Lucifer Takes a Break
He stirs sugar into black, watching white crystals
transluce. He rolls a cigarette, crimping a white tip
and dark tobacco carefully within the rustle of thin
paper and remembers, as he snaps a match lit,
a time before: just an instant.
There was darkness there, but warmth.
Yes, gorgeous warmth … a ‘shh’ pressed
to his lips before he was handed down.
The whisper of white noise … voices?
He remembers, how long the fall was, how sheer, how short.
He sips the coffee, thankful for its bitter sweetness.
****
Barbara Smith is an Irish poet whose latest collection, the intriguingly titled Ann Askew on the Kafka Machine, is published by Eyewear Publishing, part of the Black Spring Press Group. Smith’s range of subjects is broad, her perspective often gently feminist. She enjoys challenging such male-dominated themes as the vicissitudes of growing up in rural Ireland: see, for example, her potato-peeling takeover of Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh in the poem A Woman’s Work. Her revisionist tale of Lucifer, AKA Satan, the instigator of the Fall in Christian theology, is perhaps less a dig at John Milton than a demolition of the church-endorsed view of sex as evil.
Lucifer, the brightest of God’s angels, who fell from grace through pride, is given a break as he takes a break. He isn’t deified, but he is clearly de-demonised. Lucifer may of course be the code name of a very ordinary man, guilty of some minor erotic transgression. If he’s the devil himself, he seems no more monstrously culpable than such a man. The poem reminded me of the Oliver Goldsmith parody included by TS Eliot in The Waste Land: “When lovely woman stoops to folly, and / paces about her room again, alone, / she smooths her hair with automatic hand / and puts a record on the gramophone.”
Perhaps Lucifer is a little less nonchalant than Eliot’s typist, though. The roll-up and comfortingly sweet cup of black coffee hint at an adventure more intensely experienced.
The sudden change in his status seems dramatised by the poem’s demarcation into white and black, symbolised by the sugar and the coffee, the tobacco and cigarette paper. He is identified with, or threatened by, the most thoroughly dualist, “black-or-white” form of morality.
“Transluce” makes an effective intransitive verb, containing a further reminder of the Latin for “light” (lux, lucis) from which Lucifer’s name is drawn. It suggests how small the light he can access has become, and how transferable, since sugar in hot coffee rapidly dissolves. Similarly, the flimsiness of the cigarette-paper is evoked by sound: “crimping a white tip / and dark tobacco carefully within the rustle of thin / paper.” The cigarette could fall apart, and in any case will soon be burnt to ash.
The struck match is another image of transience. An old slang word for match is “lucifer”. It originally meant the kind of match that could be lit by striking it against any surface so the association with the devil had some rationale. Even the modern safety match has its risks.
Lucifer is described as taking a break in the poem’s title, but this may be ironical. He appears to have lacked any choice in the matter, and to have been dismissed by another person from his sensuous paradise: “There was darkness there, but warmth. / Yes, gorgeous warmth … a ‘shh’ pressed / to his lips before he was handed down.” Something illicit has been going on, and now time’s up. Perhaps this is the bitter end of the affair: if the Lucifer analogy still holds, it must be.
The poem captures the ways in which time expands or shrinks according to differently charged perception. Twice in the poem (lines four and 10) Lucifer is transported internally through time – by remembering something. The placing of the first comma in line 10 after “remembers” separates and emphasises that process. We could even read the remainder of the sentence as an exclamation: “how long the fall was, how sheer, how short.”
Line nine is particularly intriguing. What is the “whisper of white noise … voices?” Such sounds might indicate some kind of public humiliation. If the title were reinterpreted, the “break” could suggest an accident, to be followed by a gradual recovery of consciousness. It’s also rather tempting to read the poem as an allegory of the human “journey” – from safely enclosed childhood to an adulthood of lonelier and more harmful self-comfort.
Whatever has occasioned Lucifer’s change of status, the metaphorical “fall” itself may be the mysteriously glowing central experience he remembers but doesn’t divulge. We don’t need to know. Poetry is able to tell stories, but one of its delights is that it doesn’t need to. All that’s necessary is that a few sparks should be cleverly struck from the reader’s imagination.
The balancing of the poem around a “turn” at the stanza break suggests sonnet-form, but of course there are only 11 lines. This seems exactly the right number. The crisper the narrative, the better the mystery, and the sharper the flavours of bitterness and sweetness. Lucifer in mortal guise still seems to have got off lightly, and somehow it’s hard to begrudge him his tenuous equilibrium – or judge him too harshly for his coffee and fag.