Hanging in the Air

Andrea Brady

 

Being less than an activity

we empty out the life that hangs

like code in the air, but for how long

does it survive there if the air is white and lush,

more benevolent to the city than ever, whose leaves are out

of a season we are missing. It hangs

on the window like a recrimination,

a rainbow trail, the wolf’s chalky invite

to the last kid hiding in the clock.

And like a call; and is filled with calls

of the chattering species

whose voices are carried from house to house

parties and face times, many heard, the more silent.

 

And like nothing but indifference

growing warmer in the tangled biome to its human

carriers. We pick our way prudently down the street.

The person who passes is like us

a matrix of infection. We turn around at the head

of the aisle that has someone in it, and wash our hands

and shrink. Our hands are very dry now. Our mean gestures have all changed.

 

 

When in this poem I say we I mean a nuclear family in London

who are lucky. Having outside space.

The ball keeps getting kicked over the fence, and there is someone

there to return it.

 

 

A friend, who is Chinese, has been repeatedly abused in the street.

Mean gestures, filthy speech. The street is also the space

where our neighbours are clapping. Where we perform distance

to contain the bad humours that may be hidden

in another body. Hidden inside a room that can’t be left

because of the news, the violent man, the guard, the border. It is now

very easy to get sectioned. We consider ourselves indefinitely

separated from our friends and lovers and nothing will be the same

until it is, and the amazonification

of the planet will be complete, and we’ll be released

from our incommensurate lockdown to party and write poems

upon poems about the virus and the discourse of war.

And some will still not be able to go out into

the streets still full of the performance of abuse.

 

 

For now we pick apart the hem looking for silver linings

inside the garment of bad surprises.

 

 

My kids have been teaching me about black holes, clock time

and dentistry in ancient Egypt.

I thought the singularity was a site of infinitely dense matter

but it’s the profound energy that distorts space and time.

They’re overjoyed to learn that if they tried to pass

through its horizon they’d be spaghettified,

their whole body a stream of plasma

one atom wide. If your being was not then empty

it would be still, watching the universe shift

and quicken before it.

 

 

Right now I’m writing this standing up because I’m teaching

and working and printing and feeding and remembering

and in pain. When you’re sick or in pain it’s hard to remember

what it was like not to be, the self that streamed

painlessly through another world is not yourself, the light

stuttering on her face was not your light or your face.

How could I have been so stupid not to notice

how easy it has always been for me to move down the street?

Right now I am trying to read and not read the accounts

of the anaesthetists. I misread the inhalation

of toxic gas as toxic glass. I don’t want to think of all the people alone

 

 

I tell the kids to write about their experiences

of this big historical singularity

and hide its data from them. I could say it’s like the way

the black hole can’t be seen but shifts everything around it

but that’s a comparison in a poem and the kids just laugh.

They know that the collapse of everything clears

the air at least. How cool the sky would always be

without the scratching of motors. We could lag together,

smooth in our suspension.

 

We stay in the yard.

 

In its green and yellow is an image

of the lungs we will be given

if we cross the horizon and abandon

the nuclear family, private property, obedient domains.

 

1 April 2020

 

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Andrea Brady’s books of poetry include The Strong Room (Crater, 2016), Dompteuse (Book Thug, 2014), Cut from the Rushes (Reality Street, 2013), Mutability: Scripts for Infancy (Seagull, 2012), and Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (Krupskaya, 2010). She is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, where she founded the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now.