Smear, by Anonymous

This poem is addressed to the anonymous circulator of the packages that caused Derek Walcott to withdraw from the election of the Oxford Professor of Poetry. 'Smear' was submitted to OP by a high profile poet for equally anonymous publication.

to the lamplighters of 21st-century Oxford

You'd do me in
a breath so I'll save you time. There's enough of me
that's rich and soft. And you can spread me far:
however far I am the same stuff here
as I was there.

Like you I go
unsigned. We are known only by this muster
of memory and scripture in a space
we chose, where nothing lay until its silence
niggled us

to work. Like you
I diligently seal and send out
everywhere my news to everyone
who matters, all who count or keep account.
Like you I trust

it will change them,
better them, be learned from, perform
the good in the world I don't. To believe that,
you have to believe there are night-skies of us
out there like you,

friend, as I
in turn believe there are night-skies of you
out there like me, and the collective breath
of all our kind is taken on our signal
when the brand new

light is shed.
Here we come, the kindlers, the night-watch.
Lonely as the labour is, its nature
utters outward everywhere: a wick
is treated, flame

is sheltered, time
is told into dead quiet but it's quiet
that moves in sleep, accedes in dream, or lets
a held breath go free so the window mists
and shows a name.

We two are gone
by then, our deed done, bobbing round a corner
out of sight and mind. Our breath is steam
concerning only strangers. I would teach them
how the night-time

goes for me,
how I butter rolls and amble out at sundown,
shouldering like a bow the ancient lighter,
plotting a path I never took before
with crook and hook

through all my town.
The start and end are all that stays the same,
like parents, one waving and one timing.
Lit rooms are all of life and each dim shuttered
window life

no less: I look
to where the light is gone and where it's gone to.
The room I cannot picture myself
passing through is not a room I've noticed
on this patrol,

this shift - sure,
I'd have a home in any home, I cackle,
stir my flask of oil in the sweet quiet.
Soon it's so quiet and cold there's everyone.
That's how it is

for me, friend:
you want them all - no you do, you want them,
for our language likes the you to mean us all
these days. Language too will smear itself
in time, and time

will tend to mean
us all. You want them all when it's so cold
and lonely there is everyone. This spill
of language from us, what do you think this is
but a cry to them

for fuck's sake,
friend? We earn our keep on the foggy crystal
field where the streetlamps end. One final sight
of an angle-poise and a silhouette grows all
I know as love,

draws out the word
god from me as breath, or breath from me
as the word god. And all it is is the thought
I made or was made to have, that someone there
awake alone

is, was or would be,
there for the days I have. O silent friend
who likes our tongues to work - in a ring of twelve
there are generally eleven I would eat with
(and I come round

to the other) five
I'd blurt my life to if my days were decades,
three I'd chatter with so long our tongues
like kids would curl together and there's one
and only one

but always one
whose cunt I'd lap to order till dawn.
I'd give you names if I only had your own.
Then you could give them mine. And in the hour
before they come

to witness us
two breakfasting in peace beyond harm,
sunlight will spread everywhere, in mist
or fog or sleet or downpour, only sunlight.
Will we see you?

More chance I guess
of catching a lamplighter at noon,
pale and boozing in an ashen corner,
his skills superfluous, his fuel rotted,
his day gone.