Bezdelki

Small things

Carol Rumens, Emma Dai'an Wright, Rachel Piercey

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781910139790
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn't purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.

King Taharqa’s Last Thoughts

When the Pharaoh wants the war,

the war wants the Pharaoh.

When the Pharaoh wants the war no longer,

he sinks into the sand, already a sphinx,

and the drum, the drum he hates more than the war-drum

(who’s banging it so hard, his weightless heart?)

slips away from his chest, devolves to footfall.

*

Dawn. Sole-beat and water-song.

The river my sister sings the shape of herself,

leaps where lion-I leaps, dances past the lion

on his short rope, appetite:

sometimes pretends to do nothing –

marsh-maker, rock-sucker, sky-mirror,

word-weaver, choked with papyrus;

rouses again, and races the lion-man’s racing:

foam-fleck, foot-flash, rainbow-flake, two of us neck-and-neck,

slipping past settlements, slopping in rock-pools, black

and white in the crash-sites, slow and snakeskin-yellow

through Memphis into hundred-gated Thebes.

The Kushite cub, nosing in the ruins,

feels a hand on his shoulder finds himself kneeling –

bread, beer, oxen, birds, my heart being sweet cause me

to carry to you anything –

and the same hand opens, slides an arpeggio

of light on the toppled pillars,

and taps in my head seven syllables: carry to me my city.

*

The unfledged papyrus sighs

for water, twisting its toes

in rusty canopic silt

and the beached skiff prays for a river, for you, Amun,

Amun, who drops, who rises

when the

Pharaoh

wants the

war

and when the Pharaoh wants the war no longer,

and sags to his hip-bone, prayerless,

his sweet heart sucked by five Assyrian arrows.

*

Souls clatter like wings,

like netted marsh-birds, blind

to everything but their sky.

Was this your lion army

or mine, Esarhaddon?

The dead grin up at our flags.

They belong to no state, no species.

Croak with the broken ibis, Pharaoh. Howl with the soldiers’ wives.

*

When I woke, it was only this world.

Thin waves came in from nowhere, rippling the dunes.

The dead rolled over, ignes fatui,

and the moonlit boat appeared, dragging threads of new river.

I felt a hand on my shoulder felt that muscle

of air in the silk-cool desert-night. Amun

(wiser than Xerxes) wanted

it seemed to call off the war no longer wanted

a king who wanted a war (or a war that wanted a god).

*

Taharqa, already a sphinx,

moves his eyelids, remembering.

*

At first, we were playing a game. We joked and jostled,

but we knew our race would become

a temple, we felt that darkness.

Soon, with a fiercer beat and concentration,

we ran, just ran ran on ran on and on our lungs

high lyres we scrubbed the burning from our eyes

wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Books from the Emma Press
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• 'When Psyche-life follows Persephone…'
• Bezdelki, with Morphine
• Equipped
• He Drank to Naval Anchors
• The Admiralty
• King Taharqa's Last Thoughts
• Shapka and Spider
• Collection Plate
• At Four Monthes Mind, no Requiem…
• Summer Visitor
• Vidua
• Diaspora
• Nant y Garth
• Notes
• About the poet
• About the Emma Press