Peter Riley
The poem ‘Civilised Living’ arose out of a series of events thoughts and circumstances which I view as perfectly
ordinary and commonplace, but worrying contextually. A week in Paris in 2015. The metro breaks down and we
(whoever ‘we’ are) go to a nearby canal-side bar and talk. (This was at a bar on the Canal St.-Martin.) I can find my
way around central Paris quite easily, and this ‘talk’ was at first conceived as focussed on a sense of disappointment,
that Paris is not now what it was, mainly because of mass tourism, which had reduced the city to something
conceptually much smaller and less friendly. But in the writing this ‘talk’ sprouted into a long series of mini-narratives,interconnected or marginal or entirely disconnected, shifting this ‘disappointment’ and its contrary
across a range of scales and locations, positive or negative (hopeful or abandoned) conditions, skimming ‘politics’
and ‘art’ but never drifting entirely away from the initial condition, which was hopefully reconstituted intact at the
end. Or the hope which hovers over the whole text in the form of the title refusing to be forgotten but intervening
wherever your travels take you. This scheme is of course retrospective; my writing method is, once the broad basis
of the work is established (mode of address, scale, etc.), to press on intuitively until the equilibrium is exhausted.
CIVILISED LIVING
The Metro stops running. We don’t get angry.
We get out and go in small groups down to one
of the river-side bars crowded at this time of day
to share a bottle of wine and a bowl of nuts.
The sky dims and the footballers in the park
end their game. The tongue moves and the talk runs
into the waiting response. Turn it outward,
lateral scope, cut the poetry tricks,
work it out slowly in all consideration
under the sign of the owl, under the moon,
the sleeper on the park bench, the fallen statue.
Civilised Living is the space we inhabit
daylong, phasing to a silent recuperation
as long as the door is open and the chairs
not yet upturned on the tables for the night.
Only what precisely is will serve. Open the bottle
and share it, according to implicit agreement.
The children, after all, are not simply ‘ours’
they are mutually owed to the world,
them for world and world for them as the
land is in Friday evening conviviality
which is to say Civilised Living on pay day.
And when on the way home after work
the bus breaks down we simply share
a minor predicament and go in small groups
to one of the bars down by the canal and call for
a bottle of white wine to sustain the spirits and salted
nuts to stimulate the thirst. We think about
the big river that flows through the city,
how its great width and ceaseless departure
are felt to the core of what we are as commonplace,
mass and movement united to a common sense.
Civilised Living is there in the hush as in the noise,
the village as in the town, the movements of trees at night,
work done to a tested purpose and offered to the world
without favour, some for you and some for you, a bag
of peanuts open at both ends in memory of
African workers of the 1950s and their thin wages.
Civilised Living speaks for the healing hand however
meagre it is what little reward or sense of progress,
Civilised Living persists in the knowledge that one day
a dynamic wholeness will be reached in the guise
of an angelic rider on the ring road or an old man
in a worn coat on an Irish coast road in the rain,
falling over and getting up but continuing,
to be recognised when he gets there as
the lost benefactor, the man who spoke out
against corruption and ideological secrecy
on behalf of the people their Civilised Living. At which
the flowers mass together and form a power cluster
of light and hope just to the left of Mrs Bonnard’s lunch.
We can’t see them but they are there in our trust
sitting in the dark bar sharing resources. Then
somebody comes in and sings Ukrainian folk songs
to an accordion and everyone bursts into tears, for all
the lives man woman girl boy together apart
made intolerable by austerity and greed any
where. Energy fades over the fields and hills:
one light shines in a window beside the road
through the night, one heart beating gently
where there were two. The lustre in Civilised Living
is to remember, shopping bags full of anxiety, that
somewhere there is a central point on which
the compass turns. A music runs to it from
the ends of people’s fingers and lips, persistently
asking questions which keep you awake,
about the heart and its food, to which there are
strictly no answers but they have to be put
openly to anyone any manner of person who
wanders into the pub in the hope of being treated
or into the park at night and sits under
a chestnut tree in bloom, the candles proclaiming
against the green darknesses a structure of hopes
visible with no blood on your mind or hands.
This we want to know about. We also want to know
about the people camping on the pavement
we want to see into every crack and corner
of the land, how they survive in hope who are
not told about Civilised Living but may well
reach it under their own histories in a fighting and
shouted collusion or a parish porch, at any rate
not in trembling and not taking the nonsense,
flopped on the sofa with a can and a zapper why
not after a day’s hard and unrewarding work. And a rose,
perhaps, on a windowsill, a white one. Reader,
sitting staring at the box worried about the language,
that what it says is not what it means and something
hides in it, something unknowable in which case
there cannot be a happy ending. But here in the bar
with the bottle and the bits it all comes
to the conclusion it rightly should
clusion it rightly should