Christopher Middleton: Saloon with Birds

If someone barefoot stood in a saloon,

His dromedary might be chomping, outside,

That majestic meal. High olive notes

Plucked from a mandolin. Fumes. Leafgreen.

A dark descends. There, with banana palm,

Consorts forbidden music. Ugly. Ocean.

Delay it. First a clatter, from the birds.

They wax decrepit. Vocal signatures:

Who could ever have so illuminated them

That the letters, cut from stark air,

Assume no solitary monumental pose,

But wavily ache with the boat hulls?

Certain or not, an urgent finger prodded

Epsilons and wagtailed gammas free

From habit, a peculiar glue. No help. No

Waste. In the saloon each dust spake.

In the saloon the spokes of another

Sunlight, still this ocular companion though,

Rolled afternoons around, like meatballs,

Bubbles of corn sizzling in a crystal pan.

Throaty owls also, they could entertain

Quick, tensile teeth. A joy. Pelican moonlit.

Look at a pine nut. It exists, you know.

Little furred insects inhabit vast smells.

For this the saloon is open. A waft.

A waft is all it takes. A venetian blind

Has wrinkled the wash basin. A cool expounds

Blood orange, air in China, appalling beliefs.

Air wraps the mast. Air singing. Air,

The solo invader who timed anew

Our free objects. The saloon twangs,

Dust swims, a gong letting its hum fly.

Closing never. Least of all on syllables.

A split lemon has released from evil

Any soul what’s willing. Get that. Now

Never you move like you were shrunk to be.

Or else forgo the little sorrow. Treasure

The big one. Tell, in the saloon,

Nothing of it. Look up. Long enough

The ocean has delayed. You can breathe again.

At first appearance a poem with roots going back through John Ashbery to surrealism. But unlike Ashbery and the even more extreme LANGUAGE poets, Middleton’s work aims to communicate a statement using visual and rhythmic impulses of jarring power at the edge of meaning. Is there an echo of the experience of an eastern church or other building, now become saloon? The images of birds, in dusty air (lots of it), help the reader to breathe.