Excavation on the Nether Steppe

Philip Gross

Illustration by joinedbywire@hotmail.com

Toccata in the Key of T
for Ceri Thomas

To begin with: a meeting.
            Simple I
comes up against a new dimension.

It’s a sign. Of change?
          Give Way
and you may find it’s not a junction

but a desert freeway,
            a roadmovie theme’s
                      one track unreeling
boundless to a straight horizon

as far as the I
          can see, and over
                  maybe into free fall. T
is a journey, always and just now begun.

                       T

It’s a traveller’s tale: the lone
      T, miles out on the plain
page like a nail hammered in
       to a blank map, a staked claim,

a surveyor’s levelling post
        that sizes up the grid plan
of a coming city. Some reports
       say that it’s huge, on the horizon,

others (as they crawled towards
         it) tiny, inches from the eye.
It’s True North, the True Cross,
        it’s a pit-prop holding up the sky,

a single column, Doric maybe,
        with a dream of colonnades,
a civilisation… though the empire
        this capital – T – bestrides

         is its own shadow, always falling.

                        T

Towards sunset we pulled off
    on the dirt verge, here as good as anywhere,
       now that we’d given up looking. There it stood. Or rather,

reclined – not at attention, not at ease,
    like a Roman condemned to an eternal banquet:
       a tumbledown rooftree, walls and timbers stripped from round it,

dispersed on the wind: an unaccommodated
  sound, unpronounceable: topple-T… not quite
     a dead letter but going that way, one dropped out of the alphabet

like those losers yogh and thorn. But not,
   wind mumbled in it, not too late to turn, to be T-square,
      T-total (yes, tomorrow)… It was a tall tale laid low, a True Historie

that stumbled on the edge of telling. What
   could we say? Already, as we drove on through
      the night we’d begun to forget… what? It’s on the tip of my tongue.

blank line
blank line

Excavation on the Nether Steppe
Unhinging the coffin, unpeeling the verdigrised
trim from shreds of sandalwood that’s mulched, gone
or held in suspension by the rotted silk that lines it…
a crack, a breath of dead air

and the first thing you think is: empty. Then,
the shock of the small (was the conquering Khan
a midget? deformed?) in a breastplate and circlet
most particularly wrought:

a monkey-mummy, tailor-made-up as royalty,
with jewels, with regalia, more than just a surrogate
so Death would let (that year) the real king be,
no, a mockery – in your face,

Death, here’s a monkey come to best you – while
king, courtiers and the artist who conceived the jest fell
about, and fell down laughing, irremediably, laughing
till their breath was gone

and if we think we know so much better, so might we.

 

 

 

 

The Light Box

Dull on the outside (as the final Emperor decreed),
flawlessly silvered within – the mirror-maker’s
masterpiece.
           Why would you wish to live
beyond perfection? Call yourself an artist?
said His Munificent Majesty. He nodded
to the executioner
                    and the work was complete.

§

To admire it was never the point.

Rather, the perfect day
in late spring, the light washed by rain,
the sun itself doing the rounds
of pacified horizons:
                   Now
he snapped it shut. All he could wish
was inside, even his own face smiling
like a child.

§

Was he tempted to open it? Naturally. But this
was never equal to the fine delight
of knowing it was his
and (once the headsman too received his coup
de grace) that no one,
no one knew.

§

Things crumbled. Naturally. What if… – he found
himself glancing down the corridor in which the room

- …if by some sleight of somehow – in which only he
knew which of a thousand cabinets which secret compartment

- I might yet grow small enough to slip inside? -
until the day he went to look

and found he had forgotten.

§

After the palace was burned,
the rubble.

After the rubble was cleared,
a box

resembling a charred brick
almost perfectly.

§

It became the corner stone

                             for another illusion

§

and another, and another, e.g.
that the forger of this fable might be me

(as opposed to, say,
a sour boy in a hide hut
near that wind-wrecked border

whose father set off for the far and half-
imagined palace with a cart of mirrors

and has not returned; 
                      or

§

that any happiness
                      (Now,
my love, our health and time
still holding, do I dare to say
Now?)
                might not have terror in it:

shut my eyes, wish for forever;

shut my eyes, all this might disappear.

for Zélie

 

PHILIP GROSS’S latest poetry publications are The Egg of Zero (Bloodaxe Books – shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize 2007) and The Abstract Garden (Old Stile Press, with engraver Peter Reddick) as well as the novel The Storm Garden (OUP) – all in 2006. A new collection The Water Table (Bloodaxe) and a collaboration with photographer Simon Denison I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon) are due in late 2009. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University, South Wales, UK.