2 Poems

Dead Languages

Time to think of the dead

languages. Each a syllabary from which

a universe fell. Places,

erased and nameless, lift like

tissue-wrap, to reveal their poverty.

We think by not thinking we think

before language, it feels soft

we lie on it we still know this word

soft we are timid and of course slightly

decayed. The thousands of dead:

if you like, conquered, absorbed,

unfitted. Lie or rely on them: they

matched the world, its cadences, they

lulled objects towards us.

Orpheus’ lyre exists least

of all, under the scent, faint

pear-blossom under which we walk,

in the dark, homeward. Did things

exist before language? Trick question,

nothing can exist before the word exist

exists, or the same or similar

in any of the older deader tongues.

The word precedes the thing. In the lapsed

minute’s monument the word

sits short of breath from having carried

the severed godheads from the temple.

Its speakers singing:

Yelü Chucai, Yelü Chucai.

Driving back

I’m driving my son back to uni.

In front of us

an open lorry with logs of

widths from a couple of metres to

that of a severed arm

and I realise it’s all one tree. The tree is

in bits it has no bark but it’s there it’s

all there I point this out to him and

he too is impressed a whole

great tree bound there on the truck

to be turned into utile

members, stairs or rafters, which

is what we are doing more or less or

maybe he my son feels that we’re simply

going back home. I study the vagueness, the clouds’

irrespective weld into sunset.

The road is char-marked, skidded upon.

Night corrugates. My grizzled

hands how did they get that way.

Giles Goodland’s books include Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023). A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012), and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Civil Twilight was published by Parlor Press in 2022. He has worked as a lexicographer, editor, and bookseller, teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, and lives in West London.