The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Chris McCully

An auction for Amsterdam

That man, who recently acquired -
      for an astronomical price -
      the old Dutch master,
I wish him well, I wish him well.
It turns out that this hitherto-neglected, until-now-
      unattributed piece of transcendent
      Biblical hokum
wasn’t anyone’s to sell.

Imagine avarice, locked in
      its 22nd floor office with its Dic-
      taphone and its cruel secretary,
its bank of screens, its plasm of phones.
Hands crook round the Eagle atop the walking-frame,
      but nothing moves except the brightening eyes
      that get their promises to keen
among a nest of deals and bones.

And what’s he bought, that man? A prophet
      in a 17th century, Thank-God-I’ve-made-it pose:
      ’I travelled, then studied Greek; then put that by for guilders.
      ’Now here I am. Now here I am.’
Nonesuch, I sit and watch them every day. They move in
      rimless glasses, architects of coffee, raincoats, air,
      on any street that crawls the smell of drains
in Amsterdam, in Amsterdam.

To the last most intricate detail, they too
      have wives wear sharpened scissors, dirty toenails;
      down to the valves and palp, breasts and bush consumed:
mute need; burnt night. And then the night
whose ochre grumbles as it pays , or scratches
      stub-ends of its brush. The technicalities of skin admire,
      geometry of moon betray -
and bleed them white, and bleed them white.

And what the eyes just paid for is this
      cutlture that means everywhere, yet is no one’s -
      a finicking insistence on the peripheral, pathetic, over-obvious bowl
of withered flowers; the starveling dog.
These things are home, they nag between the tapestries,
      dust falls and lies, whatever light. While outside…Outside…
      Perhaps he knows, the man who rooked the master. If so,
he bought the fog. He bought the fog.

Chris McCully is a writer based in Amsterdam. He teaches part-time at the Vrije Universiteit. This year he publishes a textbook, ’The Earliest English’ (Pearson Education, London), and also a memoir on alcoholism, ’Goodbye, Mr Wonderful (Jessica Kingsley, London). He is also working on a further text, ’The Sound Structure of English’, that has just been commissioned by Cambridge University Press. He has published three collections of poems with Carcanet Press - ’Time Signatures’ (1993), ’Not Only I’ (1996), and most recently, ’The Country of Perhaps’ (2002). He never enters competitions...except sometimes.