Andrew Nightingale
DOB: 14/7/69 (UK)
Personal site (a selection of links to work in
ezines): www.hermegasmica.org.uk/list.htm

My work has previously been published in a number of
UK small press magazines such as Orbis, Manifold,
Staple etc as well as in ezines such as Stride,
Alterran Poetry Assemblage and Sidereality.
Email address: nightand@yahoo.co.uk

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I CAGED COY MOJO

for Amalia

1.

Why? Why to capture the envoy
then fix it. Fix its movements
to steel rails. To move tram-like.

Muses: spirits that possess.
Shy anima fixations. Mojo
forced by rails to talk.

Always travelling,
the envoy looks out of sooty carriage windows:
she holds a secret message.

I spend all my time waiting on an empty platform:
Amalia, now stone dead, is coming tonight by rail.
She has stolen information.
I wait, taking a chance,
but it's the old Triestine Honeytrap: femme fatale!

The envoy is a secret agent:
I can see her figure silhouetted, carrying an attaché case.
She's bringing her dead words to a warm mouth.
The air around her resonates,
the planchette is rattling,
and everything she has to say comes through in secret code.
What she reveals, no-one else can ever read.

2.

An envoy speaks out loud.
Internal speech leaks outside:
her voice has automated paradox.

An automated paradox:
a paradox because it's out there
and automated because it's tram-like and can't go off
the rails.

Gustave Moreau's muse is all gossamer and light.
I can't get to grips with this painting.
I'm taking her out of it,
placing her on a crowded tram,
putting a letter in her hand,
waiting on a platform again for her visit,
for mojo to make tracks
with word from heaven's secret agencies.
 
*

for a Cup of Coffee

1.

In Palo Alto they conducted experiments on ESP. Its strength, at times, was increased three-fold.

Local Sidereal Time was key. Spottiswode found performance increased daily, when certain stars were overhead as though calda luce cremosa was pouring down. I prefer coffee. I find good strong espresso has a similar effect on anomalous cognition when my eyes tire of Adriatic light. Miei occhi falliscono al buio. When we fail we listen, and the radio starts coming through.

But as far as radio sets are concerned,
it's an old analogy now...

Spicer. Strong coffee. Staring downwards, darkness turns. Stirring spoon. Sip.

Swallow. This is Heimarmene. The compulsion that distant stars steadily exert, inserting our desires from outside. Remote bodies are grains of white sugar - their sweet modulations can be misleading. They're added from outside the borders of the cup, spirits to work on us, such well-behaved customers. Tremulous, hyped, entranced by the vortex...... Look! Mars! Broadcasting!

2.

Each morning I wake up early,
four minutes before yesterday:
the stars hold sway over sunlight.
The world keeps turning, meanwhile
I sit tingling with strong Mocha in
Trieste, on a shady table outside the Caffé Degli Specchi.
She must exist: black goddess,
my poisoner:

I mean, if I suddenly thought I could do without it,
I'd do without

Day is ending and only cinnamon-sprinkles will break the spell.
The harbour lights oppose the stars
turning against the frictionless dome: hours, days, months:
I've written nothing and I'm stuck fast between yellowing pages
aging slowly. Please, Amalia,
get me coffee!

*

for Jan Morris

1.

Memento Mori: you move
to the capital of nowhere.
Che pense? Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria.
Autobiography as travel guide,
      hiraeth, limbo,
I was the world in which I walked, and I was the very junction between east and west.
O! Come home:
      flags, trams,
            listless,
      passengers, waiting,
      ships,
            the empty streets,
      gardens, scented,
            urbanity, exile,
                  hiraeth,
      messengers, spies:
            home to nowhere.
This place, it's wet with foreign memories!

Hush it's ten to the hour. Do you hear?

Memories falling like rain: sopping-wet angels.

2.

I know you liked Wales as much as you liked exile in Trieste. I suppose you internalised your exile. Until it wrote itself through you. Writing through you and your body a page. Ghosts in mirrors are trapped there... Inverted! Paperless!

A gentle creature.
That moment, she says,
ten minutes before the hour
      when things pause,
will leave just enough space.
For angels passing!
      There'll always be room
in a moment's hesitation
to reconstruct an entire life.

Rubbing out a page of writing and rewriting it is not for the sentimental. The blanked words are put to death, covered up - reproduction in print... is no longer a possibility. Your body cut in half makes two outward facing bookends around the bulk of your text, so we have the sense of an old woman falling asleep on the end of a shelf... falling into the serenity of the stars: the observatory, that old castle: it's observing deepest space. Nobody is there!
 
*

for the Fish

1.

She keeps her hands in full view as the skittish planchette clearly announces the arrival of a certain Mr V. Dear lady: Madame, take heed. It's your William your little William. She whispers her question in breathless awe: the table rocks. The pencil taps repeatedly on the paper then starts to move rapidly leaving in its wake the scrawled froth of a contemporary bourgeois criticism strangely at odds with a life of sexual indiscretions. Hester Travers Smith's Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde records a singular impression: a great bulk of filth written in a fit. Hester can't have thought writing itself a perversion nor that channelling made her a voyeur, a tarnished silver shadow... fingers, cold and calm and moving... for souls, lost souls.

I can hear her whispering now. Hester's opinions by proxy: on this. It can't possibly make any more sense than a child's distracted scribbling. Patterns, disembodied patterns, no centre holds! Hester, have mercy!...... O hoher Baum im Ohr!

2.

First his precipitations appeared on my computer: I swallowed them too easily.

The future is random, uncertain, dangerous... Then Mr S came to visit. It's my own fault: because I let him into the house, unhindered; the Lords of the Dark Face have many envoys. Mr S was a bulky somnolent man of middle age: he hadn't come to deliver destiny, bowler-hatted, so much as to sell insurance to me... Old Latchkey wouldn't leave until he had prevailed: satisfied himself. Expelled the Esoteric Lodge. Master! Earthly Master!

I've tried to erase all traces of his visit: introductory letters, financial proposals, those clichés that come automatically. But I couldn't get rid of his pervasive smell, like over-ripe fish caught off Porlock. Dirty words! I won't be his servile amanuensis for any longer. His words foul fishes in my mouth. A corporate man writing a cage out through me that cages me in the constructed space.

No sensible person would suggest that you shouldn't take out insurance, quite the contrary, they say, and the advice is like having a slick and expensive funeral with all the brass trimmings. Your mode of operation changes. Sure. It unbuckles heaven's grim psychodrama in which quite undemocratic tortures are awaiting you.
 
*
 
for Lucia Joyce

1.

She's a little American flapper: dancing
her Ballet Faunesque for Isadora Duncan.

After the fire she's transferred to special care,
it's prétesse primitive,
she sometimes feels homemade like a motherless child.
A homemade silver fish starting fires.
Why is she crying?

She has a disintegrating gift: her Chaplin impressions.

She dates suddenly.
Beckett leaves her Dante:
ardent, indifferent:
a monkey-ish changeability: foreboding.

2.

Alexander is the last to be pushed aside. Guess what, she's started writing novels! She hits mother. Like one in ten, she holds her pen lefthanded. Waiting.

The spirits, though they can't be forced to come, will move their wisdom-wearied lexicon to the hand that summons them over the Karst.

            I am a catatonic empress
      starting fires: blue-veined I am
            Miramare unbuilt.
      I am love's old sweet song: I am
            a kind of insect I am
      falling not diving I am,
            an amputee, at full moon
      I am gone gone with the needle boats......
                  But I was never Lucia!...

*

for the Man Carrying an Umbrella

We're following timetables.
A tram moves through the piazza in an arc
that repeats itself at regular intervals.
The tram halts and I step off into a sudden downpour.
      I open my umbrella.
In truth I'm not sure I've the gifts needed to make this work:
I'm too passive and normal and stuck in my ways.
      Like other normal people: I carry an umbrella.
Neither called nor chosen. We coyly elect ourselves.
      But how?
      - What dictates, these words, these lines!
      - Can't it be described as who?
      - What?
      - The sense of Amalia writing through you.

Rain tapping
on my umbrella -
fleeting codes - falling
and falling -
each momentary meaning
impossible to stop.

Non c' è fine...

Boulders: wrecked stone trams.
Torpid fractions.
Shattered on the Karst:
they once fell.

An open umbrella
helps block heavenly light,
rock-falls, and junk mail.

Her precipitations:
this rain, memories,
and letters inked
on a white field.

Envoys: water droplets, tasting of Amalia.

*

The procedure used in I CAGE COY MOJO was to (as far as possible) swap words, word for word, into the text of Giacomo Joyce while maintaining punctuation, italics and sentence length. The procedure proved too much to complete so what is left is I CAGED COY MOJO

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