The poem below comes from towards the end of Rob A. Mackenzie’s freshly launched pamphlet Fleck and the Bank. Fleck, an unconventional bank employee, has disappeared. A few months later, a letter-in-poetry arrives.
To Occupy an Absence
…now blankness can speak through me in blank verse (Ian Duhig)
Dear Rob,
The nights are short here and the days
Slip by in prayer or what I have learned to call
Prayer: the occupation of a stirring
Privation of thought in air with matter at hand,
With underhand mock-heroic power
Liturgically fuelled neither by common
Order nor disorder nor delusion,
Where hope springs abysmal, undermined
By temporal despair, but still attempts:
Take the sponge’s unfinished ode to mud,
The cook who spun blancmange in his own image,
Rimbaud’s valentine to Tom Verlaine –
Pointless, incongruous, I take my pen,
Replace blankness with a solid blank
Line and line of blank verse and a blank cheque’s
Inevitable bounce, and dedicate
Them to the heterodox and highly strung
Patron saint of plainsong maledictions
For unstringable lyre. She croons to me:
To butterfingered guardians of the banks
Patrolling selective memory blanks –
Sing grace;
To where the hype gyrates hip after hip
While talent hiccups from its crypt –
Sing grace;
To memorabilia groupies hellbent
On Nazi tat: Hitler’s tablecloth,
Waxwork Belsen Commandant –
Sing grace;
To the boom and bust of certifiable facts
Drifting from their origin in dust
Jackets and unexamined acts –
Sing grace;
Eine kleine Nachtmusik dissolving
Into daylight’s cursory rush; within
Each note a little death, diminuendo,
Undiminished by its power to hold
Only the merest resonance of grace,
To make nothing happen beyond a dim
Psalm sung among the gleaming neon signs.
Eyes down. Follow your ears.
Yours, Fleck
P.S.
To the self-effacing inconsolable
And the too eagerly consoled –
Sing grace;
To literary artifice where curse
Resembles blessing, blessing curse –
Sing grace
Or otherwise, and sing the difference.
Rob A. Mackenzie is from Glasgow and lives in Edinburgh. His publications are The Clown of Natural Sorrow (pamphlet, HappenStance Press 2005), The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt 2009) – and a new pamphlet, Fleck & the Bank (pamphlet, Salt 2012) . He is reviews editor for Magma Poetry magazine.