Three Poems by Paul Murphy Copyright © 2002 by Paul Murphy and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Three Poems Paul Murphy IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS The sideways disenchantment with the night Is a subject of remote interest to me. When my handgun gesticulated wildly In La Rue Victor Cousin, In the Luxembourg Gardens We stole off to the Parisien To see the busts Arranged in verisimilitude With depictions Of the French Revolution For sale at one hundred Francs, plastic Eiffel Towers, T-shirts with the logo 'Vive la Revolution' plastered on them: Where were Danton, Robespierre, Marat -- Heaps of junk in the mini-markets Rotting fish, heaps of rotting meat, The Morrocans bartering for bread, Brown haired girls carrying fish To the vendors, tradesmen, Egalite, Liberte, Fraternite Was the garbage of history, Gone with the soupstains The ashcans, David's Napoleon Rode through the Tullieries, With the Army of the Revolution A ghostly battalion Of waifs and unwanted The unelected inheritors Waited for the milkround. REMEMBERING THE HILL Those were days of liberation; I walked down Wardour Street Looking for a job, getting nowhere, remembering The Hill Murphy 2 Copyright © 2002 by Paul Murphy and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 And Lady Chatterley's Lover's unbanning, as if that dour Nottinghamshire face appeared at the dolequeue, or walking with The crowds to Camberwell, a manuscript of 'The White Peacock' Stuffed under his coat; I strode to the Tube and disappeared Into the Underground's haze: those were the days of Ol' Ez, The Modern Movement, Lawrence died in Vence, Ez got gaoled In Pisa, Ole Possum strode above them, a banker's ledger stuffed Into a scroll of poems, Nobel Prize, OM, no rewards for the men And women of the Revolution. In Russia Sergei Eisenstein made The first film, 'Battleship Potemkin'. Within two years montage Conquered the world: Picasso, Dali, invented Cubism, Surrealism. Manifestos appeared everywhere, exhorting, coercing. Hysteria Gripped the world, as if it would explode under the severity: I strode out of the Tube, into the Isle of Dogs, under the river Into Greenwich, remembering 'The Hill', those days of liberation. REVOLUTION, REVOLUTION At the gallery of high unstudied art We dined with the ruling elite Who were unruffled To see the toilers Pressing noses to panes Demanding to see the Titians And leprous Michaelangelo. So we made revolution Bombed Municipal Galleries Dynamited Libraries Incendiaried schools, colleges and clubs Thousands of old statues Van loads of paintings, books This was no affectation This was the day we had waited for. After the Generalissimos, Tsarinas etc Had been dispatched, we created the new film Kino, montage Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia Its anti-thesis October and Strike Kerensky as a peacock, The new poetry, Men with Movie Cameras. Murphy 3 Copyright © 2002 by Paul Murphy and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Trotsky's Agitprop train wound Into the Don basin and the Black Sea Red troops cleared the villages Forced the Kulaks to their knees Eyes bound, Heavyfighting with the Czech Legion In the Dnieper and Pripet marshes. Lenin's summation on film Turned the Formalist Poets Into film-makers The Anarchist Vertov Was political trouble for the NEP Man, Man With a Movie Camera Bombed at the Box Office. Brownclad NKVD men Cleared the cinema With automatic fire A greater political opponent Was Sergei Eisenstein, his film Ivan the Terrible and Shostakovitch's Opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. The cinemas were cleared The intellectuals went to the Gulag The banning of subversive journals Fell to Yagoda 'malignant dwarf' Who was in his turn Bumped off by Stalin Fifty years of history Largely wasted, built on the hopes And fears of the proletariat Who rioted again in Gdansk in '70 Prague, Budapest The years wound in, much butchery Little sense.