You look past me, listening
to them, perhaps, or
watching
your own reflection somewhere
behind my head,
over my shoulder
You shift, and the bed
sags under us, losing its focus
There is someone in the next room
There is always
(your face
remote, listening)
someone in the next room.
iii
However,
in all their games
there seems
to be some reason
however
abstract they
at first appear
When we read them legends
in the evening
of monstrous battles, and secret
betrayals in the forest
and brutal deaths,
they scarcely listened;
one yawned and fidgeted; another
chewed the wooden handle
of a hammer;
the youngest one examined
a slight cut on his toe,
and we wondered how
they could remain
completely without fear
or even interest
as the final sword slid through
the dying hero.
The next night
walking along the beach
we found the trenches
they had been making:
fortified with pointed sticks
driven into the sides
of their sand moats
and a lake-enclosed island
with no bridges:
a last attempt
(however
eroded by the water
in an hour)
to make
maybe, a refuge human
and secure from the reach
of whatever walks along
(sword hearted)
these night beaches.
iv
Returning to the room:
I notice how
all your word-
plays, calculated ploys
of the body, the witticisms
of touch, are now
attempts to keep me
at a certain distance
and (at length) avoid
admitting I am here
I watch you
watching my face
indifferently
yet with the same taut curiosity
with which you might regard
a suddenly discovered part
of your own body:
a wart perhaps,
and I remember that
you said
in childhood you were
a tracer of maps
(not making but) moving
a pen or a forefinger
over the courses of the rivers,
the different colours
that mark the rise of mountains;
a memorizer
of names (to hold
these places
in their proper places)
So now you trace me
like a country’s boundary
or a strange new wrinkle in
your own wellknown skin
and I am fixed, stuck
down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mind’s continent
(here and yet not here, like
the wardrobe and the mirrors
the voices through the wall
your body ignored on the bed),
transfixed
by your eyes’
cold blue thumbtacks
v
The children like the block
of grey stone that was once a fort
but now is a museum:
especially
they like the guns
and the armour brought from
other times and countries
and when they go home
their drawings will be full
for some days, of swords
archaic sunburst maces
broken spears
and vivid red explosions.
While they explore
the cannons
(they aren’t our children)
we walk outside along
the earthworks, noting
how they are crumbling
under the unceasing
attacks of feet and flower roots;
The weapons
that were once outside
sharpening themselves on war
are now indoors
there, in the fortress,
fragile
in glass cases;
Why is it
(I’m thinking
of the careful moulding
round the stonework archways)
that is this time, such
elaborate defences keep
things that are no longer
(much)
worth defending?
vi
And you play the safe
game the orphan game
the ragged winter game
that says, I am alone
(hungry: I know you want me
to play it also)
the game of the waif who stands
at every picture window,
shivering, pinched nose pressed
against the glass, the snow
collecting on his neck,
watching the happy families
(a game of envy)
Yet he despises them: they are so
Victorian Christmas-card:
the cheap paper shows
under the pigments of
their cheerful fire-
places and satin-
ribboned
suburban laughter
and they have their own forms
of parlour
games: father and mother
playing father and mother
He’s glad
to be left
out by himself
in the cold
(hugging himself).
When I tell you this,
you say (with a smile fake
as a tinsel icicle):
You do it too.
Which in some ways
is a lie, but also I suppose
is right, as usual:
although I tend to pose
in other seasons
outside other windows.
vii
Summer again;
in the mirrors of this room
the children wheel, singing
the same song;
This casual bed
scruffy as dry turf,
the counterpane
rumpled with small burrows, is
their grassy lawn
and these scuffed walls
contain their circling trees,
that low clogged sink
their lake
(a wasp comes,
drawn by the piece of sandwich
left on the nearby beach
(how carefully you do
such details);
one of the children flinches
but won’t let go)
You make them
turn and turn, according to
the closed rules of your games,
but there is no joy in it
and as we lie
arm in arm, neither
joined nor separate
(your observations change me
to a spineless woman in
a cage of bones, obsolete fort
pulled inside out),
our lips moving
almost in time to their singing,
listening to the opening
and closing of the drawers
in the next room
(of course there is always
danger but where
would you locate it)
(the children spin
a round cage of glass
fr
om the warm air
with their thread-thin
insect voices)
and as we lie
here, caught
in the monotony of wandering
from room to room, shifting
the place of our defences,
I want to break
these bones, your prisoning rhythms
(winter,
summer)
all the glass cases,
erase all maps,
crack the protecting
eggshell of your turning
singing children:
I want the circle
broken.
Camera
You want this instant:
nearly spring, both of us walking,
wind blowing
walking
sunlight knitting the leaves before our eyes
the wind empty as Sunday
rain drying
in the wormy sidewalk puddles
the vestiges of night on our
lightscratched eyelids, our breezy fingers
you want to have it and so
you arrange us:
in front of a church, for perspective,
you make me stop walking
and compose me on the lawn;
you insist
that the clouds stop moving
the wind stop swaying the church
on its boggy foundations
the sun hold still in the sky
for your organized instant.
Camera man
how can I love your glass eye?
Wherever you partly are
now, look again
at your souvenir,
your glossy square of paper
before it dissolves completely:
it is the last of autumn
the leaves have unravelled
the pile of muddy rubble
in the foreground, is the church
the clothes I wore
are scattered over the lawn
my coat flaps in a bare tree
there has been a hurricane
that small black speck
travelling towards the horizon
at almost the speed of light
is me
Winter Sleepers
They lie side by side
under a thick quilt of silence.
The air silts up with snow.
The drifting land
merges with the inside room
gradually through the window
and the white sheet
swells and furrows
in the wind: no things
in this deep sleep are solid
only perhaps this floating
bed which holds them up, a life-
raft where they weather seas
that undulate with danger.
Under the bed the dust
eddies and collects;
dead leaves, broken
twigs, water-sodden
bones of small
animals gather
like sediment on the seafloor
under the snow.
Outside, the land
is filled with drowning men
and stretched remote close
beside her
he foundered and went down
some time before she knew.
Spring in the Igloo
The sun had been burning for a long time
before we saw it, and we saw it
only then because
it seared itself through the roof.
We, who thought we were living
in the centre of a vast night
and therefore spent our time
hoarding our own heat
were astonished by the light.
I made this house once
because I wanted the
coldest season, where you could be
if only by comparison, a
substitute for sun
but the earth
turns for its own reasons
ignoring mine, and these human
miscalculations
and so we are drifting
into a tepid ocean
on a shrinking piece of winter
(for two so frozen
this long in
glacial innocence
to swim would be
implausible)
with ice the only thing
between us and disaster.
A Sibyl
Below my window
in the darkening
backyard the children
play at war
among the flowerbeds
on my shelves the bottles
accumulate
my sibyl (every woman
should have one) has chosen
to live there
thin green wine bottles
emptied of small dinners
ovaltine jars, orange-brown
emptied of easy sleep
my sibyl crouches
in one of them
wrinkled as a pickled
baby, twoheaded prodigy
at a freakfair
hairless, her sightless
eyes like eggwhites
I stand looking
over the fading city
she calls to me with the many
voices of the children
not I want to die
but You must die
later or sooner alas
you were born weren’t you
the minutes thunder like guns
coupling won’t help you
or plurality
I see it
I prophesy
but she doesn’t reach me.
Old spider
sibyl, I’ll
uncork you
let in a little air
or I’ll ignore you.
Right now
my skin is a sack of
clever tricks, five
senses ribboned like birthday
presents unravel
in a torn web around me
and a man dances
in my kitchen, moving
like a metronome
with hopes of staying
for breakfast in the half-empty
bottle in his pocket
There are omens of
rockets among the tricycles
I know it
time runs out
in the ticking hips of the
man whose twitching skull
jerks on loose
vertebrae in my kitchen
flower
beds predict it
the city burns with an
afterglow of explosions as the
streetlights all come on
The thing that calls itself
I
right now
doesn’t care
I don’t care
I leave that to my
necessary sibyl
(that’s what she’s for)
with her safely bottled
anguish and her glass
despair
Migration: C.P.R.
i
Escaping from allegories
in the misty east, where inherited events
barnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshake
might be a finger pointing; you can’t look
in store windows without seeing
reflections/remnants of privateer
bones or methodist grandfathers with jaws
carved as wood pulpits warning
of the old evil; where not-quite-
forgotten histories
make the boards of lineal frame
farmhouses rotten
the fishermen
sit all day on old wharves facing
neither sea-
wards nor inland, mending
and untangling their old nets
of thought
and language is the law
we ran west
wanting
> a place of absolute
unformed beginning
(the train
an ark
upheld on the brain’s darkness)
but the inner lakes reminded
us too much of ancient oceans
first flood: blood-
enemy and substance
(was our train like
an ark or like a seasnake?
and the prairies were so nearly
empty as prehistory
that each of the
few solid objects took some great
implication, hidden but
more sudden than a signpost
(like an inscribed shard, broken bowl
dug at a desert level
where they thought
no man had been,
or a burned bone)
(every dwarf tree portentous
with twisted wisdom, though
we knew no
apples grew there
and that shape, gazing
at nothing
by a hooftrampled streamside:
it could
have been a centaur)
and even the mountains
at the approach, were
conical, iconic
again:
(tents
in the desert? triangular
ships? towers? breasts?
words)
again
these barriers
ii
Once in the pass, the steep
faulted gorges were at last
real: we
tossed our eastern
suitcases from the caboose
and all our baggage:
overboard
left in our wake
along the tracks
and (we saw) our train became
only a train, in real
danger of falling; strained
speechless through those new mountains
we stepped
unbound
into
what a free emerging
on the raw
streets and hills
without meaning
always creeping up behind us
(that cold touch on the shoulder)
our faces scraped as blank
as we could wish them
(but needing new
houses, new
dishes, new
husks)
iii
There are more secondhand
stores here than we expected:
though we brought nothing with us
Circle Game Page 3
