Vanishing Acts
Page 2
Flits from
gunship to fractured gunship.
Ash of lead, ash of zircon,
ash only can the land afford.
Ash only
I could rake from my brother’s pyre.
Pyre that white-hot, hollowed
skull
of a bull, pyre that glows,
throbbing glows between the torpid
arms
of drowsy rivers, throbs above
the gore.
Blood no longer but coarse shroud
smouldering on the long lines of pyres
our wakes
sluggish, numbed, unruddered, our wakes
we reeling ships.
Prows snapped off, reeling ships
that have beached here in sooty dunes,
beached here, run aground miles away
from brothers, from brothers’ pyres.
In a tree-hung village
ships reeling, ships trying to reel in
what’s left,
straightening their keels,
trying to
escape
vertigo memory.
II
How long must we bleach our hulls
on these sooty dunes, pitching at
a sunrise that won’t cauterize
our barnacled backs? Pitching,
waiting to forget. Waiting
like shiftless tramps.
Even where the fine cracks are free
of flitting ash
no drop drips.
No drop drips
to lease a little sea to landlocked lips.
The wind’s a dry and hacking cough.
On walls that have trudged
to this village to die,
a fire’s dried grief
has left its carbon ghost.
Wolf Rain
In the dark, we saw workmen shovelling mud
into shallow pits. But the guards were watching
and we drove by quickly.
*
Rain-hit my eyelids shuttered and rain-hit
my shoulder receded into its shell,
and from watching the tracks spooling into the past,
I drew back, wrapped myself into the train, rain-hit.
Tried to write. The drizzle nosed its way in
through the grille, the pen slipped.
The ink slurred across the page,
blurring dates, blotting out centuries.
I have not seen the stars for centuries,
it has been raining.
*
Time dances best at night, when no one’s watching:
century segues into century in our sleep.
When a hundred years meet a hundred years
by daylight, on paper, they explode.
I got off in a rain of ash and scorched leaves,
powdered glass settling on bridges and cars.
The crannies between blasts
filled with memories:
the shards of a wedding under the trees,
the groom smiling, the bride hidden
by marigold blotches.
The wolf knows when it is time
to cross the steppe
and breathe on our windows.
*
Danger swarmed up the stairs but at every turning
as you came to meet it, slunk away
like wet sand sucked into a crab-hole.
It slipped down the steps like the hair of the bride,
floating serpentine down the canal.
The groom, I think, ended his journey
in the salt mines: that page in the records
is badly smudged.
*
I went out to the bridge in this city of canals.
The wolf waded out, fixed me with phosphor eyes.
I trod water, sank; eyes closed, felt his paw
on the fine hairs of my nape,
smelt gunpowder on his fur.
I splashed through the thick rain
he’d brought with him,
never looked back
as he threw his mask away, shouting.
Since then, I have seen neither fireworks nor stars.
I ride trains, I write.
Icarus Insurgent
All night they fished the sound for his bones:
the clanking gossip of their hooks,
drawn and thrown over the sides of coracles,
killed the quail’s black sleep.
In the morning
they set his mother’s creaky brown table
in the garden
and threw his big bronze wings on it.
now Icarus, they said,
you drink up your milk
and tuck in tight.
That night, fishing: their nets
dragged along the glinting shelves
of the nymphs, weighed down
by big bronze wings.
They rode hard home on hooves that cracked the darkness,
trailing their tattered nets behind;
shadowed by the dry wind in the wake
of flapping big bronze wings.
Horse Hymn
No shelter from your foaming drives, the night
offers no respite.
You break the axles of dreams,
mud-splash the sacrifice.
Was it for this the milk ocean spawned you
and gave you into these, its impatient churner’s hands?
The fire god has given notice. My hermits chant
at flame-pits stripped to faggot-bone
by his absence. The sparks, absconding rebels,
leap to the stoking of your silver tail:
charred pastures chart the bite of your breath,
the campaign of a mane that is wind.
My voice has never reined you. Unquestioned,
you have reigned in my name. My seal
means nothing; it’s your hoof-print
that cowherds brand their cattle with
in all the villages of the flood-plain.
Even the river in spate is allowed
some anger, some ferocity it can force
from the snow’s long ride to the swallowing sea.
My fate is patience: that, and the drumming of hooves,
the swishing of a mane that is wind.
Not once have I climbed into your dun saddle.
Not that I would try. I like my crown,
dislike the thought of my face falling
in the mud of my subjects’ laughter.
Like an angry god’s bowstring,
your throat shafts its arrow:
a neigh vaned on my complicit silence.
Even Ganga shivers in her flowered bed
and sleep is a fugitive, crouching under blue trees.
Bring me, as I survey these acres of trampled corn,
the hundred-stringed harp. Let iron bells clang
in the chilled air above shrouded slopes.
I shall leave no account of triumph or compassion
on the contemptuous faces of cliffs that know better,
no strata of hieroglyphics
for digging grandsons to puzzle over,
no riddles in three unknown scripts.
Only this my music.
Tiger Poem
In this green dream, language and I
face each other alone.
Language is forests and hills;
I, tiger.
River flaming up from the crouching dark,
I make bloody incursion upon thicket and slope.
Ravines and gorges grow from the mauling
of my paw.
Then string and horn call to each other
across the thick mud at the edge of language:
the creek ripples with the din of drums
and gods track me with torches and guns.
My spoor fades in the rain, above broken branch-traps.
I fasten my cliff against riding gods and rooted hills,
call slope to heel and light to order.
Then whoever would grasp blade and clamber up
should wither in the amber blast of my eyes
and the leafy hate of this way that I have come
should plunge the gods in a whirling of lost cries.
When, damned vespertine omen on the skyline,
a temple found by the failing light
explodes in the craters of my eyes,
as if, on that horned and jutting headland,
nothing else could have flashed and stopped
my stride.
As if the clap of rock met with ray,
alone of all this land’s voices could have stayed
the certain death of my prey,
stayed my leap
over the ashy sun.
Thwarted, a target chased down the howling night,
I roar still into the wilds this anthem of war.
Leonardo
Sun-drunk Tuscan air and the blue glaze
of Virgin’s robe and Infant’s gaze:
the brush fleshes the impossible
as it lands from what could not be
on the strand of what has been made.
Now come out to this burial of wind,
to these damp cacti and cypresses:
support my drugged head, my fantasies as they
get buffeted on these rocky shores.
Vulture, risen from amber earth,
misheard bird, omen of my miscalculated birth,
fluttering at my mouth, suspect index of my
irrationality:
Come, let your talons strop their guardian anger
on my cold still silverpoint, strip the grand
designs that cloak my deluges.
Or fan your wings
on the red chalk in which my strident face
is cooled, tempered, offered as axiom
to disciples of reason and its corollaries.
This is a face of etched lines, hard
and confident as history.
Fan it so the particles are sifted and rub away
ingrained determinations.
Fan it so the nose
is fractured, and the eyes peer to suit
a prodigal presbyope.
Set doubt aquiver in the wrinkles of the cheeks
and let the thin lips loosen
to ask the mirror’s left-hand code
if anything was ever done.
Let history be a little afraid. Let it peep
from behind a tree, with a child’s eyes,
at the immensity of your black wings
when they eclipse the sun.
Noche Triste
in memoriam: Ricky, Sona, Scamp
The tree has come of age this spring.
It has burst the roof, full-blooded, to let the sun
fall through its limbs on dead arches.
Thickening through bricks and crevices, its roots
spread like Christ’s arms, sap drained
by centuries of chill.
Dawn and the dying night play chess
in the courtyard. Standing in the atrium
where the pool slept after the rain,
squared by four hazed margins,
my ship run aground, my crew broken up,
I have stopped believing the world is round.
The world is what lies broken within these walls.
Feathers consecrate the theatre
where cannibal eagles whirled:
masked gladiators,
moments tinctured with blood
flaking around them on the rising steps.
Notching creaky doors and clotted ponds in passing,
the feathered snake yawns. I throw the dice,
wait for the bitter wind to make its move:
against the ruffling of scales,
the dice strike together,
sparking annual complaints.
*
The rock’s long-dragged battery brunts up
in whirring dust and hobbled walls. Noiseless,
a boat whisks its wake across the plateglass sea;
noiseless, a blue net trawls the tiles of the church.
Outside the fort a charcoal wave sends
a shoaled catch up to the gunmetal air:
what can this gesture mean, on the cloudy morning after
the gods have fallen?
From the turret, I watch the bird-crowned prince escape
over the creek-bridge, weighed down by wagons of gold.
Musket and pike meet helmet and mace. Turning to face
the enemy, half-hearted, the prince is hit
by the punctual boomerang of prophecy.
The eye
follows the bird-crown,
which crosses the creek
alone.
A smoking citadel and seven sinking pylons
are left behind. And though my turret is greased
with yestercentury’s torching,
all this might have been a weather report
from another planet.
*
The fisher’s arm as it heaved the catch today
was iron-hard like the arm
in a cold scabbard in the conquistador’s grave
near the thick-lipped well.
Its pulleys tripped by creepers, this well is a mouth
that the jungle cannot cry through;
even the kissing twin-trees that twined as they grew
are caged apart now, under the mind’s curfew.
That mind, a marble veined with conceptions,
exerts itself to hold motionless this frieze
of quays, this dodging flotilla of waterfronts,
this serration of terraces. But a figure escapes
the mind’s shaping punch and point,
dives below its strangling reefs.
Then the mind, freed from its own sepulchre,
becomes a horse, with the escaped figure for rider.
Clattering by an inn of a winter’s night, its hooves ignite
memories on the cobbles, memories that are not
the marble thoughts of a marble brain.
The horse brings back its rider
to a stable neither can forget:
home is an empty house;
the garden brims where we buried the dog,
a candle burns for the buried cat.
When the need aches and steers like a fever
and I must see my friends again,
I go to the excavation,
find them among those who hover
above the harvest of the heads of men
whose lives had been gentle,
whose only ambition had been to grow
trees that would ripen the summer with lyric:
senators with clear eyes and dull fortunes.
*
Bilious oracle of the full still air,
turn the key in the door of foretelling,
let our eyes smart with vatic vapours.
Before the uncial epitaphs on these deadshells can be
reckoned over by another orthography,
tell us what the eclipsed fort and enfeebled sea
can hope for, tell us when the thermal armies
that roost among the palms
will come out in combat.
And when the acid beaker of combat is poured out,
what can quench our retching throats?
I see fins on fire threshing in charcoal sludge:
for the foundering rayfish,
for the sunbird trailing its tattered wing
over snapping tides,
will there be place to beach or glide,
to come to rest with a degree of grace?
Coagulate with retting leaves, the crypt
where Christ lies has been veiled
from fishermen’s stolen stares.
The marble, waspwarm with desire,
drugs itself with form:
lymph seeps, hard
muscle curves and marrow sets
inside the half-breathing stone.
But doused with limefire,
the thermal armies sense none of this.
Threat and answer,
the sarcophagus for the moment maintains
a sibylline silence.
Vector Geography
On a giant prowl, the gaunt hills rake
earth’s carapace, its towns and lakes:
theirs is a slow race with clouds
that, becalmed, sag like dried udders.
The surveyor’s laws of stamp and signature
cannot sentence these apostate hills.
The earthquake of their going shakes history:
neither dead nor germinal, that squat god
on a burnt mound. His four eyes stare at creation,
his heads gather bee-hive.
Incontinent crows
metronome his meditation.
*
Earth has been a crab: patient, pincers prickling
to answer those who clipped the hills’ wings
and whittled the moraine banks to slope-strung skeletons;
who pin moths in black albums, pepper-spot atlases
with clusters of maximum ore.
Half-Hannibal, dissenting conquistador in scholar’s robes,
I translate earth’s anger, the march of the hills:
reversing the shocks of census and seismograph
with cursive phrase, I work in a tongue
that speaks for the sierra, a script remote
from the surveyor’s scrawl.
*
Baking in a buff oven of sky-sealed sand,
earth swells from crab to turmeric scarab
rounded from sun’s hot breath, hot flesh of hills,
itself its journey’s amulet. But even this miracle
and the hills springing, swaying-sacred
in the dance of light are less than what