The Book of Jonah
1
Salt on his tongue in his ear
in his heart corroding his purpose
even as the big voice sounded.
Thunder in a sandgrain, in a seed
at the bottom of Pharaoh's tetrahedron
fashioned out of stone brick misery.
Priestly fingers pointed to a sky.
A voice shaped as if it were a mighty finger
stone heavy, logical as darkness and water
lands on his life's bone helmet
as though a spear
had dropped from heaven
through so many light years
growing heavier
plutonium heavy, with each second.
Nineveh: city of neon shadows, fluorescent whores
grand chapels of Gothic ribwork
massively detailed as the inside of a whale.
Nineveh: whose secretaries dress in codices
ciphered incantations
chanting halleluias to the sun to keep on moving
whose temples are the gentlest boats
dipping on an ocean bigger even than
the voice that just stopped speaking.
The distance between now and a second ago
longer than chronicles written in sands
that lap against the pyramid walls.
Nineveh: city of gridlock and speeding squad cars
metal windhovers with a lightbeam focused
on some asylum seeker in the street below.
A ziggurat pokes heaven in the eye.
Nineveh. Some big lads there
God wants me to have a word with.
Best go to Cadiz.
Sea calm as a mill pond today.
2
Some called on Shamash some on Ishtar
who had gone down to the depths
where they eat only dust
where eyes are polished obsidian
when they open their mouths to speak
bats fly out.
Some called on unknowns gods
from dry localities:
Hurca who ate bulls and pissed rain
Trankirin whose limbs were of light
who flew faster than waves
Chersit who had a thousand eyes -
when he blinked the day went out.
Jonah could not call upon Yahweh
without explaining
how come he'd bought a one-way ticket
to Cadiz when Nineveh was his appointed destination?
They reef sails
Praying, cursing, cursing and praying
while Jonah goes down into steerage
and sleeps.
3
Storm is the Lord's anger with Jonah
tempest and typhoon Poseidon's,
hunting Odysseus who blinded his beloved son.
Hauling overboard
the boat's toxic possessions.
Anything to avoid
that fluent darkness
crashing underneath our feet.
Swallows your flesh first
then memory
swirling like an ocean through your days
in thirty seconds flat.
Here's the toxic possession you need to disburse, I say,
holding out my arms.
At first they refuse
finding even in Jonah
a glimmer of humanity.
But as the god pursues his fury
they take up my offer
and over I go.
4
The water's welcome
in its torment.
Its coiling skin's a dragon's, aflame.
Jonah can't swim
so this should not take long.
But the god of narrative is not done yet.
Out from the ocean's depth
a great whale rises
opens a mouth arched like Grand Central Station
and swallows.
5
After the liquid corridors
yellow with amber mastications
after chambers of darkness
Piranesi dungeon with Noah's gopher wood above.
After growing used to this squelching sepulchre
a bone chancel creaking through winds
I settle down to contemplation
three days and nights.
The odd thing arrives that's edible -
I don't even try to name it.
Threw me overboard
with a winch-handle still in my fist.
This they'd have grabbed had they seen it.
At a loose end for an hour
losing the thread of my three-day meditation
I walk round the big hall of the whale's interior.
Could my tool master any knot, join or calcium articulation?
Never quite fitted somehow
metal and bone
always fractionally out of kilter.
I took my penknife out
cutting this hieroglyph on one of her bones
JONAH
(the only hieroglyph I happen to know
picked up from the Egyptian stowaway
on that boat to Cadiz).
My name like the Lord's
carries to the bottom of creation.
In Moby-Dick Father Mapple, old sailor that he is,
says I'm a sly little bastard
a sort to be seen any day at the edge of a wharf
looking for a boat to take him
out of his life and crimes
as though each wave were a year
separating you
from the sea of your historic misdemeanours.
6
Herakleitos insists
mind goes back to water willingly
but only ever thinks itself in fire.
I have been fire in the belly of a whale.
Her vast being was surely a thought
pumping its way through liquid metaphysics.
Splashes and drips enough to drown you.
Tidal surges of a sewerage system
large as a village.
Jonah's dryness in a world of wet
a second womb I didn't need to float in.
Alice almost drowns in her sea of tears
AMNIOTIC
a word I couldn't even spell
as I sat in silence with the big womb round me
clutching my penknife.
Three days and nights then
I am vomited forth
on to dry land.
Sit still by the side of the sea
Robinson crosslegged and yogic.
A white thread holds each wave together
weavings of water and air
dancing from one shore to the other
no need to leave home.
Next time I'll be a wave
instead of this particle Jonah.
Looks as though
I'd better make for Nineveh.
How angry gods do get
given a sea to play with.
Now your three days are up.
Vomited forth once more
out of the sepulchre
into the eyes of men.
Find yourself inside the grand event
asking, what are the terms I'll need
to tell such a devouring story?
Turning into a myth, it seems
if only because I already was one.
Sometimes in the night I wonder
Was I a thought
the whale had once
then thought better of?
Might man have been the one thought nature couldn't swallow
so vomited out on the limes?
She was a good spitter:
I put down safely on dry land.
7
Women sell their children in Assyria
so terrible the famine warfare brings
as they will in Bengal in 1943
and do this day in countless shanty towns
south of Texas.
Yahweh's providential intentions
are not enacted here on earth
certainly not in the ocean.
With me the exception
proving the rule
as a taxi drops me
by the Nineveh Shopping Arcade
bigger than a whale
certainly drier
capable of swallowing a man.
Nineveh: where Austin Layard's man
one day will kneel in the dust
to find tablets from Ashurbanipal's
palace, telling of a great flood
the world will drown in.
I stare up at the electric signs
to gaze on these tablets in wonder
who have gone down in the flood and returned.
On the edge of Nineveh
by the Tigris Riverside Apartment Building
stands a high-rise ziggurat
a ladder of brick and bitumen
where stars are trapped
momentarily
in a priest's devoted gaze.
All wonders and catastrophes computed.
Its canopy glows in the night
a candle whose flame
prays for the moon to swallow it.
8
For three days
though with nights off now
I shout and remonstrate
the sandwich-board to the front of me announcing
SIN IS DEATH
the board on the back
REPENT.
Might as well be Oxford Street.
They snigger and walk round me.
Some shout obscenities.
One asks if I've ever tried them
sex and drugs
so how would I know then?
One offers to put me under an oncoming juggernaut
both boards squashed flat
making a Jonah sandwich
a houmous of scripture and anxiety,
One boy asks how you repent.
Turn your face toward God, I say.
Which way?
I point to the sky.
Stiff-neck religion, he says, leaving.
9
My job's now done, I reckon.
I quit the shopping precinct
with its concrete car-park
minicab office with its mosaic of posters
encrypting the glass
tasteful delicatessen with offputting prices
kebab takeaway, one slab of lamb
turning slowly on a vertical spit
solid as a whale's penis.
Find a bus shelter where the bus-route's extinct.
This I call temporary home.
After three days in the whale
it begins to feel like comfort.
A wait for the cataclysm
His promised retribution.
Once His anger reaches critical mass
Nineveh will be Nagasaki shifted westward on the map.
Like the San Francisco earthquake
streets will open
to swallow the whole loathsome lot.
Smile on the other side of their faces then.
10
But one has turned
(one, I ask you)
and He's resolved to be a Lord of Mercy.
We're not even talking now.
Didn't enjoy it in that whale, for the record.
Didn't smell good.
11
After His anger
after my anger
after the mightiest sulk
and the mightiest dunking
all for what?
So some sad little man, an accountant probably
involved in a snow-job with a ledger-book
or a back-street abortionist
growing squeamish at last
at the procession of tiny ghost faces
should whimper his confession
in the dead of night
and He calls it quits.
This I do not call justice.
Still, I reconcile myself to the scheme of things.
The rest of my life to be spent
inland, as far as I can get
labouring at my hermetic profession
blowing glass into the shape of clouds
carving messages from dead tongues
on whalebone
reading considering even praying sometimes
drily.
Riding the oceans out there
a blue whale has my name
engraved on a bone in her belly.