I believed that the poem must stink
          But I didn’t know how to read.
          I just caught the scent of something
          Wafting off the page, plotless as grass.
          Like bad news it could follow me anywhere.
          A character insofar as a smell can fail to please.
          I read for a whiff with my nostrils flared
          Unbecoming as the eros of a dog
          With a cartoon bone in a cartoon cloud
          Above its head. It’s not how things are meant to be read.
          I perform my analysis of the text
          By rubbing myself on the corner of the page
          Like the disaster of being an animal so
          I put down the book as a sign of love.
          I get my things and make my way out.
I have always loved odours, be it sweat,
Morning breath, even excrement,
The dirt of a long train journey and in a bed.
          I lead you to the terrace. A lone
          Crow clicks at the wet dark road.
          One of my best friends is a malodour
          Who lives outside the fourth house along.
          On the way everything’s normal – boxwood,
          Styrofoam, indistinct chips bleached
          grey by the rain – until sudden Delphi
          Where the pavement cracks up like
          The Navel of the World. Air studded
          With perpetual goldfinch; the squalid
          Absolution of a lawn with ceramic
          Bambi votives. I hold us there, transfixed,
          Pythonessing the vapours like poppers
          Of the sublime. Later you say –
          You know it’s raw sewage, that smell outside No. 4?
          Okay so what. The accident of an origin doesn’t contain it.
          And what is a sewer if not an honourable
          Katabasis; if it’s good enough for Zola –
Master of the epic dungheap! The Homer of the sewers!
          – I’ll take it. I don’t mean to say that the
          Sewer is an oubliette of the authentic.
          More that it guards the poem’s stink like
          Baudelaire’s dog who turns up his nose
          At the cut-glass scent of the finest perfume in Paris.
          It’s as Ancient Greek as lyric to marry the nostril
          To resistance. Should we not at least try
          To be waxed splenetic by the artificially
          Preserved – as if never-corpsing – sentiment?
          What I want is for the text to stay opaque,
          Contaminant as a stench even after it’s named.
          Not to read like I sleep with a knife
          By the bed, a would-be stab as if meaning
          Were a night-time intruder. Callie said,
Poems are bad places to go looking for themes;
Our surroundings are so saturated with themes in disguise,
Peeping out from behind every billboard and tweet,
That the poem seems to be the only theatre of language left
In which we are not trying to be convinced of a fact.
          Alone in the sewer of writing I wake in the middle
          Of the night. Dreams of squalor; lyric
          shame sours my breath. I walk past a bush
          And stick my hand into where the smell
          Should be. Soon I become the herb, irradiate
          With the pleasure-fear of pluckability.
          What to do with those dew-on-ankles walks
          Of childhood, along scuzzy edges of fields that
          Always seemed to border the treatment plant, whose
          Vast, grounded clocks – filled with what? – were
          Perpetually stirred in plain view, agape to the sky,
          Which only further enshrined their mystery?
When the public sewage vehicles arrive in a street by night,
How poetic! Such agitation! One couldn’t ask for more!
How to contain oneself! Impossible to hide one’s emotion.
          What if the sewer is my Beloved in the dying
          Romance of the State. If I venerate her networks
          As a blueprint for that municipal fantasy,
          So equally vast, and devoted to the circular
          Abolition of hunger? I dream the amorous
          Needs of the stomach to be met succinct
          As a flush. Little idyll of maintenance works,
          History of prolonged storm discharge, nights
          Of the rounded gables of the nether-jewel of
          Rome. Cloaca Maxima, biggest and most useful
          Of holes, where the Venus of the Sewers tends
          To her toilette. Verily I descend. The goddess
          Cloacina lurks behind the text, sapid
          As a sphinx. I’ve come just how she likes it,
          full-nosed and empty-handed. Cloacina
          Squats on her haunches and asks: How
          Is a sewer like a lyric. She opens her mouth.
          The drain of the world sloshes in and out,
The personal impersonal.
          With tersorium, myrtle and festooned anonymity
          I embellish this House of Office.
***