Perhaps all worlds of memory are drowned?
Submersed in the past?
Although sunlight does still sometimes
striate the wavering ground of the city
where herring and turtles swim along the silted streets
or are bowled along by tidal currents
past the stoven wrecks of automobiles
some driven upwards over ten storeys
hurled through the windows of corporate headquarters
to rust now among the computers and the desks,
filing cabinets and draws, whose contents
are broached and scattered
and which still float around the buildings,
printouts of spreadsheets, brochures and reports
in their millions,
pieces of paper pinned against ceilings
or wafting slowly along corridors
as if trying to seek out readers again
and so to re-establish 
their meaning again, to reassert
their place in a lost system again,
to seek someone's thoughts, to matter.

Sometimes, when memory grows hostile,
and the surface of the memory becomes riled,
it is not enough merely to peep over the edge
and look down at the drowned pinnacles of towers,
or the grid of streets, laid out below
the swirling fathoms of clear water; but instead,
it is necessary to go down, to descend
into the depths, to dive,
and so become immersed again
in those situations which have ceased
in order to impart to them
at least a little life again,
sharing with them a few fragments, a few grains
of your sacred attention,
bidding them speak, asking them
to die again...

But why? Why return in memory
to a drowned past, and to a system which has been lost?
That was a drowned world, 
and a drowned city,
like all the worlds and cities of our memories.
It seems almost foolish to return.
Yet, I do sometimes return,
descending beneath the waves,
because once I lived in that city,
and it was in that city I met my love.

I was at a launch party at an eminent publishers.
Not my party, and not my publishers -
my publishers would never throw a party for me
my work being so obstinately unfashionable
and therefore, of course, obdurately unprofitable.
No: I was there accompanying a friend, another writer.
It was not his party, either, his work possessing the virtue
- to my eyes at least -
of being even more resolutely unfashionable than mine.
I don't really know why he wanted to be there,
and I don't really know why I agreed to accompany him, either.
But anyway, there we were,
in the atreum, beneath the waxy ferns,
exchanging pointed vacuities with our colleagues
and drinking flat, lukewarm champagne.

For me the event was at once boring and stressful.
I had to pretend to admire this or that work
when the fact was, to be candid, little by my contemporaries ever moved me.
I had escaped the worst of the conversation
by reatreating to the balcony, and by pretending to peruse
the work of the man of the hour,
intently turning the pages, and letting the words slide away
into a haze of inattention and smoke and champagne.

"It's brilliant, don't you think?" she asked.
"Fantastic" I replied.
Of course it was just another piece of ethereal postmodernism,
subtle like a perfume, but like a perfume
prone to grow stale, and to evaporate.
It was a love story, apparently, albeit one
of gorgeous inconsequence, told in the style
of desiccated cool. "He's very elegant" I added,
looking into her eyes for the first time
as she smiled, and drew back her long straight black hair
which seemed to me almost geometrically pure
where it flowed down over her simple white dress.

How does a love begin?
In a world where beauty seems common,
where one can, it seems, choose among different beauties,
how does a love begin?
With real beauty, where so much other beauty proves false?
With a subtle elision of competing desires?
Or with something crasser -
with opportunity, and coincidence?
Or is it something more profound at work,
a duplicity so soft and pervasive
you do not notice you are lost in it,
nor that you are its source?
Or something perhaps more profound again -
with a willed ideal,
something so lucid and so pure
you can hardly believe that it has happened to you
or that you make it happen?
Can you tell me? Will you tell me?
How a love begins?

I think our love began through a kind of dark luck.
I believe we both felt that, almost at once -
that we were lucky to meet,
in all this vast world of people,
by the suspended light of midsummer in the evening,
suspending in each other's eyes
a glance of all our fortunes.
For each other, we were a kind of knowledge,
we were a certainty, we were, at last,
the destination of love.
We went from off to on in lightning -
there seemed to be few increments:
one moment, I was not in love,
not even really believing in love anymore,
or believing I was capable of love anymore;
and then, the next moment,
I was in love with you,
and I found myself staring at my own hands, bemused,
and watching tufts and liquid zigzags of moonlight and of electric light
striate and glimmer on the canal, thinking
how suddenly my life was alive,
and that I was not used to it...

It was disorientating.
Loving you, I felt somehow innocent again.
There was an adolescent purity to the way I felt,
and yet a kind of adult detachment as well,
which was confusing. That strange fervour quickly
became a source of unease to me.
I was no longer built to feel this way.
It wasn't becoming - not appropriate - it was too
unbalanced. You know how totalitarian adolescent emotion can be,
how one lacks the defeated wisdom of irony at that age,
so that one is unable to leaven the passion
with a real understanding that the passion will end,
and that, in any case, life was not really that passion,
although the passion was life.
So, within a few days, I found myself troubled by our beauty,
and trying to check back, but unable to do so.
It was like a brilliant music, but a music
one couldn't turn off -
a music which we made, but which rather despised us,
a rough music, which wished to use us,
then use us up, and cast us aside...
But how sensational it was - that music...

I catch a drowned train to work.
And the doors take an age to close.
It is midsummer, and the windows are open.
I take my seat, where I usually sit,
and listen to the music which is burning in the drowned train.
Only I hear the music, burning in the drowned train.
We leave, late as usual, and draw out of the drowned station,
past the platforms where other travellers are standing
and head out, into the open countryside,
flooded with water and light.

I know a few of my fellow commuters by sight,
sitting in their usual seats.
Their hair floats upwards, and shimmers in the water,
and their newspapers slowly drift and warp and crumple
as the train picks up speed.
Some of them have dumb smiles on their faces.
Some of them sleep, with their mouths wide open,
and a slow unravel of silver bubbles rising from their throats.
Some gaze, detached, disengaged, out of the window.
And the music rages and there is silence
in the carriage, in midsummer, beneath the waves.

And it is the same trip in reverse at night.
The crowds bob and nudge beneath the glass
of the train shed's roof. They float down the platforms.
The trains rest and throb without noise
like chunky, geometric eels.
The carriage doors open and the crowds drift out.
In midsummer, when the evenings are light,
and the day and one's life linger,
in the drowned city, where the taxi cabs
queue and sprout coral, while all the time
an aqueous music rages across the world,
and no one listens.

My old steps wait for me. It's been a long time.
All those places, sites of my life,
for so long unvisited. There, the newspaper stand,
where the vendor calls me Guv and Chief,
still with his newspapers, dated before "the event",
stacked and bound with dark blue plastic baling tape;
and there, the coffee stall, with the staff from China,
Vietnam, Venezuela, the Ukraine,
and the cardboard beakers with a latté for me
and Alena floating by, half out of the booth...

I was on my way to you. I guess I always was,
and perhaps I still am,
if desire is a kind of journey,
if oneself is not enough.
And when the surface of the sea is uneasy,
and the agitation of night rain keeps me awake,
oceans of the past come calling,
a voice out of the deep,
with sea urchins on my pillow
and my thoughts in your hands
like a scoop of pearls.

You were a kind of stillness, but storms came to you.
Even now, I want to praise you:
but how can I praise you when you mock all praise
with a loveliness no one has ever known before,
which is fresh to the world, refreshes us, and outruns all our words?

What can I say? We loved you.
Men, women, we adored you.
You know how people have different talents:
to each of us a gift; to each, a loss.
To some people, thought comes easily;
to some, feeling - they're emotional.
To some, words come without effort,
names, like Caspian or les anges, or altocirrus -
whatever. To some people,
a certain skill; to others, a certain mystery.

But to some, life itself comes whole,
and living is at home in them,
not just the bird flying in the sky,
but the sky as well,
and you were like this.
Other people loved to be near you,
didn't want you to leave at the end of the evening.
You hadn't given up, and you hadn't given in:
no wonder we were grateful for knowing you.
And you were so generous with yourself, it was almost frightening.
There were moments when you were high,
and you reminded us of the eerie grandeur of a human life,
when the whole scene begins to open up -
not just a moment -
when the voids of time and space and memories
are like a landscape under a slowly rising moon,
the shadows of trees very gently moving,
swaying with the passage of the moon above them
like weeds flowing beneath a stream.
We felt the world turning when we were with you.
We felt the pain when the axis of the world
was driven right through you while you were crying.
You were a kind of stillness, but storms came to you.
You were beautiful and made us hopeful.

Now you lie on your back with blood in your eyes,
and somewhere an engine running.
Castles float away, you've lost one of your shoes
and they never do find it.
And I don't understand anything,
because all the castles begin to float away
and you lie on your back, with blood in your eyes,
with one foot bare,
you don't say anything.
No one can hold the castle forever.
You think you can keep it for a while,
but really you don't keep it at all.
You try to hold the castle, but the castle was light,
the castle has gone.
You sit in your castle, but the castle betrays you,
the castle melts away.
You couldn't even hold the castle for thirty five years.
One by one, these castles, these bastions,
drift away. And you lie by the road
with a head full of sky, and I stand
above you, with the wheels still turning,
but you don't say anything:
and if you don't say anything,
then how can I hear you?...

There were tears in my eyes and clouds in my mind.
There was you, in my mind, with the tears in my eyes.
It is the moments when you break,
you cannot remember them.
It is the moment of vision but with no one seeing,
with clouds in the sky, and the sky, above you,
in your mind. And with your hand in my hand,
and my hand empty, there were clouds in my eyes.
It was a moment of vision with no one left to see.
It was my hand in your hand, and our hands empty.
It is the moment you mean something,
the moment you break.
You lie on your back with blood in your eyes,
and you are a different kind of stillness.
Above me, clouds float away,
and we go looking for one of your shoes.
You were a kind of stillness, but storms came to you.
You are a different kind of stillness,
and now all the storms belong to me.

When the great wave came, he was lying naked on his back
in his apartment, watching a dvd, the lights out,
awash with the black and white of the film.
And she, she was looking at her mobile phone;
she was standing in the street, checking a txt message
when the great wave reared up behind her.
Me, I was looking down in my hands
at a few coins, counting my change
when the great wave came.
And the great wave came.
And now all the storms belong to me.

At that time, a second-rate critic called me 'the master of the supercool'.
It was because of the forensic inertia of my style,
the affectless way my writing occurred,
flowed through events, seemed to come into contact with many things,
and yet failed to react to them,
or to cause a reaction from them,
to be hollow like a crucible, to catalyse nothing.
I thought how cool it was,
to be the 'master of the supercool'.
And there I was, the master of the supercool,
down on my knees sobbing and with snot on my fingers,
choking and weeping, with a sore throat and with no air in my lungs,
because I'd listened to a record in which the singer
had used the words 'folding chair',
and because you had not called me.

What was the darkness of the luck of it, our love?
How can I say? A certain inscrutability about events,
the stealth of a life passing so massive with subtlety,
the sheer ethereality of the machinery,
where a simple whisper can bring on a suicide,
or a storm break and you not notice it at all.
But perhaps that quality of darkness
was also to do with the fact that our love was real,
and real in a certain way,
in a way which did not tolerate weakness,
which was a form of necessity,
a love which made ruthless demands of us
and in which, if we didn't meet those demands, 
certain consquences must inevitably follow,
knowledge of weakness, knowledge of loss,
a love which, in the end, became a kind of dare,
and in which, in the end,
we began to run out of options,
as the drowning begin 
to run out of air.

At first though, it was not like that.
But it was radical, almost at once.
Love of that nature and strength
is like a kind of exile - an exile where
one is banished not from a place
but from a time, from one's own past
and from the life which came before,
which love changed by making it irrelevant,
insipid, somehow, useful only in that it did eventually pass
and so, at last, bring us together.
Friends, routines, work, families, they all somehow dropped away,
exiled to inconsequence. They went on, of course,
but they made us, who were impatient only to be with each other,
merely irritated, because we knew we were wasting our time
away from each other.
So, our earlier life became a distant place,
provincial, spectral, shrouded in a less benevolent weather,
in a dreary clime, far from the centre of my currency.

We made a mess of it.
And not a quick mess like a broken bowl,
but a long, slow mess, a creeping stain, a growing cloud,
a situation which evolved
without our even being able to notice it was evolving,
never mind trying to change or end it: a situation 
which worsened gradually.
Sometimes, when a love fails, it fails through boredom or fatigue,
a sudden depressurisation, and you walk away.
You find that you were never really that engaged,
you stayed easily within the bounds
of what you may call your own life,
and you can easily get back there when the love breaks down,
it is not far to go,
just a walk across a childhood field,
in summer, as you remember...

But we didn't make a love like that,
it wasn't an arrangement with each other,
but with life itself.
We made a love real, and against death,
and I found that as our love began to rot
and go off, it was not so easy for me
to find that path across a childhood field,
that my own life was far away from me,
that I was trapped
in the strange country of our room with you,
and that I could not get back.

It was not our fault, but we believed too much.
Perhaps there was a little pride, but I don't know.
What we made was not really very natural.
We wanted something absolute, so pure,
we wanted to live at altitude,
above the common crawl and drift of other lives,
above the din of greed and habit,
and to resist all the deprecations and erosions of a lesser life -
we didn't want to be reduced,
to grow banal and torpid,
to allow our lives to settle and to pass
as if in a dream, lazily, without passion anymore.
But it is not easy, sustaining such a love.
It is like trying to hold a note forever.
We were trying to go against our own nature,
our being creatures of the relative,
not made for promises or for staring too long,
but made for moments of inattention,
yawning, negligence, for compromise and tenderness,
for unbidden memory, for memory
of ripeneing wheat and a path beside a field
in July, with the sky a dawdling emptiness above you,
and the sheer, daydream blue of infinite recession,
the blue of exhaustion and extinction,
the endless fathoms of your future calling to you...

So our love became too much for us,
and I began to hanker for the way home.
Our love never matured, never mellowed or relaxed.
Instead, it kept its initial, almost childlike intensity.
It became a dare, for one of us to weaken,
to refuse to keep working at the brilliant seam,
to shimmer towards a wish for something less fine,
less serious, less beautiful.
It became a race, a challenge, a game of chicken,
not to be the first one to grow afraid,
to find the belief in each other impossible to sustain.
But in the foundations of our love,
that absolute injunction still remained and ruled:
if we flickered in our belief in each other,
if we let our love die,
then what would be left to believe in,
what wouldn't we let die?
And then the belief in everything must flicker too,
and everything would die to us,
and yet go on, absurdly, like a ghastly chore, mocking us,
floating in the scattered wreckage of the irrelevant,
in the trash which collects around
a broken word, and a revealed illusion.
That was the subliminal condition under which we lived.
We had to be utterly faithful.
And in the end, but quite naturally, I came
to resent it.

The evening I found out you were having an affair
with that nonentity, I felt quite ill.
I had spent the afternoon in our flat,
dozing by the open windows of the balcony.
The heat was stifling: it felt
as if you could pick little beads of moisture
right out of the air, it was so humid.
You know how morbidly sensitive I am to sound,
and how I hate the neighbours to make noise,
especially when I want to sleep or write.
That afternoon, in an uneasy sleep,
I kept waking, and it seemed to me that down
in the flat below, a door kept opening and closing,
and that all afternoon, to the banging of a door,
people kept coming and going.

I woke in a fine net or shawl of sweat,
cast in a kind of vapour all over me.
I must have been sickening for something.
I felt totally enervated; and no matter how much water I drank,
I felt continually thirsty.
Life is like that sometimes, just migraine and fireworks.
Downstairs, the door kept banging, and I heard voices.
It didn't seem logical: people kept coming and going,
it seemed as if there were queues of them,
all afternoon, hundreds of people queuing
to enter or to leave that flat below us.
I felt angry and miserable. What was going on?
It didn't seem to be a party or even a gathering,
just this incessant flow of people
going through the door, which banged every time
someone passed through. It was strange,
and I cursed my neighbours for their lack of consideration.
It was pointless even trying to write.
Instead, somehow, I dozed.

You left me to die.
But I didn't die, at least
not entirely. We were like two mountaineers,
and you were the lead -
you were the lead, because I loved you.
But then, what happened?
Did you grow bored? Did I disappoint you?
You seemed to lose interest,
but the thing which ceased to interest you
was my life. It was our love.
Doesn't that trouble you?
Have you no idea of the weight of a life?
How could you do what you did
so easily? How could you cut me loose in that way,
and let me fall?
How could you leave me to die?

The drowned people want more.
Too much is not enough, they must bring more drowning down.
I glimpsed you together on the escalators.
You were drowned too, it seemed.
He was leaning towards you in that complacent,
yet ingratiating way he has,
as you slid away down the escalators.
He was like his writing: facile, derivative, second-rate,
although the banality of the culture encouraged him
to believe he was someone.
Perhaps he was someone, in that drowned world.
I stopped, stockstill, when I saw him kissing you,
and the drowned people bumped into me,
nuzzled me like helpless fish
before drifting on. I watched you both
disappearing down the well of the escalators,
into the darkness of the drowned station
where a world had long ago come to an end.

I woke to the sound of the door of the downstairs flat banging.
People were leaving, it seemed.
I didn't know what to do with myself that day,
and I found myself in the mall
watching the crowd floating and drifting along among the shops
or being transported on the gliding escalators.
And on the streets, they lolled out of their cars,
the engines idling. They played their music,
floating along, gliding, bobbing.
Fish darted among us as we rode the tube.
Light from above occasionally penetrated the tunnels.
Light, from before. Light, from above the surface.
But we didn't take much notice.
We were too intent on getting our share of things.
There was limited time, we had to try and make sure
we got everything we could.
There was so much we could have.
We wanted more and more, even if
it meant we immediately ignored all that we already had.
We needed to fill ourselves full of things.
And you were quite rapacious, you know,
for all that you were beautiful.
You wanted more.
And eventually, you wanted someone else,
someone who also wanted more.
And because such people are of easy morality
you found him. Now you have each other.
But, of course, you want more.
Just like the others. They all wanted more.
And where, in the end, could they find more?
I watched you all disappearing,
down the well of the smooth escalators,
into the darkness of the drowned station
where you all found more.

I dreamed, with tears in my eyes and glass in my hair.
As I watched the crowd moving towards the escalators
I saw flowers begin to rush upwards
from somewhere deep down in the darkness.
I was frightened. I could feel a very strong current of some kind
which was drawing me towards it.
Though I was still, I was forced on to tip-toe, leaning forward.
A crack, a vent, had opened, in my dream, in the past.
I could feel myself being impelled towards
a column of underwater smoke, a thermal,
into which detritus was being sucked and caught,
surging upwards towards the distant surface
miles above us. White flowers from an underground stall,
pouring upwards, styrofoam cups, newspapers,
with muscular submarine fire the colour of blood,
and a smoke black as crude oil,
all incessantly pouring away, pouring upwards.
I was sure there was something I had to remember.
I was sure there was something I was supposed to do.
Then I woke, and I remembered I loved you,
and that love was useless, now.

It was all right. Everything was safe,
everything was going on as before.
Each night, I kissed your beautiful face,
your eyes wide open, their whites
so clear against your skin of pale, asphyxiated blue.
Your hair flowed and drifted upon the pillow.
Our children slept, with seaweed wound upon their cradles.
In the mornings, I wrote my long, languorous poems
about Saturdays and shopping and Japanese films,
about the futility of passion, poems as sinuous and ethereal
as the hips of white candle flames
shifting in the air when someone moves, then
resuming their elongated almond burning
recklessly lovely with no thought of time.
And I thought of the perfect greeds of candles,
of things designed to burn and waste, to burn and shine,
to waste away in light like flowers,
never to come back.

It was much later when I realised we would have to separate.
I'm obtuse. I'm middle-aged, I guess, my habits have made me torpid.
Ironically, we were to separate in spring.
It was a wet spring, but very warm,
I felt almost as if I were in the tropics.
At times it seemed as if the rain were perpetual.
Rain seemed to make a theatre of everything,
with curtains of water hanging from rooves,
and all our humdrum movements accompanied
by the soft, ominous, crushing sounds of rain.
I grasped that you would go, that I would be alone,
in the midst of this carnival of moisture,
a fertility which seemed almost barbaric.
As I watched the ropes of pearls of teeming beads,
and heard the gutterings choke,
saw blossoms sailing down the roads on spreading floodwater,
the drains backed up, the flowering trees
trembling and shaking, as if electrocuted by the power of rain,
I looked ahead to something barren,
something denuded, a life without you.

It was okay. I realised it was only my personal sorrow,
that my emotion had little traction on the world.
It was a very trivial thing, my loneliness.
It is not important to be happy. It is important to be real.
It is important to be true. To be alive when you are living,
and when you are dead, to die.
This was what I told myself.
Events in any case had overtaken us.
Our self-consuming love, so vital to us,
was like a tiny dab of colour after a bombing,
or the movement of an animal through the ruins.
I realised what we were living through
was a Dresden or a Nagasaki or a Tokyo,
it was a place for cremation and cremators:
beyond question, this location marked the end of the world.
And there we were, making our way through the rain,
through the wreckage, through the rain
in spring, the buds like weapons on the boughs.

And so we came to rest in open country.
The storm light had a mineraline quality, slightly glassy,
as if the air were being slowly poured through a flake
of translucent quartz. The world folded its wings,
and stopped singing, crouching down,
waiting for the storm to break.
Leaves fell still, the air died.
I stopped singing, you rested closer against me.
You had an avian grace, a swanlike movement in nestling
your head against my neck.
I felt an unbearable sadness, 
a sadness I had spent all my life trying to avoid
and all my life searching for, too.
I found it with you when you rested against me,
and I realised that even though you had betrayed me
I still loved you; and that my loving you
would change nothing, and you would betray me again
and it was alright. I knew my tenderness,
my resignation, my love, they were all useless,
that there was a desolate place
where all emotion ceased and the point of emotion failed.
I stopped singing, because that desolate place
was very near, and we didn't have much time.
The train rolled to a standstill.
Outside, the grasses stopped swaying,
and we all waited, expecting the driver to make an announcement.