jamie mckendrick

	Walberberg 2007: You cannot be serious!

Adjustment  

So much for the ineffectual sandbags:
we were put in touch with the loss adjuster,

who came when the ‘black water' had retired.
They would indeed replace the white goods

(for which we'd better find the lost receipts)
but, with a droll glance at the furniture,

he let us know that didn't mean
what was wrecked already might be redeemed

nor that the house would be caulked and fitted out
with gopher wood against a future flood.

He must have seen a rainbow smudge
of expectation in our eyes. His soles scuffed

the buckled floor boards – the alluvia
of silvered dust, clay, gravel, seeds and spores

still promising the new, the better life.

Tiptology
(for Valerio Magrelli)

A monarchic silence as of the grave
reigned in the Peter and Paul Fortress
where Peter had tortured and killed his son Alexis.

The felted floors and felted walls answered nothing
to Kropotkin's knocking. He exercised his arms
with the wooden stool and walked seven versts each day

up and down the cell. On the small oak table
he wrote The Glacial Period and Orography of Asia
when that vindictive Romanov, Alexander II,

finally conceded him pen and ink -‘just till sunset',
which occurred at two o'clock in winter.
Summer 1875, after the mass arrests, the silence broke

and a series of taps spelt out KTO VY?
(Who are you?) His friend Surdokov, as it happened,
and a peasant, below, who lost his mind.

The Cyrillic alphabet was broken down
into six rows of five letters, which made
conversation slightly less laborious.

Moved to the House of Detention,
weaker now so he could barely lift the stool,
but one step nearer his glorious escape,

he narrated to the young man in the next cell
the history of the Paris Commune
which took, however, a whole week of tapping.