Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick Page A

me for some time. Now she stepped round, took the book I had balanced on my knee, kissed me.
    Tickets? Passport? I never leave the country without my New Directions copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations . Prose poems and letters that serve as a philosophy. Especially the letters of May 1871, written when Rimbaud was sixteen. And a half. Coming up to his A levels, I suppose.
    I cherish the book, disorientating, boundless, because it has often served as the antithesis to the world in which I grew up. “A prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses”, the poet demands. Of himself and other poets. A rational disordering? Of all the senses?
    No wonder we steer clear of the cracked kid these days. How easily he might offend the thin-skinned legions of the writing classes. Those letters are manifestos of scorn. But magnificent. The writer’s attempt at decoding poetry’s genome.
    One thing Rimbaud does not do is endstop the imagination. And one thing he does is identify stupidity as the poet’s enemy. So what would he make of my literalisms? Or of Lahti? And what would Rimbaud say to Eminem?
    What problem? asked the woman.
    I thought about it.
    No problem, I said.
    Her partner sneered at the next table. I noted his saurian eye. Unreconstructable pissheads. No question. The danger they radiated might have been my own unease.
    I am lesbo, said the woman. She kissed me again.
    I looked at the man. Days drunk. He sat slumped in a poisonous lethargy.
    So am I, I said. And took Rimbaud from her like a baton.
    Booze, I thought. Another thing that is really stupid. Really really stupid. The enemy of the writer. The enemy of the mind. Then I ordered another Koff medicine. Just to confuse myself.

Babble
    I went to Babel once. There’s not much left. The tower’s gone, as you might have heard. Instead there’s a crater with mud bricks at the base.
    But there’s a mosque. And when I was there, a pyramid of shoes. A big heap. It was prayer time and the men had taken off their shoes – sandals and trainers and some black Clark’s. And all the men were inside the mosque. The mosque with the blue minarets.
    But outside the mosque was a well. So I stood against a wall and looked at the boy, the waterboy, the servant of the well, and watched what he was doing. He seemed a happy child. Oh yes, he laughed a lot.
    This boy put a stone in a bucket and lowered the bucket into the well and filled it and raised the rope and poured the Babel water into plastic bottles and jerry cans.
    Then he did it again. And again. Women kept bringing him containers and he kept filling them up.
    Yes, all the time I was watching, he did that. This laughing child. This boy pouring out the silver water – because it looked silver in the sun – and the drops he spilled darkening the dust around the well. The dust of Babel.
    All that time I could hear the prayers from the mosque. Those voices like water, voices murmuring like the green Euphrates which was just over the hill, flowing there as it had always flowed.
    And I thought, yes. There has always been a waterboy. Ever since Babel was built, there has been a waterboy, lowering a bucket, raising a bucket, weighting that bucket with a dark river pebble. A pebble from the Euphrates. A river-riven stone.
    And I also thought, maybe God is in the well. Yes, maybe God is down there. Not in the mosque, not in our churches. But down there. In the well. Where the dark eye of water is the eye of God.
    I thought that. Maybe an idle thought. Maybe a foolish thought. But then I thought something else. Maybe God is the well itself. And then I thought God might be the pebble. That river-riven stone.
    Then I thought that God might be the bucket. The water? The well? The bucket? The pebble, that river-riven stone? Yes, leaning against a wall in Babel, those thoughts certainly crossed my mind.

Antares
    (for Trevor)
    A few years after it happened I started going to Beachy Head. High