A Poem by Tony Williams

Transcaucasus

It begins as it always does with a book
which took off its jacket and sat down to wait,
woke up in a different decade where a different light
plays on its threadbare weft and the title shines
like gilt on the domes of old imperial towns
that sit with their toes in the tides of inland seas
no longer traded on, or argued for, as if
both deeps and history could evaporate.
That title promises to dredge up to the light
by virtue of a tale the mise-en-scène
it needs to happen in, the cunning way
the actual has of breaching the abyss
with mantelpieces, samovars and chairs
that people move among. Murmur of sturgeon
moving in black wavelets of water under
midnight towards day… Patronyms
and old proprieties… But neither Tsar
nor Shah nor any patriarch awaits.
The book when opened makes a different change.
At some point in its vigil on the shelves
behind the boiler in the village hall
inside a tea chest coasting tides of dust
in Bishop’s Stortford or a great-aunt’s loft,
between The War and Falklands War the book,
unhinging from its alphabet of birth,
reversed its words’ polarity, so that
to read is not what a reader does to it
but it to its reader, and the reader’s world:
rather than chapter one I see a pear
(it seems to be the one I ate at breakfast),
a hologram of heavy, browning flesh
looming like a fruiterer’s frontispiece,
succeeded quickly by a barking dog,
two cappuccinos and the Netflix app,
a stream of emails, news of you-know-what,
my childhood home, the hospital, the car,
all points I drive to and what’s waiting there.
My face. My bones. The year. It’s all absorbed
by this voracious hoover of a book.
I’m reading now, a memoir of my life,
but sated by myself, I turn away,
looking beyond the pages at the town:
the bridge, the palace, and the mausoleum,
the strange ribbed stonework of the Maiden Tower,
a plate of dumplings, the scherzo’s breezy flight
aborted at the crux, the sullen hands
that played it cool across the keys
turned opalescent in the saffron-scented dusk.
The province holds refusal like a fate.
I clear my throat to use uncertain words
but now a captain of the Olviopol hussars
approaches to arrest me, as he must.
I glimpse the possible as only those
who live a story glimpse it: how I won’t
have time to make my declaration, won’t
come back here from the place that happens next.
There’s joy in misery if that’s how stories tell us:
I’m feeling what my Author meant, except
something is bothering me about that book,
the one that I can hardly remember reading.
My love ­– whose name it seems temporarily escapes me –
she looks away embarrassed when I ask
if I can take it with me, to finish on the train.
What book? Don’t be misled. It’s not that kind of train.
Where I am going there will be no books
and only endings are what happen there.

Tony Williams lives and works in Northumberland. His work has been shortlisted for the Aldeburgh, Michael Murphy and Portico prizes. His most recent collection is Hawthorn City (Salt, 2019).