ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 200
Where The Sun
Shines Best
Austin Clarke
GUERNICA
TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY • LANCASTER (U.K.)
2013
For Gladys Irene Jordan Clarke-Luke, My Mother. 1914–2005
THE YELLOW leaves are trampled over by the black
boots of three soldiers from the Moss Park Armouries;
in uniform, intended not to be seen, nor identified,
for their intention and profession is to kill
to shoot from a distance, clean and perfect
and wipe their minds clean, erase all imperfection
of marksmanship. War. War has been declared.
War. It is all that’s on their minds. War;
and the intention for war declared upon Moss Park.
THERE ARE three other men standing as if at attention,
though they are no soldiers; one man’s posture is stooped
with old age, another is hampered by Saint Vitus’ Dance,
uncertain in his balance and his gait,
all three men, crippled civilians, taking puffs from one
cigarette, from hand to lip, smoking their jewel of luck
found amongst the rotting cold leaves that numb
their fingers. A cough drop will clear their lungs,
after each passed puff, will make them high, will turn Canada
into Florida jaunty and warm, for five minutes, the life
of their happiness, and clear the head, to unlock the lungs
and watch the pure white smoke rise over their heads,
precious as the breath they breathe in this crisp December cold.
THEY ARE passing the stub, passing it, standing
under the bodies of maples and the other trees,
their names not taught in geography classes in Barbados.
They were not names learned by rote and heart, carried
here to this wide country of snow and wind and whiteness,
to take pause on their daily long journey, their constitutional,
in Moss Park, common in its uses, and users, not always swept;
condoms, discharged bullet-casings decorating,
in silent boasts of manhood, the shooting of anger,
desire, hunger after the flesh of women,
cheaper rates now that they are east of Jarvis, east of Church
and McGill, the prices lower the farther east you go.
I HAVE walked on these artificial, rolled-up leaves,
long-lasting and long out-living the fall of foot and instep,
flowers of cream plastic, a patch of two red ones,
boasting virulence in a man who has lasted longer
than the red and yellow fallen leaves from the trees
whose names I do not remember.
SQUEEZING THE last puff of joy from the joint
disappearing like spit on the lips, they move like soldiers
in disarray, shaken by the battle, ragged,
marching, “Easy!”, coming in my direction.
I can see the last spit of marijuana cigarette
leave the lips of the man walking in fits,
alcohol and broken legs that barely balance him, who laughs
and jogs and plays like a doll sculpted from the two
stick-spines of a popsicle. He spits a smouldering last blob
of phlegm from deep inside his chest and walks
in a straight line, leading his two companions,
dragging his feet in the thick dying leaves.
THE LEAVES make the same sound as the poisonous dried
black pods of the shack-shack tree in an un-tilled field
in Barbados. His head is cut off, beheaded suddenly
by my window that is too small to frame his shoulders.
No rhythm to their footsteps as they walk like three men on stilts.
And I stand and think of popsicles and of men made of cloth
dropped from the needle-worker’s sewing machine. And I think
of walking in the burning sun in Old Havana,
in a square, the playground of dictators; once; now an ordinary
square for tourists and the poor and prostitutes; turned
into a museum of contemporary knick-knacks and dolls,
piece-work for Cuba’s poor and indigent, the works
of artists, and the frustrations of poverty: row after row
of golliwogs that stare me in the face, locked eyes of brotherhood,
and womanhood. I am embarrassed by my pity, as the whores
are following me, sticking to my black skin, like leeches,
like moles sucking the pity out of my Yankee dollar bills.
MOSS PARK Armouries where men just past puberty wait,
their heads buried in the silken pages of the Holy Bible,
praying for the luck of the draw and the trigger, to return
to this park. They come from the ticky-tacky suburbs
where identical and monotonous backyards clean as Pyrex bowls
after cornflakes, raked clean as skeletons, as if from plague
and household germs, and the influenza from pigs,
and bacon at the same hour of suspended morning.
YOUNG MEN waiting for the jet plane to Afghanistan
where poppies are pure and stronger, from Scarborough,
Mississauga, Don Mills and Brampton and condominiums
in Pickering, are certain of victory: for luck in war
is vouchsafed in beliefs, and luck of the dice, the presumption
that race and place, country and flag, give easier growth
to ego and hatred of men, and women, homeless and whores
who sleep on leaves the colour of gold, on a park bench cold
and damp, under a yellow sleeping bag, colder than raccoons
and squirrels warm in roofs and attics where they bury
tomorrow’s breakfast and food for the week.
A MAN without a home, and a whore without a trick left
in her cold skirt, lie on two benches of cement
and wrought iron, a half-empty plastic cup of ants
that frolic on the surface leaving their journey marked
like lines in the middle of the palm, their horoscopes. They foretell
the beginning of dreams, of warmth, prosperity once known
and lived: the man was an editor, and printed stories
of homeless men; the woman remembers days
when her bed was warm with the body of a man beside,
her husband.
THREE SOLDIERS in uniform of dark green camouflage,
one with three stripes, one with two stripes, the third with one stripe
against him; their weapons left behind in a rack
in the Armouries with bigger guns, automatic, to kill in the dark,
and you don’t know you’re dead when you are dead.
These soldiers walk like the other three men who had left
the park before, puffed with pot, puffed with power.
THREE SOLDIERS, unsteady on their legs, stagger in uneven step
from the bar on Barton Street, where books of Canadian fiction once
were born; round the corner, walking-distance
from the Armouries. They are spinning and slipping-and-sliding
from blowing froth from the heads of draughts — more
than they could count — Canadian Molson’s and U.S.
Budweiser, coming out on George Street dark as a back
alley, desolate patch of road a few steps down
from the Mission House which kisses Queen Street East.
> They cross this road singing their favourite march,
“It’s a long way to Tipperary,” as the streetcars rumble; and they
imagine Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Canada’s enemies.
Their arms become machine guns, and bullets fall
out of their mouths like a stream of bulbs on a Christmas tree, rapid;
repeating a long line of perfect aim.
They come upon the enemy: the man sleeping,
the camouflage of dark and yellow leaves covering
his body not exposed under the umbrella of the night, still, breathing
in the perfection of this black night, happiness
and fatigue gained from his collection of four empty bottles
drained to celebrate, and five cigarettes butted to one inch
of their life. “Let’s scare the shit outta this fucker!
Trespassing on our Armouries! Bringing their shit ...”
The first attempt missed. The sole of his boot was wet,
and it hit the cement, and fell harmless; as the pain whizzed
through his ankle he lost his balance, and fell in the wet
freshly-cut grass. “Get-the-fuck off! Fuckers!”
the soldiers hissed, words boiling over like milk
in an enamel saucepan, like spit rising in small bubbles
in the fresh snow, like baseballs thrown at deadly speed
in the nearby empty diamond.
THE SOLDIER with three stripes on his shoulder ignores the woman
at Jarvis and Queen, mistaking her limber body for a back-pack
under a blanket in the half-darkness, in his hurry and his anger
to land his boots, left and right in the same soft spot on the man’s
chest. She thought she could pull a trick on this night, safe
on the mowed lawn tucked neat inside the rectangle of fence,
blackened iron to protect the Armouries from invading whores;
attacking bloody beggars who cross the Rubicon,
brown dying grass carved into paths of Xs,
going and coming during the light of day and the unsafe
darkness of night, asking for spare change.
WHEN THE sun has left the skies, and stars come out
like fugitives, you can catch them swapping their bodies for a street-
car ticket to ride to the bars on Dundas Street,
to wash down the peckishness in a glass of draught beer,
in the same bar as the three soldiers, or a cup of coffee
getting thicker and colder, held with two fingers, as if
it is champagne, the same plastic cup I see them use
as an ashtray then drop into the uncollected green garbage bins
in front of my neighbour’s house, the neighbourhood dump.
“DIRTY FUCKING shit! You fucker! How dare you
trespass on these Armouries?” And then, in the same blackness
of the night, he realized there were two sleeping bodies;
three fuckers fucking with the Armouries, noticing
the second body in the darkness, he screamed as if
it was this ghost that frightened him. “Fuckers!”
“Fuck-off!” the second soldier screamed, finding voice
and bravery in the blackness of the night. There were no walkers
of dogs peeing against a tree, just the ghosts in the shapes
of maples; just the wail of a police cruiser going in the wrong
direction; just the shriek of an ambulance. It was a shooting
on Shuter. A black man. Gang-related. Related.
It was a gangster sixteen years old, too young,
the Law said, to show the city his face, for only his mother
shall know, and his father, if there is a father living,
that he is dead. “Deading,” as they say back where he originated.
“FUCK OFF!” he says, for no words suit the venom
in his body, only two hisses like daggers. “Fuck off!”
And the third man, without the anger to match his manhood,
to clothe his manhood in, stands silent. He turns
his face aside and says, “Pardon me,” and the next
second all three are listening to a sound like water
hitting the ground pounding, pounding heavy as iron.
The sound of gushing water that could never rouse
the homeless man from his dream.
MOLSON’S DRAUGHT beer gurgling in his head, losing
his balance, he led his two companions tied by the rope
of friendship, members of the same cult and secret society,
a brigade of violence, tied to obedience in the same drills
of precision, standing at attention, “Left turn, right turn,
Roy-yal Sal-lute ... Pre-sent ... Ho!” the training manual
gave the words and drills, to inject bravery into the veins,
to squeeze bravery into violent vengeance mixed
with the corpuscles already there, floating in the weakened
red liquid that has turned pink.
“O, MARY, mother of God, I put my life into your two hands!”
“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
I entrust my life!” And the haunting voice spreads
the hoarse comfort of the blues, “Bring back, bring back,
bring back my bonnie to me, to me ...” without weapons
tied to their thighs, with no hand grenade, small
as a pineapple rotting on the stem, the size of a testicle,
manhood shrivels to the size of the balls of the sleeping man.
WITHOUT GUNS and hand-grenades, wearing their mufti-clothes,
blue jeans, blue t-shirt and black leather-and-canvas boots
tipped in steel, they came like sneaks upon the man
chloroformed in sleep, hard concrete for bed springs and bed bugs
from the halfway house. But the soldiers’ words are bullets,
the cold steel of drawn bayonets stern as the iron
painted black on three sides of the Armouries, and keep
this homeless man from dreaming that the concrete of the park
bench is a soft made-up bed, enticing as a mattress
standing on display in a show window of a second-hand
store selling bayonets and goggles, swords and rifles,
helmets and boots from wars in foreign countries
the soldier could not find on a map of the world,
because he did not reach grade five in school, and was not
yet born when wars were fought and lost, in foreign countries
painted red in The Times Atlas of the World;
no geography in his head.
SURROUNDING HIM is his silent audience; tongues
cut to the stump, silenced and dumbfounded, unable
to tell their opinions, so speechless they have become
witnesses of the spectacle, in the arena, sitting on cushions
softer than the yellow maple leaves broken at the spine
and the ruptured veins, behind thick curtain and white
plastic blinds matching the colour of the television screen
reflected on its white face, intolerant of the blackness outside;
from three floors above the leaves in townhouses patterned
after England, Victorian and Georgian; their windows sealed
against the cold draught of the night, and the dust of summer,
to escape the smudge of life swirling around them,
as they fence themselves behind wrought iron, sturdy
as prison cells, in carbon copy of the barricade of iron
running round three sides of the Armouries to keep bums
and the sex-workers and homeless men hiding beneath heaps
of maple leaves rotting side by side with used condoms,
cigarette butts and chewing gum.
I ST
AND in this silence; in these shadows thrown from the Armouries
and the cannon sweating in the silent dew, coming alive
in the purr of this soldier’s anger and fantasy; this cold
morning with the sun breaking in a soft cool kiss, a mist,
a cloud, weak enough to raise an aura from the dew on iron.
I hear the language that bathes his quarry clean,
words flung at the man without a home,
to wake him from his wet cold blanket; I sit,
try to stand, and count the number of times
the pendulum of the boot takes aim and lands in the stomach
of the sleeping man.
THE FLAG of Ontario, its Crown, its Cross of St. George,
three branches, from the maples in the park, and the trillium flower,
once silk and white, delicate and sensual,
covered in myth and superstition, not to be touched,
flies regal from my neighbour’s second floor
window, guarding her roof, flapping in four
different kinds of wind in hurricane, storm and flood
and pouring rain that makes me think of Barbados,
fifty years ago, when the chattel house made from grey
unpainted deal board and sheets of galvanized tin
the colour of the skies when rain is falling, and the coral stone
were dumped in backyards, by the side of the road, hidden
in the gutters and cane fields, and the population bathed
in tears of blood, cried “Help!”; saw Sodom and Gomorrah,
moaning “Help we, O Lord, O Jesus Christ! Help we!”
THERE IS no sign of the three men smoking under the maples
in this morning’s bright sun, now that the leaves have changed
from gold to brown and some have turned to garbage
irrefutable as condoms, and all of a sudden, I am not here, not here
Where the Sun Shines Best Page 1
