Table Talk of Mr Andrew Marvell on his Late Mission to the Duke of Muscovie

Below a short story (of a kind) on Andrew Marvell’s ill-fated trade mission to Russia. I’m prompted to post by the discovery that Matthew Francis has devoted the title sequence of his new book Muscovy to the same subject. But my own inspiration entirely independent, let me hereby insist. {Waffling intro ends.}



As one challenged over cards on the Anabaptist controversy or the Hanoverian succession

Foolishly seated on a hogshead of rum the cabin boy tumbled in and was drowned

Nay, Sir, as Mr Milton has lately argued on the Popish question

A distant prospect of th’ingested vomit of the sea, otherwise Holland

Another evening lost on footling correspondence with the Hullites, the boundary fence twixt Mr Chadband’s tannery and the adjoining bawdy house still causing daily nuisance

A beluga, do you say! The Academy will hear of this

Arriving in Archangel, Carlisle was apprised of the withdrawal of the copper coin in the Muscovite duchy and addressed a missive on this subject to the court

The following thousand miles we travelled in six barges pulled by serfs, as is the custom of this land

Mistaken in my furs by a Vologda boatman for a small black bear

It being Guy Fawkes Night Midshipman Niblett did endeavour to dance a hornpipe on the ice, to general hilarity

The many signs of mobilisation against invasion by the Poles now plain to any traveller

Thou heathen slave!, Carlisle’s rebuke to the Muscovites who saw in him, he wrote, an idolatrous likeness of the image of His Majesty himself

But to whom his manservant would trade small pouches of tobacco for quarts of the local fire-water

A period of some three months’ idle waiting

Snubbed and ignored

[The next half hour’s remarks in Latin]

The frolicsome blockhead’s effrontery I threw back in his face, demanding redress

Finally entering the capital on two hundred sleighs to copious sennets, the gift exchange occupying three hours, the niceties of Muscovite protocol a further four days

Standing hatless in the sled, bearing the ambassador’s credentials on a yard of damask

Czar Alexei then appearing entirely covered in jewels, a magpie’s nest of his despot’s gewgaws

A boyar holding the despot’s hand while we kissed it, that his master not be put to any effort

Insolence upon insolence

For ‘Illustrissime’ in the address read ‘Serenissime’, complained the despot

Five hundred dishes served continuously for dinner yet, what’s this, trade privileges not restored? By the Turkoman’s beard!

A sorry disaster

The bootless gift of a sturgeon’s head mouldering away in my chamber

Missives of grievance flying back and forth like a persecution of summer flies all the way to Riga

Exceeding saddle-sore at this point and heartily tired of dining on mutton

The Stockholm interlude, the review of the Swedish fleet and the prototype submarine

An affray with a Hunnish wagoner, pistols drawn, and my rescue from a barbarous rout of peasants and mechanicks, my poor little page tossed up and down in the air

A beluga’s head in the water very like unto a dropsical Dutchman grinning horridly

The biscuits long before our journey’s end having become infested with weevils

Your Majesty! We have not been idle these past nineteen months

In the matter of the boundary fence alongside Mr Chadband’s yard, I recommend it be moved one foot to the left and not one word more be said on this tawdry affair

Self-Portrait as Staff Meeting of the Touareg Uprising

Nakid mahedjak ya assouf erhlalan

Working within procedure, attendance at arms dump ambush
open day up on last year, a higher than usual proportion of applicants
expressing an interest in kill the rabid dogs, kill them all,
a child watching his own father hanged from the barracks yardarm
while the goat too weak to suckle cries outside my tent, did you find this
meeting very productive/productive/not productive/don’t know?

Mounting fears of destabilisation of Malian regime, beacon of democracy
in region, regulations governing second-marking and collection
of essays by students subject to quality assurance benchmarking
and review; increased porousness of desert borderlands, insurgents
snatching essays from staff pigeonholes by night. O my brothers,
you who have suffered the camps and uranium mines, when will we return

to the seminar rooms of old, scene of staff meetings our forefathers sang?
Bass player absent from this track for reasons of study leave,
exams officer for reasons of extrajudicial internment, any other business
introduced to sound of hand-claps and ululating, gesturing women,
my innumerable harem. Come the Spring, Victorian modules
follow their treacherous migration route south, invigilators

and external examiners trailing behind them, Rossetti and Browning
bedding down by the oases of Niger and Burkina Faso. Learning outcome:
this is my featureless ocean of sand like no other, dispossess me at your peril;
aims and objectives, increased public service television programming
in Tamashek, a naive backpacker from Derbyshire kidnapped
and beheaded. Joining the faculty this semester is one of the leading

goats of his generation. In an increasingly competitive sector,
what are sand dunes for? I have climbed up and down the mountains
and know the caves where the questionnaires are hidden, the Research
Excellence Framework impact statements we have worked on so long.
Further to chair’s business, violent separatist demands submitted
single-spaced in future will be returned unmarked. Parched void

my homeland, minutes of the last meeting its only laments. The monitor lizard
is cunning, but no less so the teaching assistant. As the vice-chancellor
himself prophesied over mint tea: inappropriate in the workplace,
the billowing blue-robed elder will one day return through the door
of the essay revision seminar and declare, ‘I alone am Sultan of these
my Touareg homelands, and hereby raise this fact as a point of order.’

Tale of a Horse

after Isaac Babel

It started with Savitsky taking Khlebnikov’s white stallion.

Khlebnikov was given a black mare instead, but pined for his stallion.

So Khlebnikov wrote to headquarters, who said, Give him the horse back.

Off he rode to get it and found Savitsky shacked up with some Cossack girl.

Do you know who I am?, asked Khlebnikov. It says here to give me my horse!

Do you want a piece of this, said Savitsky, waving his pistol. Get lost!

Off rode Khlebnikov to the Chief of Staff who said, I dealt with this earlier.

So Khlebnikov sat down and wrote a letter saying, That’s it, I’m off.

On and on it went, saying how much he missed his stallion.

You idiot, said the commissar, come and have dinner; it’s just some horse.

But he threw himself on the ground saying, Go ahead, shoot me.

All he wanted was his damned horse.

And off he went, and that’s how we lost him.

I saw a lot of myself in Khlebnikov.

The whole world to us was a meadow in May criss-crossed by women and horses.

[Untitled]

In Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude
a man holds a knife to the narrator’s neck
and launches into a poetry reading, then
apologises, explaining it’s the only way
he can make people listen to his work.

Listening to your work, by contrast, I feel
I’ve got the village flasher instead, who,
having opened a raincoat on his baby-bird-
on-a-nest of a little pink winky, proceeds
to wave it in my face for a good half an hour.

Adultery

from the Tamazight

Has Mahmoud married a third time in secret?
Brothers, so he would have us believe,
rolling his eyes and preening himself,
but I see him slip from his tent at night
in search not of some loose-sleeved beauty
but the storks that nest by the mosque,
singing to them while his wives sleep alone,
speaking their names like a young man in love.

Sam Riviere

I enjoyed Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities so much I decided I couldn’t wait for his next book, and have therefore written a new Sam Riviere poem on his behalf. Hereunder. I hope he likes it. Poet in question not him, obviously.

[Untitled]

The hair-dryer in the swimming pool is broken again,
it was roaring away to itself on the way in
and still doing it as I left, prompting the thought

‘That’s a coincidence’, but then a man in overalls
started whacking it and I knew it was broken,
at which point I thought of that reading

you gave three years ago, the sound of which
I am still to this day scraping out of my ear,
your enjoyment of which in no way lessened

as the horror of your seven-person
audience grew, reaching a condition I can
only describe as panic, and Christ but you

droned on and on; it wouldn’t in the least
surprise me if you were still there three years later
shouting at the bloody coffee dispenser.

‘Analphabeta...’

‘Aie – Aie – Aie!
Please sir, your thumbs are through my windpipe, sir!’
– Browning, Mr Sludge,‘The Medium’

after Tibor Soustal

‘Analphabeta,
muse of creative writing
courses, hail! patron
of scribblers no one wants to
publish (and that’s just the prof) –’

*
jots bored hourly-paid
teacher stuck with ‘life writing’
for non-readers, man’s
inhumanity to the
humanities come to this.

*
Workshop by workshop
instalments proceed apace
of The Sword of Drax,
a tale of who-gives-a-fuck
inspired by Christ-make-it-stop.

*
Congratulations,
friend, on your PhD by
novel. It remains
unpublishable. But did
Tolstoy have a PhD?

*
‘Dear Minimum Wage-
provider’ (mentally drafts
reference, one more
debt-crippled, fobbed-off, naive
poor innocent off his hands.)

*
A visiting bard,
drunk, spins a tale of what he’d
like to do to ‘that
cunt’ reviewer: livelier
by far than his wilting verse.

*
‘Over the weekend’
(mentally fills out report
on conference in
Derby) ‘I shared best practice,
a drinks tab, body fluids...’

*
Lingering late on
the library’s abandoned
classics floor he weeps,
pens hexameters to the
muse of illiteracy.

Visitors' Centre

I am passing HMP Hull when I see a sign for ‘Visitors’ Centre’ and go in. As quickly emerges, there is no exhibition area, interactive display or café. I’ve misconstrued. Not that my idea of a visitors’ centre would be such a bad thing, as I explain, showing myself out. A student of mine has worked in the prison, and I ask him whether he has ever seen any violence or other dodgy dealings inside. He drops some hints about complicity and how it gets passed on: if you as a trainee witness an older officer doing something dodgy with a con, do you report him or say nothing? That wouldn’t be for me to say. There is a bar beside the prison called the Sportsman, which features as a watering hole for prison officers in Robert Edric’s Hull-based thrillers. Surely this would cause tension with prisoners’ family members, who would also drink there, I thought. My friend Mike confirms this, but tells me people have been known to get one over on prison officers by reporting them for drink driving when they leave the pub in an overly refreshed condition. The Sportsman is a music venue, and among the bands playing there are The Penetrators, two of whose members are siblings of Hull musician Trevor Bolder, bassist in David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars alongside his fellow Hull guitar legend Mick Ronson. On his Wikipedia page, I learn that while on tour with the ‘Cybernauts’ Trevor Bolder painted his face blue but then discovered the paint was semi-permanent and would not come off. ‘Bolder had to sell his car to raise the money needed for a specialist skin peeling process at a Swiss clinic. To this day he still has traces of blue paint behind his left ear.’

How Hideous is the Semi-Colon

CITIZENRY: Greetings Apostrophe Man, only resident superhero of Newland Avenue, Hull!
APOSTROPHE MAN: Greetings citizens, what appears to be the problem?
CITIZENRY: This man has been hit by the number 115 bus and is bleeding to death!
APOSTROPHE MAN: The rules governing the use of the possessive, though frequently encountering popular resistance, are nevertheless simple to grasp and once learned never forgotten!
CITIZENRY: Do something, Apostrophe Man!
APOSTROPHE MAN: ‘Hi’s and Her’s’, though potentially referring to the first name ‘Hi’ and the title of a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), HER (short for Hermione), is almost universally best left in the form ‘His and Hers’!
MAN HIT BY BUS: Uhhhhhhhh.
APOSTROPHE MAN: Though not without comedy value, and capable of being construed to mean ‘the trees belonging to a woman who used to be my mother (but for some reason no longer is)’, the phrase ‘Xma’s Trees’ is strongly to be discouraged!
CITIZENRY: Turn back time and save this dying man, Apostrophe Man!
APOSTROPHE MAN: Popular resistance to the possessive case, common sense would suggest, should logically take the form of eliminating the apostrophe altogether rather than sticking it in any and everywhere! Thus, ‘the homeless mans dogs smelly breath’ rather than, for instance, ‘apple’s and orange’s and pear’s’!
CITIZENRY: Do something fast, Apostrophe Man!
APOSTROPHE MAN: Though ultimately there is no accounting for how the popular mind will respond to pedantic hectoring from a part-time superhero dressed in a not very impressive cape and with a floppy apostrophe on his head!
CITIZENRY: Thanks, Apostrophe Man!
APOSTROPHE MAN: Thank you! But won’t somebody do something for this poor man? He looks like he needs medical attention, and fast!