Oils

Stephen Sexton

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781912915651
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Oils is a gorgeous, beguiling collection of poems where the poise of the delivery belies the emotional, existential turmoil within.

Through his portraits of an atheist, a pickpocket and a spinach-loving sailor (among others), Stephen Sexton evokes a strange kind of melancholy as he strives to reconcile passion with detachment and profound self-doubt with unwavering love.

The Deaths of Orpheus

1. A FLATTERING LOOK

Look when my head washed up on the shore

I was singing through the salt – they seem sure,

and it’s mostly true – but by then I was mostly salt,

I meaning head and what remained of my throat.

When my eyes opened, finally out of that wine

fucking dark sea, pipers commanded the battered

coves in a moon-shaped bay, though by moon-

shaped, we mean only a part of it. Clouds

were squandered by the coastal gales.

Evening. I realised where I was in the arms

of a woman in whose arms the roll

and loll of my head ceased its hymn.

She carried me on the strings of my lyre

and though I couldn’t see it, you’ll know it’s noted

for nacre inlays on spruce and willow, my signature

in pearl on the rosewood tailpiece. They evicted

a tortoise for his hollowed resonator, for the tone.

And – I should settle this – three strings,

though I could have made you weep with one.

My hostess, with her dark-ringed eyes, had been weeping.

Her pinafore was the green of hunters and olives,

ferns and forestry, patterned with viburnum, haltered

by copper brooches at the shoulder over a rather suave

gainsboro undershirt the unlovely shade of the underworld.

She wore lilacs, mint, fennel in a bunch at her solar plexus

and I smelt the brightness of lemons from under me

and the broad freshness of their leaves. I sensed tortoises

on the ground. It made me so sad knowing she

was going to bury me here among the lemons

and the olives, with my lyre, in some lonely

adventureless grave. I’ve become the death again in every glance

backwards. I’m brave enough to do it twice.

2. NYMPHS FINDING THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS

Always becoming, always becoming, instar

to instar, the salmon-pink sky runs

a jealous parallel along the mountaintops,

the mountaintops envy the scum of the sky –

each is envied by the black ash trees

swooning in their gothic copse

which only for context sharpens as a spear

the narrower birch with its adolescent rings

of years which longs for touch and hands

and more touch than the hands of nymphs in rockeries

and nymphs in the stream

with their torso-sized bronze water jug filled

and the opening covered by one girl’s hand

which is envied by waterlilies and peonies

and aconite for its transport – they itch to work

their frenzy of medicine elsewhere than this fresh pool

which seethes at everything other than itself

for being various and loathes in its algal

green flotage that depends on sunlight

resented by the accumulating moon

whose caprice impulses the currents around

whose currents I admire for their powerlessness

which is me half-drowned at the bottom and jealous,

O insects, jealous is what death is.

3. RED

the tenses of my was streak like thinned paint.

My body resigns itself on this plinth

as a treasure for the vultures. My gorgeous

body is divorcing itself from itself.

My chest grotesquely arches. It is curved

like the lopped-off top of a circle, the rusty

chord drawn through. I’m Christ-wounded in the side.

I hadn’t imagined death this red roar,

but a slalom of light outpoured. I had

imagined not stasis nor the language

of my hands stopped, but my thought becoming

advisor to the order of things – the invisible

reminder yearly to the deaf, innocent

wonders of the world to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Oils
• Other Titles from the Emma Press
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Contents
• On Betrayal
• Young Bean Farmer
• The Death of Horses
• Long Reach
• The Deaths of Orpheus
• Subimago
• Slip
• An English Teacher Leaves the Room
• Schematic for Atheism from a Child’s Watch
• John’s HiFi
• Dead Cat Bounce
• Credit History
• Because
• Ekaterinburg
• House without a Face
• Elegy for Olive Oyl
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Other Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets