a man who roared on an island for ten years,
whose body grew banal
while he stayed humane
behind the black teeth and withering hair.
Imagine in his hands – black
from the dried blood of animals,
a bow of torn silver
that noised arrows loose like a wild heart;
in front of him – Paris
darting and turning, the perfumed stag,
and beyond him the sun
netted in the hills, throwing back his shape,
until the running spider of shadow
gaped on the bandaged foot of the standing man
who let shafts of eagles into the ribs
that were moving to mountains.
PHILOCTETES ON THE ISLAND
Sun moves broken in the trees
drops like a paw
turns sea to red leopard
I trap sharks and drown them
stuffing gills with sand
cut them with coral till
the blurred grey runs
red designs.
And kill to fool myself alive
to leave all pity on the staggering body
in order not to shoot an arrow up
and let it hurl
down through my petalling skull
or neck vein, and lie
heaving round the wood in my lung.
That the end of thinking.
Shoot either eye of bird instead
and run and catch it in your hand.
One day a bird went mad
flew blind along the beach
smashed into a dropping wave
out again and plummeted.
Later knocked along the shore.
To slow an animal
you break its foot with a stone
so two run wounded
reel in the bush, flap
bodies at each other
till free of forest
it gallops broken in the sand,
then use a bow
and pin the tongue back down its throat.
With wind the rain wheels like a circus hoof,
aims at my eyes, rakes up the smell of animals
of stone moss, cleans me.
Branches fall like nightmares in the dark
till sun breaks up
and spreads wound fire at my feet
then they smell me,
the beautiful animals
ELIZABETH
Catch, my Uncle Jack said
and oh I caught this huge apple
red as Mrs Kelly’s bum.
It’s red as Mrs Kelly’s bum, I said
and Daddy roared
and swung me on his stomach with a heave.
Then I hid the apple in my room
till it shrunk like a face
growing eyes and teeth ribs.
Then Daddy took me to the zoo
he knew the man there
they put a snake around my neck
and it crawled down the front of my dress.
I felt its flicking tongue
dripping onto me like a shower.
Daddy laughed and said Smart Snake
and Mrs Kelly with us scowled.
In the pond where they kept the goldfish
Philip and I broke the ice with spades
and tried to spear the fishes;
we killed one and Philip ate it,
then he kissed me
with raw saltless fish in his mouth.
My sister Mary’s got bad teeth
and said I was lucky, then she said
I had big teeth, but Philip said I was pretty.
He had big hands that smelled.
I would speak of Tom, soft laughing,
who danced in the mornings round the sundial
teaching me the steps from France, turning
with the rhythm of the sun on the warped branches,
who’d hold my breast and watch it move like a snail
leaving his quick urgent love in my palm.
And I kept his love in my palm till it blistered.
When they axed his shoulders and neck
the blood moved like a branch into the crowd.
And he staggered with his hanging shoulder
cursing their thrilled cry, wheeling,
waltzing in the French style to his knees
holding his head with the ground,
blood settling on his clothes like a blush;
this way
when they aimed the thud into his back.
And I find cool entertainment now
with white young Essex, and my nimble rhymes.
She said, ‘What about Handy? Think I should send it to him?’
‘He’s supposed to call in a little while. I’ll ask him.’
‘He retired, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
She waited and then said, ‘Say something, Parker. God to get you to gossip, it’s like pulling teeth.’
‘Handy retired.’ Parker said.
‘I know he retired! Tell me about it. Tell me why he retired, tell me where he is, how’s he doing. Talk to me, Parker, goddamit.’
RICHARD STARK, The Sour Lemon Score
DATES
It becomes apparent that I miss great occasions.
My birth was heralded by nothing
but the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s marriage.
No monuments bled, no instruments
agreed on a specific weather.
It was a seasonal insignificance.
I console myself with my mother’s eighth month.
While she sweated out her pregnancy in Ceylon
a servant ambling over the lawn
with a tray of iced drinks,
a few friends visiting her
to placate her shape, and I
drinking the life lines,
Wallace Stevens sat down in Connecticut
a glass of orange juice at his table
so hot he wore only shorts
and on the back of a letter
began to write ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’.
That night while my mother slept
her significant belly cooled
by the bedroom fan
Stevens put words together
that grew to sentences
and shaved them clean and
shaped them, the page suddenly
becoming thought where nothing had been,
his head making his hand
move where he wanted
and he saw his hand was saying
the mind is never finished, no, never
and I in my mother’s stomach was growing
as were the flowers outside the Connecticut windows.
BILLBOARDS
‘Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic.’
My wife’s problems with husbands, houses,
her children that I meet
at stations in Kingston, in Toronto, in London Ontario
– they come down the grey steps
bright as actors after their drugged four hour ride
of spilled orange juice and comics.
Reunions for Easter egg hunts.
Kite flying. Christmases.
All this, I was about to say,
invades my virgin past.
When she was beginning
this anthology of kids
I moved – blind but for senses
jutting faux pas, terrible humour,
shifted with a sea of persons,
breaking when necessary
into smaller self sufficient bits of mercury.
My mind a carefully empty diary
till I hit the barrier reef
that was my wife—
there
the right bright fish
among the coral.
With her came the locusts of history—
innuendoes she ha
d missed
varied attempts at seduction
dogs who had been bred
and killed by taxis or brain disease,
Here was I trying to live
with a neutrality so great
I’d have nothing to think about.
Nowadays I get the feeling
I’m in a complex situation,
one of several billboard posters
blending in the rain.
I am writing this with a pen my wife has used
to write a letter to her first husband.
On it is the smell of her hair.
She must have placed it down between sentences
and thought, and driven her fingers round her skull
gathered the slightest smell of her head
and brought it back to the pen.
LETTERS & OTHER WORLDS
‘for there was no more darkness for him and, no doubt like Adam before the fall, he could see in the dark’
My father’s body was a globe of fear
His body was a town we never knew
He hid that he had been where we were going
His letters were a room he seldom lived in
In them the logic of his love could grow
My father’s body was a town of fear
He was the only witness to its fear dance
He hid where he had been that we might lose him
His letters were a room his body scared
He came to death with his mind drowning.
On the last day he enclosed himself
in a room with two bottles of gin, later
fell the length of his body
so that brain blood moved
to new compartments
that never knew the wash of fluid
and he died in minutes of a new equilibrium.
His early life was a terrifying comedy
and my mother divorced him again and again.
He would rush into tunnels magnetized
by the white eye of trains
and once, gaining instant fame,
managed to stop a Perahara in Ceylon
– the whole procession of elephants dancers
local dignitaries – by falling
dead drunk onto the street.
As a semi-official, and semi-white at that,
the act was seen as a crucial
turning point in the Home Rule Movement
and led to Ceylon’s independence in 1948.
(My mother had done her share too—
her driving so bad
she was stoned by villagers
whenever her car was recognized)
For 14 years of marriage
each of them claimed he or she
was the injured party.
Once on the Colombo docks
saying goodbye to a recently married couple
my father, jealous
at my mother’s articulate emotion,
dove into the waters of the harbour
and swam after the ship waving farewell.
My mother pretending no affiliation
mingled with the crowd back to the hotel.
Once again he made the papers
though this time my mother
with a note to the editor
corrected the report – saying he was drunk
rather than broken hearted at the parting of friends.
The married couple received both editions
of The Ceylon Times when their ship reached Aden.
And then in his last years
he was the silent drinker,
the man who once a week
disappeared into his room with bottles
and stayed there until he was drunk
and until he was sober.
There speeches, head dreams, apologies,
the gentle letters, were composed.
With the clarity of architects
he would write of the row of blue flowers
his new wife had planted,
the plans for electricity in the house,
how my half-sister fell near a snake
and it had awakened and not touched her.
Letters in a clear hand of the most complete empathy
his heart widening and widening and widening
to all manner of change in his children and friends
while he himself edged
into the terrible acute hatred
of his own privacy
till he balanced and fell
the length of his body
the blood entering
the empty reservoir of bones
the blood searching in his head without metaphor.
GRIFFIN OF THE NIGHT
I’m holding my son in my arms
sweating after nightmares
small me
fingers in his mouth
his other fist clenched in my hair
small me
sweating after nightmares.
BIRTH OF SOUND
At night the most private of a dog’s long body groan.
It comes with his last stretch
in the dark corridor outside our room.
The children turn.
A window tries to split with cold
the other dog hoofing the carpet for lice.
We’re all alone.
WE’RE AT THE GRAVEYARD
Stuart Sally Kim and I
watching still stars
or now and then sliding stars
like hawk spit to the trees.
Up there the clear charts,
the systems’ intricate branches
which change with hours and solstices,
the bone geometry of moving from there, to there.
And down here – friends
whose minds and bodies
shift like acrobats to each other.
When we leave, they move
to an altitude of silence.
So our minds shape
and lock the transient,
parallel these bats
who organize the air
with thick blinks of travel.
Sally is like grey snow in the grass.
Sally of the beautiful bones
pregnant below stars.
NEAR ELGINBURG
3 a.m. on the floor mattress.
In my pyjamas a moth beats frantic
my heart is breaking loose.
I have been dreaming of a man
who places honey on his forehead before sleep
so insects come tempted by liquid
to sip past it into the brain.
In the morning his head contains wings
and the soft skeletons of wasp.
Our suicide into nature.
That man’s seduction
so he can beat the itch
against the floor and give in
move among the sad remnants
of those we have destroyed,
the torn code these animals ride to death on.
Grey fly on windowsill
white fish by the dock
heaved like a slimy bottle into the deep,
to end up as snake
heckled by children and cameras
as he crosses lawns of civilization.
We lie on the floor mattress
lost moths walk on us
waterhole of flesh, want
thi
s humiliation under the moon.
Till in the morning we are surrounded
by dark virtuous ships
sent by the kingdom of the loon.
LOOP
My last dog poem.
I leave behind all social animals
including my dog who takes
30 seconds dismounting from a chair.
Turn to the one
who appears again on roads
one eye torn out and chasing.
He is only a space filled
and blurred with passing,
transient as shit – will fade
to reappear somewhere else.
He survives the porcupine, cars, poison,
fences with their spasms of electricity.
Vomits up bones, bathes at night
in Holiday Inn swimming pools.
And magic in his act of loss.
The missing eye travels up
in a bird’s mouth, and into the sky.
Departing family. It is loss only of flesh
no more than his hot spurt across a tree.
He is the one you see at Drive-Ins
tearing silent into garbage
while societies unfold in his sky.
The bird lopes into the rectangle nest of images
and parts of him move on.
HERON REX
Mad kings
blood lines introverted, strained pure
so the brain runs in the wrong direction
they are proud of their heritage of suicides
– not just the ones who went mad
balancing on that goddamn leg, but those
whose eyes turned off
the sun and imagined it
those who looked north, those who
forced their feathers to grow in
those who couldn’t find the muscles in their arms
who drilled their beaks into the skin
those who could speak
and lost themselves in the foul connections
who crashed against black bars in a dream of escape
those who moved round the dials of imaginary clocks
The Cinnamon Peeler Page 2
