was walk around and around in circles,
then try to sleep curled up off in a corner,
as you tried to avoid the guards and their taunts.
In your country, you grace a theatre—
here it is assumed you are a visiting prostitute,
and I your pimp. We become two humans
trapped in separate clear containers,
still trying to join by instinct, slipping
and falling, again and again. Two children
trying to climb opposite sides of a hill
of sand that only sweeps us lower. Two numbers
trying to occur together and solve an equation.
No point in mouthing words back and forth—
it is too far away for either of us to see.
But you reach out and frame my face. I realize
I am blowing kisses to someone. You forced
to live in a part of an airport for five days—
the first three days without food. Me forced
to make appeals to officials who ignore me.
Finally, I put a bribe into the right hand—
I am let through to cross from bella Italia
into a departure lounge. We can say nothing,
but twine ourselves around each other
across airport seats for an hour, allowed
entry into a silence we now know in ourselves,
making a place of no arrival or departure.
Perfect Day
Three days before your ninetieth birthday
was her eighty-fourth birthday.
A couple of the staff brought a cake
to the table where you had your meals
and sang “Happy Birthday” to her,
and touched gently at her head
so she would blow in the direction
of the half-dozen candles.
Then you got up from your chair
to sing to her too,
and in a moment of lucidity
asked those present, What do you think
of my eighty-four-year-old bride?
My grandmother, wide eyes
unable to see you, tear-filled,
leant over and kissed you.
There were second and third cups
of coffee for her to drink
as she talked with her friends,
and after a while, tired,
you went slowly by yourself
up to the rooms the two of you shared
and had a stroke, and lay down,
and two or three hours later,
your whole family around you,
your power of speech gone,
your last words uttered, died.
With the memory you had left,
when you saw the cake and heard the song
you realized it was your wife’s birthday—
and maybe in a part of yourself
found the way to the completion
of the gift you had promised her
sixty-odd years before,
and decided this was as it should be,
it was the perfect day.
Playing With Stones
When I carry her home each evening
from the park playground swing, she pleads with me
to let her walk on the bed of smooth stones
at the front of our apartment building.
She wants to find individual stones
and put them in her wide pocket, then place
the same stones along a row of large rocks.
I would like us to stay as we are now
within the flowering and flowing gold
gaze of the sun’s late rays. And suddenly
I imagine a day when she is old.
As if I were her child and she was soon
to be gone, I begin to grieve for her,
little mother, my daughter. Carrying
her shepherdess’s bag filled with her stones,
one for each sheep in her flock, already
she is keeping count for when it is night
and she brings the sheep into the stone fold,
already she is asking that they all
be kept in the great invisible scrip.
The tears she comes to cry for those she loves,
the tears others who love her cry for her,
will stray and go lost, so she places stones
one by one on flat rock, stones that are tears
she gathered as they rolled out of the sun.
My Grandmother’s Eyes
The leaves of last summer
that danced their green light
through the lifting trees
lie changed and scattered now,
dull pennies on the path
melting coldly into the earth.
Her eyes, her old eyes,
that shone and were pale green,
the green of the river water
as it flows in mist and sun
to meet the deep inlet,
have turned colour like leaves
now that sight has fallen away.
Where once her gaze was wide
and danced with all it took in,
now there is a hung head and fear,
and she looks down at nothing,
suddenly stares out at nothing.
Soon her eyes will have become
more than even she has seen,
but until then her drained eyes
are pennies laid over her eyes.
Blade
I
Razor-edged steel. I lean and concentrate
what strength I possess, worshipful. Keep the blade
inserted in under another man’s jaw.
Keep it exactly there. Close around our heads,
the same original and ultimate means
as within us, blackness, now a halo—
the blade the only light. I observe his face,
the unyieldingness in the glance, and realize
he is my father, and he and I are here
to perform this act together and know it
as our single embrace. If I lapse, he will
be able to kill me. If he moves while
I fulfill the pressure, he will sink the blade
into his jugular. I am dreaming this.
II
I am dreaming this. I hold the blade laid
in the rot of the wound it made. The one blade
that can be a balm pouring into that wound
as it cuts through to where there is no blood
but a mysterious ore in radiant flow.
The two of us the wound. Our blood still circling
but out to the unfathomable tips of all
dreaming iron and back. The iron laughs.
I wake, and a grotesque, beautiful one
slides out of me and away. Murderer
who removes the blade clean from the fallen neck,
man who walks free, bright as a song in the air,
my father and I gone, a new instrument
of life, the blade buried and lost in his hand.
Aphrodite’s Mirror
Robin in the grass, away in the trees,
on a roof with her new-flying babies,
her breast a visible electric charge,
a flung up orange-red disc. My daughter
is eyeing flowers, pilfering a rich handful
to give to her mother. Now as she runs
into a garden where she vanishes,
half a bouquet in her hand, and runs back,
the petal-glow concentrated on her
becomes a deepening show, a bright play
of the essence of copper. She will go
to her mother flower- and copper-dipped
as her mother was when she called her here
to be born and to know the days and nights,
the two of them as full of clear singing
as twin robins. Her flowers her pendant,
her ancient mirror of p
olished metal,
she moves to and fro displaying herself
and wherever her eyes lead her. Laughing
while light tells its secrets, while it keeps them,
she runs old ways, from garden to garden,
first artefact of her mother and me,
mirror looking at us, with us, past us.
My Daughter and the Geometry of Time
Clear sun, spring wind twisting spray up off waves,
my daughter digging, dropping shovelfuls
of clean sand through a sea-worn opening
in a jutting limb of a driftwood tree,
watching grains fall to an apex of sand
and slide to the widening base. I see
the black glowing around the visible,
the sun, sky, water, beach flat. There are pairs
of hands in each incoming wave tip’s froth,
frenzied, fashioning fire and flinging it,
before they fall away, to the grey sand
and into that black. My daughter is two
and I am almost fifty. My mother’s
parents’ ashes lie where I buried them
in sand a hundred feet or so from here—
I think of them as having gone within
shells that are spheres of time, the radii
three times the one within which I now stand,
innumerable times the one within
which my daughter now stands, her sphere so new
that it is a radiant point, a source
full of her future. When she is the age
I am now, she will remember nothing
of the hour and a half this afternoon
she and I spent together. She will not
ever know the two people I still see
as clearly as any in my present.
When young they courted here in the beach light,
the worn logs and cornered wind their shelter
and secret escape. Their old eyes become
more and more for me the one sphere of time;
whatever my own eyes see, they give me.
Light taking light into its arms. Light, light,
in shell after shell. I dream I allow
my daughter to know more than I have known.
I think I will be here at her margins
when I am gone in the same way those two
are now at my own margins, receding
to the beginning. I will see the froth
travelling circular intricacies
like white flames from the earth’s immense hollows,
scooped up by the waters and let go free,
I will see my small daughter gazing back
at me for a moment from where she stands
collecting and pouring the sand, moving
into the future at the speed of light.
Ambleside Beach
Once or twice in late summer I come here
to swim headlong out into the inlet
as far as I can, and return slowly
on my back trying to let my arms
and legs do their work with animal calm
in the metallic purple-green water,
the transparent cold sea ore. I look up
now into rays falling straight down the air
and fitting the sea, and see the glitter
and melt of the sun, the nickels and dimes
that my grandmother would place in our hands
the nights she visited us and spun spells.
When she had left I would swallow a coin
I half-believed would continue to shine
bright within me like her story. She would
conjure them up for us right on the spot,
though the one about her brother who swam
out from this beach and got caught in the rip
tide, and ended up in a rescue boat,
she put together with drama and flair
from real events of the past. And the one
about her father who brought her mother,
herself and her sister here from far, far
away and built a shack, a makeshift home
to live in on this shore where one evening
we stood in a quiet place in the sand
beyond the touch of the tides and buried
the contents of her urn. Now I swim here,
and now I bring my two-year-old daughter
here to play. While she stays with her mother,
I swim out. My heart muscle strong for now,
beating steady within the sea’s rhythm,
I go out and back, I go out and back,
riding my heart and the tide, and the sea
cups me beneath the high sun’s deep dazzle.
I remember when I was very young
my grandmother held my face in her hands.
I have her first photographs—few alive
would recognize who the girl was but me.
I swim out to see myself cup my child’s
face in my hands and feel for a moment
my grandmother is there as a small girl.
I look straight up, I hear myself saying
Never leave me, the sun pouring ashes
and the sea washing them across my eyes.
Gas
Gas twists in the pupils of the blue eyes,
fastens the backbone to the basket base,
seizes the entrails and crumples the face.
He tries to smile, watery-eyed, staring,
between his grimaces. His cries come fast,
a tiny bird’s trill. Breast milk his mother
produces for him as the one true food,
his mouth draws in and his digestive tract
rejects as it drags him down its hooked path.
The flesh nails him to nothing. Even now
my father is here. I want this infant
to fight my father for me. He knows it.
Flesh I helped give him, essence I passed on
to him, holds the father, anger riding
in the ageless sperm. He is filtering
through himself what I filtered through myself,
forbears, human, animal, mineral,
molecular, purifying it
to spirit as he is able. Giving himself
to the invisible. Anger in him.
Anger in my father while he views me
through the eye metal. My son howls, the howl
owns his breath. I cradle him. He closes
his eyes, his mouth set tight, while my father
and my father’s father grimace and grit
their teeth within him. He writhes, this small one,
a question he asks returning to him
as himself, all pulsing answer, question,
beyond his comprehending. The body
attempting to digest itself. Hunger
in him instructs him to eat a god. Now
he will turn it into a stink. The god
will hurt him and he will fight it, sweet boy,
six weeks old, toothless, the anger in him,
the death in the gas, the death in the flesh,
with the heaven in living flailing hands.
Iron, a Summary
Train-wheel iron ringing in the rain. Gulls and crows
opening throats that utter their own metal on metal.
Construction roar. Cranes, excavators and drills. Clouds,
concentrated and low, flow with ore and alloy.
The ringing floats up from the shore through the stillness
in the chambers of the air between the raindrops
to vibrate my daughter’s eardrums, to touch
at her brow, her cheek, and the soft curls on her head.
The black metal of the crows’ wing feathers
brush against her within the ringing, the grey and white
metal of the gulls’ wing feathers. The cries
of the birds cross and echo between the inlet
&
nbsp; and the mountain. The sound of the train wheels
on a long curve rolls through the bowels of the birds.
The cold edge of the spinning playground ride
scrapes and cuts my daughter’s lip in the morning
in the lathe-cut air and she cries, and as soon forgets,
and cries again to keep on playing. I’m making a train,
she sings out later, one coloured block after another
along the front room floor. With seats to sit on.
Wheel after wheel continues grinding along rails.
The wheels of this other iron turn and show
the rainbows in black wings, the rush of creeks
and waterfalls in grey and white wings. These wheels ring
where the roads go through the insatiable
deep gorge of the human heart from cruelty to mercy,
through the shut furnace of the human face
from jealousy to pity, through the iron of the human dress
from secrecy to peace, and through a fiery forge
from human terror to love. The three-year-old
in brilliant boots splashes through and shatters the metal
of puddles and traces her circle of laughter,
desire clear and new and relentless as the sun and rain.
The Praise Tree
I
Gusts run through the sapling and it shivers and sways,
the leaves lift delicate green, glittering silver,
settle shadow-dark, lift green and silver again,
and the tree is an actress on a stage,
swooning, flinging her hands to the sky. In this play
the bodily motion is beyond measurement
and the speech beyond hearing, it is all the tree’s
single intricate electric charge and flow. The sorrow
in this one in the lead role so full of finding,
and of being found, the joy so full of searching,
the leaves are castanets she clicks while wind
undresses her of matter, dresses her in spirit, undresses
and dresses her again many times every minute
as in a wedding dance of the visible and invisible.
II
Because of a chance wind and chance open window
near a well-travelled street, I have become an audience,
the young actress is familiar to me, and the tall tree,
I understand now, is the small potted tree that vanished
from my grandmother’s room in the care centre
Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain Page 4
