Three Poems by Sean O’Brien

Guide Michelin

Guide Michelin to Languedoc, I let you go
to charity, with all the maps,
because today there are no roads,
because the dust has settled after us
along the endless grove of limes
between the Aude and Ventenac, although
beneath the Cave the great canal
goes silently about its business
of reflection, on, on, between the willows.
Now the war is done, and what I think of it
like your advice and like your pointed silences
is neither here or there –
likewise the scent of burning vines,
the blink of snow as pale as cataract
high up, beyond the plain, which as I say
it seems we crossed, although
I am forgetting – you and I, Guide Michelin,
when every road was setting out –

Formalities

Exhausted mercury, its shine long lost,
the grey blood thickens in the heart.
I am this poison. There remains no art
to spare us what must happen last.

One chamber empties: does the other fill,
or is this all a pause that’s no such thing?
The body fails to answer to the will.
No time. No time. No more malingering.

At once fantastic and banal, the fact
accelerates away, and there I go,
no wiser, lacking what I always lacked:

so let thermometers and scalpels show
that I and I alone was the disease,
and make an end of these formalities.

Ever After

These things we hold to be self-evident:
the pigs will not perish nor the wolf repent,

and none will forgo or forget or forgive
since forever is where the wild things live.

Once upon a time, therefore, therefore,
the big bad wolf once more, once more

puts on his ancient stinking moleskin trousers
and goes out to blow down the little pigs’ houses.

Sean O’Brien’s eleventh collection, Embark, is due out from Picador in the autumn. His work has received various awards, including the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes and the 2020 Peking Com Arts Poetry Award. He recently edited Alistair Elliot’s Selected Poems, This is the Life. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.