of culture and history, to bestow tax deductible ‘legacies’. They are building our future. They are everywhere. Their sediments are in the Neckar, they are in the Swan, they are the red dust of the Pilbara. And still the prey-birds soar high then drop. Quadricopters – sudden! – throw them off course. They haven’t filed a flight plan; they too are eagle-eyed. I am lured from this room to the outdoors. Soon the hunters will be in the forests being outdoorsmen. Many boars will be slaughtered. I will go outdoors and watch the buzzards high over the Österberg, and keep in my head the eagles above Walwalinj, their numbers diminishing. That’s the language we have for them. My head, a treatment plant.

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Fasnet and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 20 Witches with heads on their backs fixating on those marching behind, luring them on up into the Old Town. Old Wehrmacht helmets with horns, skin-greaves and hooves, the fools march without giving way. The guilds ply their trades. When the Duke banned ‘pagan mischief ’ he held back an outburst that has students festooned with fox furs, heads lolling, to band together and shout-sing, ‘Sieg Heil’. That’s what’s frightening. Not the witches. Trees in the botanical garden have been scaled – bare branches snapped, scratch marks on limbs. Mud spread over paths from the struggle to get a grip on trunks. Brass instruments shudder through bent streets, drums compel families, children imitating. I saw Manto with green hair. She was gasping for air, her Geiger counter in the red. Those clustered around her hooted and shouted, driven to a frenzy

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by her example of a good time. The fate of a war prize. Sealed in a room I can hear their ranting. For the fools, those outside their club are aliens, even enemies. Malevolence always knows this future. But the sheer pleasure of letting loose, of indulging fat beneath skins, brings a smile to children’s faces. Who begrudges? Many cigar-ends smoulder on the snow-melt streets. Visitors feel they are having an authentic Swabian experience. This is culture. The bells can be deafening on Sunday.    Look forward, not back?

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Cybernetic Gestures from the Max Planck Institute, Tübingen: Skewiff to Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 21 (lines 46–56) for Anton, and Andrée Gerland

der Drache vergleicht der Natur Gang und Geist und Gestalt. —Hölderlin

Macaques. ‘Old World monkeys’. A Nobel prize winner for literature also from Mauritius. The headgear inserted into the brain cavity. From pillar to post. Head-fucked by surgery fetishists – the porn ‘scientists’ didn’t want you to see. Perspex life-coffins. Literacy of God-lust. Shiny barred cages to make it all easier. One could cast an image, like an aspersion, film-feed. Neuroscientist: death camp modernist. Lab technician: jack-off-all-trades. To perceive the neural mechanism. ‘Purport’. Probe object reason perception the common good. Who violates no violation recorded. Official. It is not a question. Response noted.

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Touching a brain is a quotidian actuality, reach in deep. Implant. Cared for caregivers. Such stress behaves such behaviours to map a displacement. Where their geography locates. Topography. Tree sense. Tall buildings. Single bounds. Flame out. Head rest. Probe that doesn’t take, to wide-eye the cage largesse, you’re collared, mate: but no three square meals a day. Precedent. Just one that didn’t quite take or take enough. Sterility? In their gowns they all look quite fit. Cult of outdoors when leisure timing. The breakdown of macaque speech. Loss of external referents. Vocab drop-out. Celan noted the loss of language. Such legality. We should face consequences. This activist, this call and response. This treason against knowledge?     Jail me. Go on, jail me.

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It Says So Much More … Out of Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 21 (lines 118–124) Down outside this window, running the length of a metal barrier dividing the riparian from carpark, are the spraypainted words, ‘Nazionalismus raus aus den Köpfen’. I too want nationalism out of my head. This is a flicker of hope. This is no bird imitating the sound of machinery and being ‘exquisitely poetic’ in its protest, nor is it a workshopping of text and slogan and graffiti, rather, it is a call of necessity where the thin river flows past the university, and its history of bending knowledge to fit the bill. Not just this university, but all universities. Accompanied by gleeful devils in their splendid red livery, the poets of the institution hang heads and compose (themselves) silently. Hell is a rowdy place. Art needs silence to transmute, apparently. All the identifiers of belonging, of the particularised collective

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warp with the magnetism of the weavers of history and culture and borders. The flensing tools are alpenstocks to assist in walking the great outdoors. In talking of a draught of sulphurous fresh air they are playing you for all your taxes are worth. Not wanting to be preached at, the poets continue to cogitate silently. Water flows north past the dead grass. I am watching it from the west. A topography of nationalism the pundits want suggested but not labelled. Identification is the pleasure of the twitcher. Look, a rare species of Devil! It’s all littered in the half-life of psychoanalysis. Winter poems where winter won’t take. ‘Sprachlos und kalt’. But I want to know if the solitary swan is of the silent sort. It just doesn’t speak. It does something else, something much more voluble when there’s no longer ice to keep it out. The devils are melting everything, all things for miles around. It’s too industrial to mention modes of transportation. We are walking, walking. So, painted word: ‘Nazionalismus raus aus den Köpfen’. All that comes out of a can.

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The devils are acrobatic and grand and determined to revive Germania.     Dare I say, Resist them?

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Australia’s New White Paper on Defence and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 21: Devils Proffering Protection Smug as pulling an all-night session cooking the books, a half a trillion is sucked out of the country over half a decade, all those zeroes, all that decimation. A regional power. A projection of force. Consolidation behind borders. Balance. ‘De-coupling from economy’ so fall or fail, the percentage will stay steady for Defence. Horns and pointed tails, they get drones. With drones you can go anywhere through the three worlds. North or south, east or west. Investment. Capability. Readiness. This is already less of a poem because it does more than suggest. It is not allowed to do its own work. Language is the loser here. The fluted gowns of Dante and Virgil can’t bring enough solemnity or joie de vivre to this unique and happy moment. The musculature of devils is something addictive, awe-inspiring. At first, they use reasonable language, but if challenged they smell of burning and so do you. This is the acid used in manufacture, and it’s the by-products of Innovation, Industry and Co-operation. No use resorting to personal insults as the spreadsheets are filled in. Electronic warfare. Flesh-hooks

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new punctuation marks. Think of it this way: a novelist, one who has no empathy with the bush in any real way whatsoever, stays for a few weeks among the parrots and eucalypts, and captures a bit of the stereotypical for his page. The renditions of urban culture or colonialism or small towns need rounding out. He is writing a White Paper on habitation and nature. The edges where, say, a possum rubs against the tin roof, or pokes its nose into food stores, or pisses through the ceiling. Or maybe the essentialism of parrotology, its scope for global renovation, a redemptive unleashing on the think tanks of the world. Policy. Inspiration. Defending the wealth of words none of us can feel whole. They are sieved through the orb-weaver’s web, through Defence Department computers. That not-quite blood red Blake gets. A watering-down. Sickly. Water spitting on the barbecue hotplate. Redemption for the Australian factory floor now home-made cars are gone. Rackety cockatoos.

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The Voice of Malacoda and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 23 and recalling the Dead Kennedys’ ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off ’ Malacoda and Cagnazzo – Evil Tail and Nasty Dog – approach down the path as you wait to collect your son from the Gymnasium. Evil Tail is a fully fledged skinhead, Nasty Dog is still metamorphosing, though the phone-mirror shows inside as much as out while he peers into its screen. They catch sight of me, anomaly, and would force me onto the bitumen, but I stay fixed to the spot, waiting. Crows are gathering in the still-bare trees and Evil Tail looks across the road at Tim waiting to cross, then turns to me, head glinting in the winter burn, and says, viciously, in Swabian, I will escort you to the bridge. There is no bridge where he’s pointing, and I say quietly but furiously, ‘Fuck off you skinhead bastard.’ I regret it immediately, and he laughs, and his boots lift him on leather wings high over the town, Nasty Dog in tow, and a filthy halfformed snow rains down briefly. As a foreigner, I can only be wrong. And though he can’t cross over into the circle of the general public, he laughs from his

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elevated position at the heads-to-the-ground citizens encased in their heavy winter jackets, stuck in cars seeing no evil hearing no evil and speaking plenty of evil: this reality of the contemporary. Evil Tail jokes with Nasty Dog about the election posters affixed to verticals: they dive down to inscribe with swastikas, draw penises on the smile of a female candidate. I ask Tim how his day has gone and he asks, ‘What was that about?’ I say, ‘Never react, never respond to incitement.’ The path opens out to the Steinlach River where elegant tree branches become ledges under which we might shelter.

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Resolve: ‘Stop the Boats’ and the ‘Misty-eyed’ and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 25 Last Wednesday, a 23-year-old Iranian refugee, Omid Masoumali, died two days after setting himself alight at Nibok refugee settlement on Nauru, in the presence of representatives from the United Nations. Video footage shot on a mobile phone, which Guardian Australia has chosen not to publish, shows him dousing himself in accelerant and shouting: “This is how tired we are; this action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it any more.” —The Guardian, 3 May 2016i Snakeman snaketalk snakeoil salesman to cure the misty-eyed to bring the serpents to the apron, grinning under the proscenium arch of television, to smile when smiling is required. You’re to blame in your encouragement, he says, he being many people in the same circle, all with scales and smiles and citing national security as they steal platitudes from each other. Couldn’t give a fig, another says. The arts can take a vulgar gesture in its stride. O Manus island infection in military plenitude, Australia lurking behind the foliage, eye in eye out, flaming sea rising to swallow an island whole and out of mind-site, broad-spectrum antibiotic for the ‘not detained’ in the light of third countries not too comfortable not too inviting so life might be viewed

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as punishment to say nothing of the self-esteem of those who reach deep into soil with fewer creature comforts, this estate development of wetlands so migratory birds have nowhere to land, to nest. The thieves eye each other off – as the CIA reached in deep to Australia’s identity so too Australia reaches deep into Papua New Guinea’s. Comes up short. Manipulation snakeman snaketalk snakeoil salesmen to island holiday encirclement lever poverty into affirmation: extension of will, taxation trumpcard to oil the waters, children made regional but unsettled – we’ll have none of New Zealand no comfort no invitation to backdoor no loosening of the sheer magnetism of inferno. Misty-eyed we make screen-savers of images, children’s faces replaced by sheets of words, ‘Take us from hell’, ‘We are human Just like others’, the cadences hardened to emoticon crying behind bars. Agnello Brunelleschi grows claws. Scales over eyes busy with the ergonomics of containment – even the guards break down. Tells you something, tells you dead foxes strung from wire, a shark strapped to a bull bar, longhorns stencilled on ute windscreens, are brazen and uncouth and culturally particular but weirdly national in their aspirations. It suits us all for the symbolism to be so grotesque we can assign the camp-guard position to others. Noise-cancelling headphones. Rose-coloured glasses. Not the tools of Dante glad to see the snakes, but your

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middle-of-the-road voter, your pulsating and omnivorous ‘middle-class’, eating all in its path, succumbing to type 2 diabetes, taking a day off work with flu, eating too much salt. Listen. Words. All that energy put into controlling them. Try: ‘This is how tired we are; this action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it any more.’ And then, the burning. Country of fire. Of entire towns eaten by flame. The facts of renewal and rebirth and seed-opening tended as hard-sell. Burns unit. We let the snakepeople douse our fears with their words. They think snake and hate snake. They let humans and snakes die accordingly. Snakeoil for the flames. Snaketalk. They quash words of tiredness and exhaustion. Words extracted by torture. Bleeding heart-burst. Word-burst. Hang-man. Fire-words. There are zones around Australia the informed won’t swim in for fear of sea-snakes: yellow-bellied and red-bellied, olive sea-snake and banded sea krait. Boats ‘turned back’ to join the snakes. Boats swallowed by sea-snakes fed on particles of plastic. Quota conservation. A clean-skin census. Snakeskin boots.     Resolve of tooth and nail and claw.

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How Can You Write a Love Poem When Reactors are Equivocal and Forests are Vanished? Contemplating Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 26 As the last primeval forest in Europe awaits its fall, wood beetle the propaganda coup for Polish capitalists that would leave Irish forest-haters envious. As the bison creep to their last corner of Białowieża they know shape and map are investments of the need to know, keep the mind occupied, fill in the gap between birth and death. In the mountains not far from Dublin up where the Hell Fire Club peddled its own circles of punishment, heroes of the tyranny drank whiskey and hot butter, cavorted with the Devil. And all about, the woods shrouded their comings and goings, their floating in flaming bubbles over wandering attentions, the desire for extreme sports; just who will shoot the last of the beasts? It’s entangled in ways you can’t neaten out or even shade into subtext: this odyssey into revelation and extermination, the felling

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of the Hell Fire woods because a storm knocks down a few branches, splits trunks: log the lot to make safe for the public. We’re loving it. And as the virgin-hunters snuff out those of us going from A to B and back again, those of us thinking about the emergence of daffodils, those of us marvelling over the lurid colours of dawn or sunset, the calmative moments of a sleep we’d hope to wake from. And their islands of Circe, their Lotus Eaters, their brotherly simpatico bonding exorcisms of self. As the flash and burn ends shape and map of body, so the unravelling continues. And in this I have to declare my love of you – total, absolute – and my love of all that lives, all that grows through life. And so, here I stand protesting the nuclear ‘energy’ cycle, and here I stand protesting from cradle to grave, and here I stand shouting out that reactors infiltrated and sabotaged and mapped and reshaped will be the nirvana of those who hate the living, hate their own living lives, and would scorch paths they have trodden. Can I love them? Can I turn the other cheek, can I keep my mouth shut as some guide acts as go-between, eliciting the stories of their grandeur

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and wow, their wiliness and subterfuge, their deathwish? Some of you separate the issues, compartmentalise, allocate roles to other players, distribute responsibility. Or abdicate in favour of a new phone, or a new car, or deny them and covet inwardly. I understand when you claim they’re just tools, part of your pragmatics. Keeping up with it all. Sleep not in the power vacuum, dreams unsteady while the wi-fi router flickers near your sleepy heads. The woodman swinging his axe against the wolf. Red Riding Hood photoshopped into foliage. But love. Love shy and incomplete. Love without demonstration. Love the story. I am no better for this. I do not grow faster and more lushly bathed in radiation of fairy tales, their origins deep in the forests, burning across rocky outcrops, heading down down into the valley deep where no one goes.

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Denkmal: Tübingen This won’t be held by a template. No Blake, no Dante, no Hölderlin can grasp it. If I had Hebrew I would write a sonnet. I would take the few words of Hebrew Dante uses and liberate them from their model. Nothing can prepare one for the impact of the site, a monument to absence. An apartment sits on the site at the Synagogenplatz, just up from the hydroelectric plant on the Neckar River, water falling fast through, lower lower. And thirty mute swans facing upstream, still as the quiet expected on a Sunday afternoon. When Nazis came with their backers, they burned the synagogue from the flank of the Österberg, a flurry of activity down the Gartenstrasse, the Jewish community made to pay –

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literally pay – for the destruction. Some critics say Dante was above the medieval Christian habit of distorting Jews, of blaming them for sins of a material world. Absence speaks louder? Reading the names of people driven from their homes, or murdered in the orderly buildings of the camps, names cut into rusty metal plate, the fountain dry with winter, I collapse all history of the town to this site. As creating the university in the late-fifteenth century, the founders ensured Jews were driven away, separating part of their own identity, the answers to purpose and eternity. And to repeat the crime. Red as any tint in a Blake illustration. Even the songbirds alighting from the peak shimmer and blur in the absorption. As after the war retired Nazis favoured the monastic village of Bebenhausen, god and the hunt,

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great antlers on barns and over front doors, bristling with their mix of charm and luck and bloodlust. .

And that was only last week. This Denkmal, which so many pass without registering. The massacre sites of the world are in constant communication: the sparks that pass between are the essences of all prayer thrown about, all prayer left hanging in the air waiting to collect somewhere. To pray without naming death?

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Cemetery X: In the Name of Medical Science their Bodies Were Rent: Through Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 28 In cemetery X the body parts donated to science. And the body parts 1933 to 1945 made into science. Science. Murdered bodies from whom knowledge was extracted through till 1990. Afterdeath experience. I will go to cemetery X to memorialise. To acknowledge our common humanity. Resist eternity as torment.

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What has been done, is still being done with the gleanings, the information? Plate after plate of names. And the plaque of 1990, denouncing the science that foments loss of humanity. Installed then decorated by swastikas. Town of tagging. All those outside regime, embodiment of the West, its apogee: torn apart to be remade in a laboratory, cut down by the scalpel. X marks the spot. The innocent from Inferno, hacked up by an angel.

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On Signing a Petition Against the French Nuclear Power Plant Teetering On a Faultline and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 29 The Fessenheim nuclear plant is ancient and extremely dangerous: It is located in an earthquake zone, the fuel rods are little protected outside the reactor shell, and the spent cooling water is partly released, radioactive, into the Rhine. There have been repeated accidents. The most serious was made public only through investigations by the Süddeutsche Zeitung: in 2014 an inundation incapacitated all sensors and even the electric emergency shutdown. The reactor could only be “blind” shut down. This was the first time in Western Europe that one had to resort to this extreme measure. —Translated from the German of the Petition (as sent to me by activists) This is a signing-off, of sorts. It might be out of sequence, it might be a harking back, but it’s also a farewell, a shift in the temporal, a replanting of presence. So we place our mark on the petition. Should it go under, it’s not that far away. Atomic closeness. Smothering familiarity of the invisible. Across hills and forests, mountains and rivers, the ripe plains. Ubiquitous. But this wasn’t how I’d planned to write out, this flaming, this parody of another canticle. Rather, I was going to say how for the first time today, on a walk

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I’ve done twice a day five days a week for almost three months, I noticed a rose sculpted in metal on a wrought-iron gate. It was painted white and in the sunlight with the Steinlach rushing past with the weight of the Swabian Range behind it, it glowed. That seemed something. But it also reminded me of graves in small wheatbelt cemeteries where painted white flowers peel under the paint-stripping sun. And of ‘lonely graves’ with wooden crosses in fragments of remnant bush, just a particle of white paint (where did it come from) on the crossbeam, saying nothing. The not telling is no official lie. Not in the same way. Not in the way the French authorities hide all in a state of emergency, in their energy self-sufficiency, in their atomic future ‘prosperity’. The spirit of the Commune has radiation sickness and no one is populating the well-lit barricades. The slow annihilation of leaks is not as rousing, not as noble? I cannot write what I was going to write without this leaking in, the scene seemingly changing but really being one and the same. If I describe a small bird in a tall budding tree, it’s under the sentence of Fessenheim and its companions. If I celebrate the sounds of Turkish music coming from the heart of the old

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Botanical Gardens last night as I walked through in the shadows, music boisterous and warm out of the trees, it will be under the jurisdiction of Fessenheim and its companions. And downstream at Neckarwestheim, a couple of megabecquerels of Hell leaking back in time but remaining omnipresent. We go about our business. Some standing by, others passing through. So with this, I sign the petition. I breathe its everywhere.

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A Call for the Fragmentation of Language: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 31 (Nimrod, Babel) The bats wouldn’t go back to the restored attic of the great castle. They tasted the poison of conservation and went elsewhere. But they returned years later to take up residence in the cellar during their breeding season, the warmer months. Some like to think these bats shelter in Swabian forest-caves during the winter, males out dreaming alone, isolated. Bat numbers in the castle are diminishing; darkness-trees cut down in front of their window, the scientific monitoring of their presence. Overexposed. There are many theories. But we read a poster in three languages – German, English, and Arabic – welcoming refugees from Syria and it has the solidarity and strength of a single language. It speaks presence and unity in difference. Many more languages on the same poster would have made it even more resonant. Welcome proliferates on the tongue. It is ecstatic. Listen. There is no consonance here, but I would like to think that all people can come here to cherish these bats’ existence.

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Bats hugging terrain as they sweep through darkness – it’s not my affair, but I am happy to be aware of their presence, their great complexity.     All Gods welcome!

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A Psychogeography of Tübingen’s Swan Lake: In Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Hell, Canto 34 The Anlagenesee looks like an internal organ – a cross between a kidney, a liver and a pancreas. Today it is largely frozen-over, with schoolkids from more elite schools trying to break through to water. The resident pair of Höckerschwäne are walking on water, finding breakthroughs and dipping. One elevated, one semi-submerged. They are not Lucifer. One has weed in its mouth. With its mate, it makes only two mouths, two beaks to test fecundity. There are other water-birds, but they are skittering to the centre to escape the snowballs, sticks and rocks that are being hurled at the opaque glass, the dull mirror. The recast of the meadow nymph crowning the water nymph, lips pursed, mouths sealed, indifferent to kids assaulting them, swans’ pity. Outside, tangentially, the Neckar barely moves around its island – so still, it vacillates between solid and liquid. It is highly reflective of welloff houses and bare trees, a polished mirror. It holds no devils between states, though it will

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have its own darknesses to match the frozen lake. It is primarily an opaque day, but more revealing for it. A Graureiher knows better, and heads for a tributary, the Steinlach, where in a few minutes you will see it grip an obscure perch – a rock ripped by rapid downflow from the Swabian mountains. It will cantilever, and momentarily open its long, sharp beak which will remain empty. It will offer nothing to the liberation of a residual Entartete Kunst, nor for three mouths, those three mouths committed to delivering eternal punishment. One child is attempting to walk out on the thin ice, and before I can find the German words to say, ‘Get back, it’s dangerous,’ his friend collars him and drags him back. The swans don’t retreat, but turn together, come closer, and whisper: ‘Stay out of this, it’s not your medium.’ I tell Tim such ice won’t let you speak again – it mutes and muffles and fuses light to darkness once and for all. We round this artificial lake every day. It will be harrowed by the sun. Mute swans can be angels if need be, returning to God? Piercing gazes from those organs of veneration. Wide white wings spread to snow-angel the lake. Lessons in physics, geography, biology, ethics.

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coda A former SS medical orderly who ‘served’ at Auschwitz will go on trial for mass murder. Age ninety-five. Dementia. In living death-memory.

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Blackbirds and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 1 Is it a mundane thing? Has it been hackneyed, done to death? Is it lyrical overload, stating the obvious, going over old ground? Is it boring, passé, redundant, much ado about nothing? So I have stars in my eyes, four stars that are like splinters of the sun doing its spring fling, the bloomage and uncoilings, and blackbirds eruptive, everywhere. I got the hint at twilight two nights ago, walking alongside the Ammer – the noise! Rowdy, rapturous, agitated, downright territorial, loaded, passionate. The path is factored into the awakening, but it’s still intrusive. And today, walking alongside the Steinlach, I see a nest in a tree just over a hedge-fence. A pair of blackbirds rowdy, rapturous, agitated, downright territorial, loaded, passionate. Tempered as metal click beetles from Royal Show bags when I was twelve, not much younger than Tim. I show him on the return journey from school. We are subtle and careful and still the nest-builders let rip. Fair enough.

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We were only taking a peek. Not too close. But fair enough, fair enough. And a stray strand of old grass that has survived the winter floats down and touches my forehead. All the shit of Inferno is wiped momentarily clean. Uranium won’t be mined, reactors won’t leak, coal won’t be burnt, sea levels won’t rise, creatures won’t join the red list then waver and vanish. The intensity of blackbirds is omnipotent. They rule the roosts.

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Winged Storm Boat and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 2 It snowed on the domes of Gabriel last night. Orange weather alert and the roads are flooding in the low places, in the ravines. I see a large seabird come in over the islands into the bay, come in with wings folded to make a boat of itself, shimmering with the needles of rain, tossed about on the boiling waters. Visitors are gathered along the shore, waiting for guidance, soaked to the skin, their hair wild and electric. The Neolithic copper workings on the mountain flicker out, telling us it’s all anniversarial. Someone is calling into the howling southerly, defining who’s in and who’s out of the revolution. Rant but don’t mention power source or hardware. The storm is a strip of loose film in the old projector, flapping light about as if it’s to spare. Someone’s stanzas are going to be value-added with authenticity, brilliance. Read descriptions of the effect of Krupp artillery on the field in Zola’s The Debacle, rearranging patriotism and industry like intent. I want no part of a violent light, its shock to the system. Rather, I won’t comply. I won’t turn up at the polling booth, I won’t shop at its outlets. This injection of divine light as the world rocks everywhere all year round. I forget the calendar, I forget the name of the ground I stand on, sea black at my ankles.

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Sun Doesn’t Fully Illuminate the Harbour: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 4 A grey heron looks awkward stalking the loading bay of the fish factory, but it isn’t. We see it vanish, and hear it walking the metal boards inside the delivery van: picking and choosing, the day’s catch. A cold wind from the south is premonition, and a dark cloud whiplashes a generous sun. The fishing-boat sheds frayed nylon rope from its nets over the pier, fibre jerked green into the green sea by the same spiky breeze that picks at us. Your arm hooked in mine, the glare off broken water, our eyes climb to Clear Island, to its intermittent houses, its walls, its summit. I am sorry, past present future: eaten by clouds, unable to wear more than a thin, fading shirt the colder it gets. Internal barometer out of kilter with metaphysics, the light touch of contemplation. That grey heron has yet to emerge, to reclaim its regular haunt in the harbour: dipping bird on the prow of a small boat moored just out. Insatiable and sculptural. They don’t add up. Look, I see the Argo entering the bay. You can just tell it has failed

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to garner the golden fleece. I’d like to think it’s because animal-rights people have caught the cruelty of mythology on film. Probably not. They’ll sail for it again. Heron is out now, making its getaway, beak laden with carrion.

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We Hide in the Shadows as Surfaces Heat: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Cantos 5 and 6 We hide in the shadows of our violence. We are grateful for shadows and regret our violence. We’ll make do with less light when the sun perishes. Pray for us as we pray for you. You and your blackening where you walk. I stared into the sun for too long and brought it in through the front door. It is time to disconnect. We did before, we can do it again. I am speechless on the verge of travelling. The filling-in of time stretching from here to there. I cannot guess the trees gone in those moments, that distance. Hot air rises, encounters the cold. Vapour. It still rains. The winter fogs of Coondle, the valley plangent and clingy. Or here, in the morning, roused to Spring as if it’s a triumph, a true proper noun. Recycling as long as it’s profitable. I look at the Neckar and know it will eventually flood again: we will read disaster. As we live in fear (what other words comport this adequately)

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of fire rising up from where the fog had clung to valley walls, to become chevrons of flame, suffocating smoke. It all goes on the same. There are no changes. Just demonstrations of change. This act. Your act of reading. Decorations to the conscience. Performance. As the look of shock to hear it’s happening faster than expected. We are glorious harlequins! Those gentle colours, tints of green and blue and rose, those sweeping curved bodies, the chemicals still working almost the same. We have our needs. Those violent corpses locked together. The smile of reassurance. We can suffer anything if there’s a pay-off in the end. Permission granted. Eternity painted all over Sydney was a ruse. We made a fetish. It travelled like the Leyland Brothers all over. Like Harry Butler signing off for a mining company. De rigueur. Progress. We grip at each other’s accumulations, latch on to one another’s potlatch. Why blame us, flicking the switch? How can we know, looking up through limelight, gasping as the false dagger stabs the actor? And so I say to Tracy, we’re going completely solar at Jam Tree Gully. Where solar rules over its fortunes anyway. Stating the obvious. And to ascend higher still is where others defeat the chance of fire with a plethora

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of poisons. And a phone tower is erected even higher. Australia, you play ducks and drakes, you shimmer on your ambiguous beaches, trust in the aura of your life-savers. Even in crises we worship the body beautiful. Its eternal shadows.

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Stumps and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 8 Everywhere trees are going. Only stumps remain. Along waterways, stumps. Next to churches, stumps. The fallen trees are cut up and neatly piled for removal. Some stumps are being grubbed out – a wet, brown loam spilling down banks. A slope makes access to a tree’s soul functional. It is exposed from the side, then levered and dug and ruptured. A gross medical procedure. War surgery. Mass disposal. In the Western Australian Art Gallery in the city of Perth, there is a series of small oil paintings of stumps by Fred Williams. Some of these stumps are loose molars almost out. Some are veined. Some are burning from the outside in, inside out, simultaneously. Or am I misremembering? All these stumps, everywhere. Maybe someone will sit on the ones too hard to extract. Outdoor seating to watch the water flow all the way down to the reactor. Or the forest I’ve seen clear-felled in southwest Australia: stumps like code, stumps around which a bemused death adder edges and snubs, finding nothing to curl up under. Eagles overhead have his measure but their nesting site has gone. The poets camp elsewhere, but drive past, drinking in the imagery. In the provinces, you only pass through. To the city where audiences are, where the rulers are, where they stub

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out cigarettes, or collect bursaries or meet with small publishers. For some reason Thomas the Tank Engine – ‘a really useful engine’ – chuffs into view. Firebox. Effort. Trees hauled away. I can smell the stumps of beech trees as I pass by. They are seeping. A party of officials is inspecting, pointing, highlighting the benefits – for locals, for tourists, themselves.

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On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 8: Kammmolch (Great Crested Newt) The vipers are asleep. The pond with shadows cut away on the Spitzberg is frozen solid, bristling with sticks poked in to test viscosity, then locked into place. This is the breeding refuge of the Kammmolch, red list species. Off their face, young men and women, boys and girls, stagger around its bleak eye. They settle on a fallen conifer, a bench of moss, and stare. The Kammmolch awaits the pond’s release, unravelling of winter. Contemporary angels hover over beech and oak, seeing through to the forest floor, the sad youth.

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Down in the Neckar and Ammar valleys, election posters are getting workovers. Citizens are crossing swords. So many interferences. The paths through the forest are bituminised. Once, on terraces, grapes were grown. Down below, where the Kammmolch once ranged, sediment accrues. The fragment of forest looks to diversity to absorb the come-down from methamphetamines, that look: Kammmolch hoping to breed where forces have shut them out. Tread carefully in your withdrawal. May the pond take eggs and light.

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Graureiher as Lucia – and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 9 (lines 50–63) Graureiher just divided the window as the snow-tinted slope of the hill speaks back with deep focus. Lines to make maximal regions, though it can be so simple-seeming at a glance. Graureiher, head tucked back, its own rules of design and pragmatism plays Lucia. My imposition. Who knows what I see. I see bird and Lucia and Lucia in bird and bird in Lucia. I watch more than I should, true, but I’ll accept a helping hand up Österberg Hill, the evening sky inculcated, a partial whiteout. How much of Graureiher did you send? A feather? A beak? Wading feet? A soul? None of the above. Intactness. Twisting my arm, critics will try to force me to separate bird and human. They will call on science. Good sense.

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I look to the evergreens among the deciduous. I see the bareness as lush and sheltering, climbing towards the hidden sun. You, up in the apartment with Tim, watching snow settle up on the Hohentübingen Castle on the Schlossberg, its snug, proud collection of Egyptology as strange as Lucia carrying me home, the nurturing Graureiher changing direction, aiming high. What is painted is so different from what I know I see.

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De-Nazification and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 9 (lines 64–101) Snow is falling whiteout over the Schloss and its collections of the dead. A small marble hand glistens in its case and holds a … broken staff of life? In a darkroom animals carved from mammoths’ tusks forty-thousand years ago, and downstairs, a piece of knotted blue jewellery aches in its category, its time period. A hoplite’s helmet is mounted as puritan offering, thick castle walls gathering around, the snowed city quiet with Sunday. I struggle with the German inscriptions, but manage. I won’t go into the glass enclosures of Egyptian death, the coffins, the writing into afterlife. I won’t. And in the cast gallery, myth and municipality and old men following the narrative of the Swabian dialect poet, the humourist,

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the satirist, the key member of PEN, Thaddäus Troll, in his true-life manifestation as Hans Bayer, wartime propagandist for the Nazis, Nazi Party member who denied membership after the war, another of the ‘de-Nazified’ who learnt the ropes of the New Europe, the new morality, adjusted with verve, became an icon of the new imprint, killing himself thirty-five years later with a Dixie band lined up for his funeral – funny. Expressing ‘deep shame’ for keeping shtum. Late-war editor of Der Sieg, egging the Wehrmacht on and on, thrilled early on to be at war, thrilled to be invading Russia, a victim of his own propaganda, his own lust to be part of the Propagandakompanien? Munitions and a thorough coverage of the arts. An exhibition among bright white naked youth, among lovers and heroes and Gods raping humans. Animals converting and cavorting. The perverse eyes of Caesars. The denied is reconfigured and built into the reincarnation of that nineteenthcentury nationalism, the defence of the town

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in the medieval castle, the fast shiny new BMWs. Mea culpa and yet, those ‘ordinary’ soldiers, the quotidian outside the Warsaw Ghetto – get it out in the open, barely slanted, and the laundry will come out clean enough. The sin hanging around as the grand entry into the hall of the gods is made. The sun comes out – holes through which the edges of the smear of cloud redden and redden and redden. Not ‘angry’, just reflecting. It’s physics. Properties. Sociology. Philology. It all comes home to roost. Tracy asks which language other than English I first read. It was Russian because of Sputnik and the Cold War. But then German because I played wars. And I read all history of Germany at war. And I knew every battle and every detail. Then I got my Purnell’s History of WWII issue on the camps. Then. Then. Then. Is it just semantics that Bayer’s father was a soap maker? How should we arrange this in his biography? I am troubled by the right-wing historian who prefaces his exposé of European ‘history’ with a plea (or warning) for vigilance

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from ‘Europeans from both sides of the Atlantic’. Who are these bifurcated ‘Europeans’? Carvers of mammoth tusk, idolaters of miniaturised animals? Artists of cave walls. Idols? Survivors? Projectors of force? Foundations of the state? Poets? A dog is leaping and bounding (easiest translation) down the white slope of Österberg. The silver-foiled rays of Dante’s exile sucking all Hellwards or up into the swirl of heavenly light. What chance do we have? It’s the colour of illustration. It’s the plates we print from. It’s the artefacts gathered to arrange a version of history. It’s admiring the small white hand outlasting its body: alive and glistening and holding firm to its identity. It’s the laugh a minute to keep up morale, it’s the excitement, it’s the conspiracy. It’s the ash from crematoriums disguising itself as snow; and if the world overheats and shrivels it has still left its marks, baked by the bloody sun we worship and fear, baked into caskets (house, town, city) we occupy with varying degrees of comfort; painting over the cracks. I watch the ‘happy’,

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wintering families climb Österberg and can openly wish them well – bright colours in the glare, toboggans and release. What else are they to do? The snow is slippery and surprising and so inviting. I think again of old men, very old men, slowly taking in the Bayer exhibition, watched over by casts of classical sin.

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The Road on the West Side of the Cnoc Osta Range and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 10 The rain can only come down on me walking alongside Knocknageeha, images of utility carved into the sandstone walls of the gap as I pass through, a curious Cavalier King Charles Spaniel at my heels. Truck after truck of Gloun Stone squeezes us against the runnels of dark flow, against the walls. Hillside fields borderline bog, while off to the west the sun is perverse on the flanks of Gabhal Mhór. The quarry, like the radar domes, hidden from view, from where I stand inside the viewfinder, an unscheduled photo op but I carry no camera and only disturbed locals snapshot me with their staccato eyes. ‘R you from ’round ’ere?’ Been in the village on & off for three years now. ‘Oh, well, was just wonderin’ if you’d know where Barney’s place is?’ The spaniel is drenched but frisky around the sodden banks, pawing epaulettes of moss, lampooning ancestry and legacy and selective breeding. Cows grimace against the mountain and a dairy buried in a burnt furze niche makes stomachy noises. I am back to fit it all together, this bits ’n’ pieces (un)belonging. A different angle on the Croagh River as I turn back, descending, watchtowers high and Seefin

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over on the Sheep’s Head higher still. I composite mental pictures. Wet to the skin. Rough macadam holds water so much longer. I can’t see Schull Harbour from here but I think of the rippling water yesterday, the fluoro confetti of mooring buoys, more each year as the economy ‘lifts’. Another quarry truck passes, chips of bloody sandstone staling purple in its open-top tipper, ready for wherever, to be installed implanted made-to-become. Go home, go home! I half-yell at the Spaniel. You can’t follow!

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Dunlough Pier and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 13 Black rock, where salt kills, invites with a placid lowering of the lids over pupils wide with glare, shot open as sun picks at the cloud. Strikes. Don’t envy God’s slipway, the way cocaine came into the peninsula via south-western conduits, bales of white powder and a brute sea. The cameraman knows the script, and tells the story of a feature film about to hit the screens. Those who find a bale and the future it might unleash. But here, now, there’s just sandstone and sea, concrete steps built to accommodate the gnawing tide, a sudden surge of wave and light. We wander the rocks, and the camera-eyes cross – try separating images from history, the potential for catastrophe. Not there, you can’t know the drummer’s code for persistence of sea: wish wish against the blade of rock that won’t polish smooth. So down into the black rock where salt kills lichen and shaves moss bald. Intensities of colour resolve into black and white, a sketch is what we can take away. But sea-pink flowers as we look, making day more than it is, edgy and alluring, risky and confident.

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To climb up is to wander, stagger steps. Triangles and quadratic equations are timing, and architecture is the processing of new speech. This community. This anarchism no one will name. But it is. Don’t trust this sea. Sea-pinks pushed down into niches by the spiked winds; down onto the black rock where salt kills off all but limpets who wait, who aren’t as silent as you want. Iron rings cemented into the rock rust track-records of landing and departure, but a local sailor says the currents here, the black rocks that would eat you alive, kill you off. And those who have, those who do, answer as script. Mussels picked by seabirds and broken open. Spongy grasses a path down to one possible end of earth, re-entry. And those who gather here to dive go below the black rocks, below the black backing of reflective waters breaking up suddenly, disrupted by the soundings of wrecks.

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As readers of Purgatorio are aware, when Dante and Virgil are on the fifth terrace they are astonished by the fact that the Mountain of Purgatory suddenly quakes more violently than the island of Delos was ever shaken by the sea. Dante the pilgrim is seized with mortal fright but is subsequently comforted by Virgil and a chorus exalting God with the words first The Quake heard at Christ’s nativity, ‘Gloria in Plates: Those excelsis Deo’ (Purg. 19.124–141). A Missing soul appears, joins them, and Virgil Illustrations asks him to slake Dante’s thirst for of Blake’s for an explanation. The anonymous soul Cantos 19 and explains that the quake is not due 20 of Dante’s Purgator y Have to natural causes, since this part of Turned Up Here the mountain is immune to natural phenomena. Instead, the religio loci in Tübingen illustrates a spiritual truth: namely, that a soul has just completed its process of purification and – renewed and redeemed – it rises up to be united with God (Purg. 20.7–66). —from ‘Dante’s Miraculous Mountainquake’ (Purgatory 20.128), by John A. Scott

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Twice the fourth-floor apartment shifted on its axis today. A rumbling and crockery vibrating and a shift taking place: the sort of shift where you know something has changed but can’t quite … Maybe even hairline cracks in walls. You won’t find them without special equipment. This theological town is laden with vivisected souls. The flowing river sounds like intrusion. We check Earthquake track and the last quake to show up within sensor range of here was a few years ago. Another map shows earthquake zones and here is on the edge of red. The fury of redemption. Rattled to the core. Point-eight metres per second ground acceleration. We have to expect it. Standing so close to the coal tit reworking its song in a dry hedge was a sign. That was yesterday. Tim was witness. And the trees chopped down throughout the town over the last week or two. Hundreds of them. Some fell on an old mossy enlichened asbestos roof and shattered it: asbestos fibres going forth to multiply in their own cybernetic way. Or prosper. The colours of winter are livened up by seismic activity. The poem is an obvious seismograph but the people going about their day-to-day business, or spitting, or smoking, or spraying their tags over other tags in the underpass are more a measure of imminent change. We come from earthquake country. It’s nothing to be taken lightly. It’s hard if not impossible to emerge fully from the rubble, God’s or the Devil’s. 84

Unravelling Hay, Furze and Flames: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 27 Illegal furze fires are still erupting like spontaneous regeneration on the lower reaches of the range. They blood the old red sandstone and purify nothing: beneath the charring, the roots prosper. As I walk the roads of this über-Catholic country, I follow the chords of smoke, the unravelled hay bale. Who is singing to themselves behind the burning hedge, the voluptuous yellow flowers igniting to undo metaphor? It’s a sincere and parodic song. It loves God, it mocks God. It is fearful and arrogant and cracks on the high notes. As the burning goes on and blankets the village with its smudge, the sun gets stuck on the horizon and night is bloodied. Zola’s description of a burning Paris as the Commune and the armies of Versailles fight, purity cult horror and total war, is unshakeable. Takes days to adapt to life after that book. I climb the benches of the range and deviate around the fires. Someone is goading me on. But I know Tracy would think me crazy to walk where the fire is. And anyway, she knows I wouldn’t, unless to tell the burners that they are wrong, that their fires are not the way. That wouldn’t surprise her.

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Another song, under the breath: holier than thou? The first stone? Not a leg to stand on? I hobble higher and look forward to the rush down to the valley, to the sea, through the tones of the colour chart. A broken taillight on the roadside fascinates as it catches the dulling flames on its bed of hay. Its little lullaby goes, Trust me, trust me. A thrush sits as close as it can to its lost roosting place.

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Kloster Bebenhausen and Blake’s Dual Illustrations to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 30 Cistercian watergod a dry fountain in winter cloister though a smear of snow still in the shadows; across from conversion, from royal hunting lodge, from where the last royal held out after her Weimar demise. In small gardens, globes on sticks – blue, red, golden baubles working reflections and a glittering sun – ward us off. Birds seem fascinated. We are in the down season and Tracy can correlate to her time in Carmel, and I automatically transpose onto what I comprehend of New Norcia. This bind-a-twine all frayed and used is the cord between tin cans pulled taut for us, our mode of communication. I walk the square in silence. Hit by kings and plague and the Reformation, bulbous but architecturally splendid out of its own wealth, sung in the beech forest. At the bright window-end of the dormitory a stag is assailed either side by bears. It’s an apocalyptic scene where the gryphon is hard to pick. The whole lot are stuffed. Kaputt. And then within that closed area, some guy in a jacket and shorts runs – sprints – from one cell to another. For real. I can see across the thin river from the filigreed

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crossing tower I can only climb conceptually. From across the cloister I see Tracy marvelling over denial, over standing for meals, over hand-signs when silence has put a lid on things. She tells me the préau in Carmel, behind those forbidding walls, was grass with roses and bush plants. If visitors ever came into the convent, the nuns and novices and the postulant would have to wear veils. We are all attracted to the machinery of illuminated manuscripts. There are disturbing analogies to be made with taxidermy. Paint of the vaulting is vivid and through the windows, council-trucks haul away trees lopped from the waterway, lopped down to their bases – thick, heavy trees. Eyes are everywhere. Luminosity makes me bow my head. The snow won’t melt even though it is paper thin and the sun has grabbed some of it by the edges. Up in the nature reserve there are hunting areas – killing zones. Deer antlers perverse over doorways in the village. Is this the best hope we’ve got to see activity between dead and living, offer a hand to poets who think they can’t cross over?

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The Dragon I Saw Rising Out of the Bog: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 32 The dragon I saw rising out of the bog, wisps of marsh gas wreathing common reeds, was tattooed with the words of Heaney’s ‘Act of Union’ – hoard jewels embedded in its scales. A man and woman stopped in a car – he stepped out from the passenger’s side to piss into black water, oblivious to the dragon hovering overhead. I asked a friend, and he said, ‘Locals can’t see what to outsiders sticks out like a sore thumb’. It sounded perverse – you can’t always tell when he’s taking the piss. But then he added, ‘The cultural pages of the Irish Sunday Times are edited out of London’. And the Queen’s ninetieth birthday. The dragon had more than one head. Heads rolled. I saw it rising out of the bog, wisps of marsh grass wreathing common reeds, and the Easter 1916 ‘celebrations’ placing border zones on a war-footing. Explosives found in the boot of a car. Masked men marching

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in Dublin. Rising out of the bog, bejewelled. Thrushes tremulous in the hedges. Tourists. The dragon too aware of its mythical status.

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Nature and Making Poems in West Cork: Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Purgator y, Canto 32 At the beginning of the 20 th century, Ireland had one of the best-documented natural histories in the world. But, following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1921, there was a period of neglect. An interest in nature was seen as belonging to an alien ascendancy culture. The impoverished new State, confronting enormous political and social problems, had little interest in the natural environment. —Paul Sterry, Collins Complete Guide to Irish Wildlife, 2010 ii Drishane House has closed at 3pm. We’re a little late. The street is steep to the bay and the Church of Ireland looms large over the scenery, being scenery and not scenery itself, its high-up graves and cenotaphs, its lush gardens and its look-out positioning, folly towers and flowering walls. You feel that among the acres of the ‘ascendancy’, animals and plants might thrive: a revelation to the bare cow-fields surrounding, right down to the cliffs of Toe Head, the stone quarries of nearby. But there’s the odd ‘preserved’ sign – land set aside for hunting – that betrays the documentation of nature, the legacy of colonial adjustment in every creature’s family tree. Offshore, fish nibble the tidbits

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of untreated sewerage and photos bounce back off the glittering ocean surface, the runs of waves breaking on old sandstone. Everyone wants to come here – between country house and the great mansion of Liss Ard Estate, possible place of Swiss Government in nuclear holocaust exile during the Cold War till betrayed over a few pints. Where in a garden that drinks in the sky, all mythologies adapted to the record, the cultural rendering of occupation, so many rock stars might gather in comfort, piercing summer birds of passage, visitors in their thick-trunked trees (such a rarity here). All of this within a few kilometres of the famine town of Skibbereen, all of this close to the sailing ships tackling coves. I can take it in easily on a single walk – making nature poetry along the scenic drive, the picturesque doing double duty as haven for all living things, for the beasts and the churches and the regal and the rich and the poor and the whores and the virgins and the farmers who won’t look for a wife until they’re well into their forties. Hearsay – who’s to say, these clichés of destruction and holiday emollients aren’t prerequisites for the emergence of the daytime fox and daytime rabbit, for the eruptions of bog cotton and peaty waters of Tragumna, or for the minuscule water creatures in private Lough Abisdealy that are yet to be classified or named, touching the plebeian

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road-edge. We pass. Johnny-come-lately. On the market. Marvel at the seven-headed price tag. See the giant magpies flirt heavily just beyond the boundaries, flyting taxes and profits, clapped-out tractors and new Mercedes sports with British number plates. But also the Range Rovers with Dublin plates, and a writhing mass of white seabirds pegging the cliffs, morsels of faith, charity and hope clasped in their beaks.

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A Spiral, After Blake’s ‘Roughly sketched figures ascend the stairways of Paradise’ in Paradise, Canto 10 (lines 72–87) Corellas over the crossed towers make the dry a whirlpool sent down to take the patient higher. There’s light in perfectly bent wings and the catch of the beaks is litany, all husks shed and spent as reflections, refraction, dispersal over the dry, the brittle, the aromatics of olive leaves and eucalyptus and stubble. As pilgrims hope to catch the wave of a spiral, to elevate with its sweep across faint sketches in the dirt, save memories and prayers, the leaps of faith they’ve held their lives together with, the glimmers, the steep learning curves of birth and loss, they can’t hear themselves speak as the corellas call out the gloss, the glare, the substance of light. Some say it is a noise but they miss the translation, peace of night.

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Formal Conventions and Faith: After Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 24 (lines 32–110) The Österberg tower is too brilliantly lit By a cold but not cold enough day – The blue capitalisation of Tübingen It looks into, certainty of grammar To be unpicked, roots reaching only So far through a wafer-thin layer, A speculative holding-on. This Afternoon humidicrib for me, relying As I do on descriptions of morning’s Black ice and sunrise encolouration, An experience in split lives that add up Or more. And even the repeaters Playing us over, making connection In denial, having not yet routed The blue – sun eating us Out of house and home. So Disconnected across town As we are, we consider the same

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View – framed – in its shiftings, Its tonalities, its degradations. Here’s A person – no, a man and a woman? Halfway up the slope – waving arms At a dark bird, a Rabenkrähe? They are Playing silhouettes though the sun Is not behind them. It’s an issue of distance: Not so very far away, but enough. In truth, I read it as semaphore. The below-zero affirmation. The wiping out of blights In the soil. But there’s nothing ‘Pure’ in any of this. It’s mixed. Light, stone, vegetation, the past. The sun glorious after days of darkness But I don’t look to spring. Will I write late-Hölderlin-like poems Before Easter? Will the light blind me? The couple have moved on up Towards the prickling tower, a cross Without its crossbar (another Cross is down the hill, closer On its off-white, featureless wall) But at the point of the slope where they were,

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Another figure with extended arm, Motioning to the pair ahead to keep rising, Rising up to sharp light that has darkened The lenses of my glasses beyond their limits – As if they can never lighten again – so much Light. So much glare. Such scrutiny. But through the double-glazing, I can clearly hear and see the figure Saying, ‘I am raising my forehead to the light.’     Unlocking the distance.

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Horologes and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 24 (‘Dante and Beatrice in the Constellation of Gemini and the Sphere of Flame’) And as the wheels in works of horologes Revolve so that the first to the beholder Motionless seems, and the last one to fly —trans. Longfellow I am lost in ‘tints’ and ‘glare’ and ‘brightness’. My imaginary map of Tübingen is stuck on the elevated, golden hands of the old town clock. I can’t see that from inside this university building, but I can from the apartment window, and I walk past it most days. It’s been nicely spruced up. It keeps fairly accurate time, or is constantly adjusted so it seems like it does. Tracy tells me she caught a glimpse of graffiti on a wall from the bus, holding the university to account for animal cruelty. The medical arm is a big part of what they do. Virology is a department. Vivisection, you’d image. There were other accusations as well. She will keep an eye out for that wall. This is the modus operandi of universities.

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Their nurturing is costed. Epistemology is utility. The whirlwind of light that makes even a small city. A friend here tells us, ‘Outside, over the hills, there are those who try to live an alternative life’. Organic. We are warned that in warm weather public nudity is an expression of freedom and health. The clock shines on the body as well – hands covering, uncovering. Each in a sphere, trying to conserve and yet connect. A safe distance. Intermingling. Familiarity. I have a reservoir of light, I am sure, but it’s unlikely in my orbs. They have done their bit. I am getting old. But I feel the division of day’s labour nonetheless. I can’t bring myself to piss in public, but nobody is asking me to. Though people play pet dogs on retractable cord leashes, willing them to the middle of the path to shit. It’s natural. Gymnastics might have been founded in Sweden but took off like a shot here. And calisthenics. Outdoors. The spheres of flame. Central heating. The forests of the Waroona hills, the town of Yarloop: burnt down past ash. Tracy would never expect me to dance through the hoops. I hung out for such a long time in the clock rooms of the British Museum. Rooms 38 and 39: ‘clocks and watches’. Lines 38 and 39

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of the Longfellow translation of Dante’s Paradiso, Canto 24, go: ‘As good beseemeth thee, about the Faith By means of which thou on the sea didst walk.’ I can hear the sea in a clock. The stroke of small waves on sharp rocks. So far inland here, at a core. Or Mizen’s old red sandstone plucked by an outgoing tide. I studied the Cassiobury Park turret clock in the museum, as they suggest. I learnt its ‘five basic elements’. A curatorial lesson: ‘Energy’, ‘Wheels’, ‘Escapement’, ‘Controller’, ‘Time Indicator’. Fast wheels so there can be slower and slower wheels. It makes for accuracy. Precision in where we are. In the yellow and green and orange and rose tints, I inculcate myself into locality. Jackhammer out on the street. Clouds of tobacco smoke around doorways, tottering towers of learning, threea-breast student phalanxes you can never part, never pass. Step aside. And the old woman with a shopping trolley packed with cardboard and paper. There’s an excellent recycling programme here with appropriate punishment for errant behaviour. Well, I saw her last night as I walked home (home) in the darkness and the sub-zero zeitgeist. She was making a nest by the church. In a nook, a niche, a corner almost. She listened to a watch on her wrist.

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Articulo mortis: Graffiti and Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 26 for those of The White Rose who resisted without violence

It’s the warmth of colour that gives people hope even now. It translates into justice wherever it grows, the white rose. To have made wrong steps, hiking the great outdoors, then to have changed the rhythm. God was there, and why not – there was no looking at the horror elsewhere, heads down. It’s the only template that lasts: the others wear away over time, are restored and displayed, and over time lost entirely. We place faith in seed banks in the tundra. As the turtle doves fly over Malta they are shot down. A delicacy in the restaurants. Some locals and visitors will be on their honeymoons over September, and love’s commodity will keep them steady. Best not to look. Gunfire is celebrating their eternity together. I dwell too long over images from Jam Tree Gully – the Easter lilies and their awkward relationship to an idea of place. Of conservation. And the young bobtail coiling across the stubbled ground, looking to fatten its tail. Outdoors. When the graffiti appeared on the surfaces of Munich: ‘Freedom Freedom’ … ‘Down with Hitler’. I hear their use of Schiller. I hear the pigment on walls. I lament

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the drunken rightwing students at Fasching dragging their wagon through town, spray-painting their IDs in front of bewildered onlookers tidying their front yards. Order and chaos short-circuiting their belonging. I see Nazi graffiti near the station. I see the tags on ancient buildings being scrubbed off by the same old man wheeling his bicycle around town every weekend. I see the Welcome Refugees over-writing, a graffiti also – this for me, is high art. But the chemistry of the pigment is a question in this real of capitalism. It wasn’t for the White Rose. It was expediency. It was necessity. The stencils cut, the letters made. The words themselves. The signing-off. Confessions? I remember the broken-gun stencils. The exhortations to non-violence stencilled on pavements. I climbed the monument and sprayed Anarchy and Peace so many decades ago. Expediency. Necessity. I called the can a tool, a peaceful means of resistance. The mess we made of those blank surfaces. And yet I poisoned, if on so small a scale, the air we breathed, the ground. I get lost in this, its implications. The colours of a Blake illustration, Adam and St John, the radiant spheres of salvation, lift me from brute reality. Transcendent? I had my portrait painted by an artist who shook violently from exposure to solvents in the pursuit of his craft, his art. And the factories that made those solvents. And the workers.

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And the surroundings: encompassing all of us. And then I return to the power of those words where such words had never been seen before: the surfaces of Munich shuddering and realigning, the Gestapo hunting out the perpetrators. And the home printing-press. The paper. The ink. The leaflets. The ‘trials’. The executions. At point of death, we are offered a way. Speak now. The breath of words is loved by the air, the ground, the water. The sun which heats the vessel we make can still be glorious.

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Wunscherfüllung: On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 28 (We’d Prefer to Walk than Dine Out) In the holy of holies, stacked nine plates high, turning on the heating flame, that almost ‘art deco meets 60s modernist’ sort of simplicity, when a slight ingress of breeze flickers security, however many sheets to the wind the shutters bash themselves up. I see Purgatory 28 rather than Paradise 28, an illuminated forest without fire, just the flashy divinity of trees, their long reach upwards, aspirations, hoping to shuck off that retardant DNA that stops them lunging Babellike towards the Empyrean. Hear that rustling of the canopy, that crack-and-sever as brought down for outreaching. All so vague, fluttering about. But I am being specific, I am talking about walking along the Schwabershaldenweg in the Spitzberg forest, and using the conifers as entry into the forests my grandfather keel-hauled: jarrah out, pines in, softwood for hardwood, and all the issues of wilderness and control and the absurdity of Lefebvre talking about the abundance of space waiting to be filled.

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Sort of talking like that. Stuck in his functional holier-than-thou ‘second nature’ suburbia. But can a secular angel be anything but smug? You see almost no old cars on the roads of Tübingen. Do the poor also have reasonably up-to-date models or do they simply catch the bus or the train or walk? Of course they walk. Ownership is newness. Like a pulp mill. Like paper. Like that little green mound in Blake’s image of desire, his wanting it on earth, down on the city green, on the outskirts, in the fields: just as much as I claimed it along the edges of Antipodean paddocks, even though a York gum has fallen over the fence wire, and over the steep, steep access road of a neighbour who had been ill (which does not bode well, we fear). In the circles of light we all come together, don’t we. It doesn’t warrant a question mark. Desire is caught up in punctuation, just as a host’s dishes cooling on the table lack something (to them). We will climb the big hill, the highest point of town. We will see the white strokes marking tall thin trees on the mount. Script is no liberation in this. That green Blakean mound. Nodule of earth in heaven. Prelapsarian, you say? Such particular and delicate features. Such whiteness of visage. Such angst in serenity. And a pile of logs shaved to their axes. Ready to be trucked.

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On Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 30: ‘In the Empyrean Drinking at the River of Light’ and IMM C.D. Wright The genesis of an ending —C.D. Wright Drink deep of the river of light, C.D., your lines of the quotidian wrought deep, of breakdown and reconstitution. We wrestle with sunlight, unravel our paradox. Snow is rarer and then comes harsh – bend of leaf under the weight. I note today climbing the castle hill brazen over Tübingen, snow heavier but vanishing before it connects with skin. Touch? A fade-out of breath I cannot catch. I thank you for cleaning my black jacket doused in conversation and metonym, the three of us talking the blurred edges of planet over the table. Forrest, the Empyrean is intoxicating though reminds me of amethysts which ward off headiness. Veins of amethysts.

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Exquisite geodes seen in museums and gem shops and in the earth opening up to take all light into darkness. It’s everywhere. The setting up a terrainmap, a paracosm to make a personal authenticity where history shakes the very presence, eats even into the flour grading system circa 1934. You would both have picked that. C.D., in your voice is an awareness that elegy can’t be written away from the ecology that imposes, that surrounds the writing. Child and foliage, herbs and earth apples, cloud 9, special affects, downtime, upwardly mobile endgame – I can tell from your poems that all such allusions would come to you in the updraft, the saturation. I am far from our wheatbelt home where I would have written you a different leave-taking, but I speak from within the orbuculum: please,     drink deep of the river of light.

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The White Rose: With a Glimmer of Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 31 The two fountains were given to the university by the city in 1877 as a gift for its 400th birthday. The fountains were removed in 1931 in order to use the square in front of the assembly hall for National Socialist rallies. An artistic foundry in Süßen cast the fountains anew and in 1999 they were again installed in their original location, now called the Scholl-Sibling-Square, named after the famous siblings who were members of the White Rose resistance movement. —Universitätsstadt Tübingeniii The fountains are dry. But then late snow falls on them and they briefly turn into white roses. Brother and sister fountains. Resurrected. Students buzz around, checking their phones, comparing marks, joking about Ordnung society they will graduate into. I cut across the square twice a day, but only today I see the fountains as the white roses they are. A few weeks ago young people were handing out leaflets. I did not take one. I do not know what they were saying, what they were disseminating. I should have enquired. The fountains look identical but are different. When they are alive under sunshine people will remark on the prisms of light. The Nazis cut out the fountains. They wanted room to move.

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In each petal of the white rose hope arose. In the silent early hours of morning, creatures move about here we don’t see in daylight, not even at night with its residues of wakefulness. I was reminded of this today, chatting with a friend. Snow dissolving. When I was a child, my cousins and I broke up sheets of asbestos with our grandfather and jigsaw-puzzled it around his beds of roses. Broke the sheets into fragments. Like smashing bottles at the tip; it was great fun. The roses grew as well as ever, and the asbestos rested under a tarp of gravel. Some were white roses. The knowledge of the White Rose resistance, its civil disobedience, its refusal of violence, gives me that hope. Over seventy years later and I can see the faces of the Scholls and their friends in the students handing out leaflets. I don’t know anything about these people, don’t know where they were born or where they come from or what their ‘ethnicities’ are. I don’t know what they are saying. But I see the faces of the Scholls and their friends, I see the overlapping flesh of the flower, so perfect it might sit in the sick rooms of those suffering from mesothelioma. My grandfather loved roses. He did not understand about asbestos. He was horrified by the Nazis and all they did, thousands of miles away.

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If I am here again when the fountains are full, I will stare through the spray, through the rose of water into their calyces. In the broken mirror I will search my face and ask of myself.

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Epilogue 1 Why Blake’s Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy Are and Aren’t ‘Sites of Memory’ and/or ‘Real Environments of Memory’ ‘There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.’ (p. 2) One simple but decisive trait of  lieux de mémoire sets them apart from every type of history to which we have become accustomed, ancient or modern. Every previous historical or scientific approach to memory, whether national or social, has concerned itself with realia, with things in themselves and in their immediate reality. Contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de mémoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or history; it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de mémoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. In this sense, the lieu de mémoire is double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations. (p. 19) —‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Pierre Noraiv I’ll tell the truth. I always tell the truth. History is a story, a memory, what grows or doesn’t. Alterations in the behaviour

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of birds some define as adaptation. I know when I am in Pinjarra the entire town is a massacre site, though there is imprecision. Some deniers hide behind the detail. I know massacre is where I step. I know it will take years for broad acknowledgement, for a plaque to appear anywhere such crimes take place. As if that can be enough. Some work hard to abolish all memory. To distract attention. Or to claim stories aren’t memory. Never memorials. You tell the truth. In this monument is no agency? If you stare you won’t see the blows that break bodies. The dead. Or if you do, your mind is playing tricks. It’s not tapping in, not really. Delusion. Apparently. You can’t have sensed ghosts because the reality has been forgotten. This is not even the precise spot. They’ve approximated. Or if it is said to be, The signs have washed away in storms or fire. Some seers would say cleansed. Some would say, ‘Show me the evidence beyond the plaque, the plate, the photograph’. In the history of history,

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as they say, as the theorist says, translating, the nation-states and classical world and early modern period and late modern and the Anthropocene and annihilation, make pigment and tools, inscription. We tell the truth. These monuments to proper nouns. These human characteristics. This literature. A friend here in Tübingen has sent me awareness of three memorial sites in the region. One is NS-Tötungsanstalt Grafeneck, the Nazi’s prototype euthanasia centre. A place for them to experiment with gas. Thousands of disabled people murdered. Another, the Old Synagogue at Haigerloch, opened as a museum in 2004. A vital place, a retreat for Jews. Then the Holocaust. And ‘Graeberfeld X’ where the remains of those murdered by Nazis and then dissected by university doctors are interred. Three sites. He tells the truth. And so, the sites contain. The sites embody. The sites inflect. They are historical. History of history. They are memories. They are as real as the blackbird shuffling aside the dead leaves of last year. There is an investment in European ways of defining my friend would reject. The identity angst.

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The map of control. It is a synecdoche of learning, of calling in the utterances, the words, the images. And this where we reject any claim excess, the loaded image caught in feedback. Amplifier. The string of locutions from before a beginning till after an end. It is the granite losing its skin at Jam Tree Gully, it is moss and lichen and suckers appearing after a tree has died from excessive heat in an excessively hot place. It is the attempt to regenerate when fire comes through more often than design can handle. Truth. And it’s my having to stomach the issue of Charlie Hebdo lampooning the Prophet left on a desk in this office. True, there as statement of liberty, of a non-censorship in this display. Of a refusal to be terrorised and traumatised. I am sure it is all these things. I am sure. I recognise the refusal from my pacifist orientation. But I also know it is incitement. And that to denegrate is an abuse of memory, all memory. To mock is returning truth to the bare bones of history. The empty details, the facts of archives. I know non-violent people who were deeply wounded by those images. Why wound them? Who is speaking? A temporary site that short-circuits memory. The tone is bothering. Non-poetic. Hectoring. We lament

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those murdered. We cherish the memory of all lost to hate and violence. True true true. True! We see flowers bloom from concrete. We see the images accruing. We need memory as history. Passed on. Site to site. A nexus.

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Epilogue 2 Paths to the Wurmlinger Chapel The cut logs piled and numbered – wood raddled – alongside the paths, twist the blade into the spirit of forest, however foresters are trying to reinvent the primeval. A woodpecker cranks up intensity and shelf fungus on a stump declaims to the understorey; moss treats the wounds of older stumps but fresh bloody stumps smell sickly sweet, conifer and deciduous ichor blending at a time when budding still works, comes basically on song. Where smooth snakes awoken will crackle through winter-dried leaves, vapid in the awakening. Ravenousness will come to the Spitzberg soon, and wild boar will charge from the hollows. So down to the fruit trees and grapevines on terraces to climb again against the flow of mountain bikes exaggerating every step and erosion, to bring it to the extreme sport variation on stations, the seventeenth-century chapel crowning off, canopy, its medieval crypt into the breast of the mount, four-hundred-and-seventy-five metres’ elevation of panorama: of villages and motorways, of haze and a coal tit outrageously loud. Where the dead

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rest on high and Uhland’s poem of a young shepherd below, the dead going to ground up in the blue gleam, and where he will go, too, when life finishes its dirge.

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Epilogue 3 Caha Mountain Revelations Heading north, we see the snow on Hungry Hill, over the tonsures of the Sheep’s Head, late snow unexpected snow thin but decisive snow in the distance, across Dunmanus Bay and Bantry Bay, over the hills and stone circles and islands and cairns and holy wells, over all of it, the snow brow of Hungry Hill and its surrounding rough-hewn peaks, its incitement to labour and profit and myth. We change intention and direction and pursue the snow, hill-walking in our conversations, leavening the old stories of horror and celebration, the ravens out of rock highlighted. Can we have any myth from anywhere or are we to be cut off, denied by excommunication, migration, exile, departure, by intrusion, invasion, inherited theft? To the thin but decisive snow, to the stock epithets of localism and familiarity, this late snow which might be a last snow or the weight of the world rearranging, unbalancing on its axis. Snow is to do with levers, with fulcrums and scales, and reaching the Beara it becomes clear that in the shadows of Sugar Loaf, that in all the shades of the Caha are fading white scars that become cascades of white

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blood cells, a Mare’s Tail, or a flushing of chimneys, wiping away impurities of charism, transferring them gradually into the bay, the sea. A male pheasant with an écriture tail tests the road, then retreats, but it is no less inscribed with the mockery of valour for this. Only the colonists’ estates, their residues, hold clans of trees beyond the eager saws of the State Forestry, the profiteering of exposure. The irony! The snow covers the sawteeth of old red sandstone, covers the benches and cairns of the range. From Castletownbere, we must look back into the white heal-all, the Robert Frost moment of horrific purity, the tourist season almost on us. Us. We, of the here and now. The snow thin but decisive, come suddenly, unexpected. Heroic?

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World’s End after Jakob van Hoddis’s expressionist poem

The sharp-headed citizen grasps at his flying headdress. A hell of a racket is busting out from here to there. The roofs are too steep for the tilers split asunder. Watching the news we are rudely confronted by rising seas. The storm is upon us, demented waves pole-vault Beaches and thrust inland to take out the dams. Most of us have runny noses, which goes with the gestalt. Coal-bearing rails cascade down from railway bridges.

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Notes (i) Page 41: Ben Doherty and Helen Davidson, ‘Peter Dutton accuses refugee advocates of encouraging suicide on Nauru’, The Guardian, 3 May 2016 (http:// www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/03/ peter-dutton-accuses-refugee-advocates-of-encouragingsuicide-on-nauru) (ii) Page 91: Paul Sterry, Collins Complete Guide to Irish Wildlife, HarperCollins, London, 2010 (introduction by Derek Mooney, p. 9) (iii) Page 108: http://tuebingen-info.de/index. php?id=812&sav_library=908e661515b0012103672&c Hash=1196c4dbe1c4f58a92c12d8f0e37ef3d (iv) Page 111: ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Pierra Nora, p.19, Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, Spring, 1989, University of California Press Stable (http://www. jstor.org/stable/2928520), translated by Marc Roudebush

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Acknowledgements Thanks to the Literary Cultures of the Global South programme, University of Tübingen, Germany, where I was in residence for some months during 2016. Thanks to Curtin University and Churchill College, Cambridge University. Thanks to Tracy Ryan and my editor at UQP, Felicity Plunkett. Poems in this manuscript have appeared in the following journals: Agni, The Cortland Review, Dark Mountain Poetics, Mascara Literary Review, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Ireland Review, Southerly and Raritan.

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