Robert Sheppard: Circle of the City: following in the steps of Chapter Five

As they moved from Lime Street…a vision of Leningrad was still super-imposed upon Liverpool in his mind’s eye.

Malcolm Lowry, In Ballast to the White Sea

no ‘flags’ left: cobbles
swirling around the unfenced
Nelson edifice:

CHANGE
            LAGS

Death peeps out, hooded
skull: it chilled Redburn every
time: but the cannon

points Empire’s precise
machinery straight at you:
the chains are real, though

captives are bronze: no
one paces up and down, that
signature of guilt:

GLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO

which one is Nelson
all his bits and faculties
idealised in place:

girl hops on crutches:
courier motorbikes cough:
cobbles rattle bikes:

hammering: windows:
knocked out frames in the Town Hall:
echoes round the square:

people with their packs,
Zara bags, settled into
‘late’ capitalism,

‘mid’ Anthropocene:
stubs stream music into ears:
not their fault (alone):

SPACE FOR SCHEMERS AND DREAMERS

sharp suit toe skips up
into start-up: sand-blasted
walls; ‘absoluteness’:

EXCHANGE ST. WEST

a hybrid bus purrs:
defibrillator phone box:
there’s no ‘Bodega’:

EL GATO NEGRO

only the drunk says
it’s never too early: the
water sculpture is

dry, fixed, a land-locked
dredger: metallic cartwheels:
car fumes grip tight chests:

masts as seaweedy
pastoral: complicity,
entanglements of

death and life dock road
excursion to their shared truths:
nobody to hate:

Melville and Hawthorne
stood here, the father asserts:
Redburn couldn’t find

his father’s hotel:
jet high in ‘summer’ blue: my
‘guidebook’ misdirects:

DIVERSION
↑

shadow of School Lane:
skirting backs of shaved buildings:
demolished landmarks:

INFORMATION IS
NOT KNOWLEDGE (Zappa)

last week’s anti-vax
wave we bumped across: the raw
rhythm of placards:

wheeled cases growl: no
transforming epiphany
on Mount Pleasant: there’s

no film to view: trust
Delphic descent, the city’s
changes, exchanges:

LIME ST NO THROU
ROUTE
LIDL OPEN
AS USUAL

trapped by barriers
on the wrong side of Lime Street:
funnelled to new shops:

WE ARE CASHLESS

imageless concrete
floating for occupancy:
networks of value:

sunburst down Dale Street
silvers its details away:
sun retreats to cloud:

now escape: up the
deep shadows of Hakins Hey:
through Quaker’s Alley

(a path across a
bombsite car park): to Tempest
Hey: Tithebarn: Lion

8-9^th October 2021

Note (read at the first performance of this poem, at the 2021 Lowry Lounge, Saturday 30^th October 2021, The Bluecoat, Liverpool): This poem is a series of haikus written (or drafted) while following the walk taken by sailor-revolutionary Sigbjorn and his shipowner father as described (in both senses of the word) by Malcolm Lowry in his newly-rediscovered novel In Ballast to the White Sea. Their Liverpool walk starts (and ends) at Exchange Flags and skirts the docks, the shopping centre, and rests at a cinema to view a Russian revolutionary film. They discuss politics generally and, more personally, their culpability in the deaths of others. Like Lowry, I take in the messages of the urban environment I pass through: street signs, adverts, t-shirt slogans. There are, oddly, both in Lowry’s chapter and my poem, references to Melville’s Redburn. The Liverpool ‘guidebook’ Redburn carried was 50 years out of date. My ‘guidebook’ was the novel itself, Bodega and cinema both long gone.