Vanishing Acts
Page 3
I need.
My pen will not any longer stay
on the journal’s ruled Appian Way:
from scarab-earth it plots its vagabondage,
conscripting elephant nouns and gazelle adjectives
in its train: an army, forage-troop, caravan
climbing to the Alps at the top of the page.
Last Memory Key
in memoriam: Alan Gordon Twigg (1963–1991)
You took off in mid-sentence, promising to be
back by the weekend.
The words left hovering in the air came down
as the wheels of a jeep
rutting a remote road, scudding, whirling on
before a truck rammed it,
splintering you through the windshield.
Blood, shards, steel skewers: so much
like the Hollywood scenarios you broiled at
in your reviews.
Pages should have flapped, instead,
and drops dripped in a sepia silence
tinged with ultramarine and the throb
of homing pigeons, weeds waving
in glassy water.
A Tarkovsky departure calibrated
in leaf stir, long walks.
At my touch the cold screen glows,
your name comes up in phosphor green:
radium guide to a maze of stories half-written,
opinions half-hazarded, we will only half-know.
But, opinions apart, we knew what had been
hazarded when you came back, punctually,
by the weekend, in a box.
The monitor sits squat and dead in the corridored evening.
The password you punched in before you went
can’t break the code,
can’t beat the system.
FROM THE CARTOGRAPHER’S APPRENTICE
(2000)
The Cartographer‘s Apprentice
for Ilija Trojanow
Bridges snap under my feet as I go east
into a morning of many rivers.
Untimely telephones do not interrupt
my meditations, and the wind drums a tattoo
on the leather strip stretched taut as a vow
across the mouth of a pitcher I carry.
Parables stir and spark, seethe in that pitcher:
a pilgrim’s currency
when heading east.
Poplars strike root
in my dreams. My grip goes slack,
the parables flow like water.
On these field trips, I cross salt pans,
bleed guts of ore, span makeshift ropeways
over dinosaurs that lie there, final as mountains.
And the wind that drums a tattoo is the only flame
that licks out in winter to play among
the mottled flutes of trees.
I’ve come back to the springs with epigrams
but my tasselled words can’t stanch the flood
and when peacocks screech at the intruder,
I watch my step but know the trap is sprung.
Treading on fault lines, I slip in the ruins:
the past is an ambush, my limbs shrapnel legends.
*
The whipcord keeper slams the gates shut.
Choked by the barge’s diesel smoke, I wait
to cross the lagoon.
Goddess who dwells on the tip of the braided tongue,
goddess who rides the white swan of desire, hear me:
The solstice of the senses is order itself,
chaos brought to a point
when all action is the fulcrum, standing still,
and static frizzles, without a word.
Goddess, I would linger on the edge between
your perfect holograms and this solstice.
There would be feints and pauses in my script:
a common darkness, an alphabet of leaves,
my fraying breath telling beads beneath
the air hung in webs from domes.
An acolyte touched by fever,
I come staggering to you in a black robe
spangled with fire. You greet me
with spells from your apocrypha
aimed at my throat.
*
Poems are soft targets caught between the lines:
fugitives waiting for trains, they pace
gravel triangles inside the cage
of childhood. Black as clock-hands poised to strike
twelve, the guards close in.
And though every platform is the wrong one for them,
poems are circuits with a sixth sense that foretells
the shock of being ripped, the boomerang
of charred trees at the end, brief flares
recalled in exile.
Beloved, your hymns fire my guttering throat,
your angels whirl their choppers in my ear;
my hand is an ultramarine glow, a startled quail.
But can it guess the cannibal shades of hair
or pluck a future from the weaver’s floating
amputated hands?
Beloved, your prayers go out when the wind falls
in the scrub, a sealed border.
Such delicate prayers, quotations
from the raven’s songbook of return.
*
A bird that followed me three days and nights
was struck by lightning.
It fell
and lodged, a rock,
in the sheer rapids
of my growing old.
Your name is salt
on my lips, your bones
a clutch of themes.
*
Fastening a collar of cloud around my neck
with the aged sun for stud,
I have lost my grip on the calendar.
That’s why a poet on a pilgrimage
shouldn’t stop too long to pray
by landlocked seas.
*
I have stared at yesterday’s sun too long,
spent too many weeks on the temple.
The plinth was slow work, the pillars ground us down.
We’ve only just finished carving the finial;
months to go before the totems sleep.
*
The clouds are a troupe of fire ganders
chasing the shrivelled sun
in my eye.
In this rock desert, where shall I find
a touchstone?
Every full stop is a footstep away from the abyss.
The next line that starts is a raft.
The curse wound up in the clock
calculates its period,
scratches out your eyes.
*
A foetus, I crouch in the thermometer:
an unformed wool-in-the-glass
exquisite corpse.
Concave and convex snap, unite
in a pale meniscus.
The immortal soul
is three blobs of mercury.
Entrails spill out,
an oracle is born.
*
All that we say, the gods have said before us:
to find the old ship, you must climb
salt ranges, till your hair is silver
and a mast grows from your unicorn brow.
Then all your yesterdays will have been keys
to doors that have fallen from their hinges:
the best keys are those that unlock
homelands from the empty air.
*
Desert-dry, the powdered lungs
clasp your heart
like fossil myths.
Call this knot a village,
this margin a road. In this poem,
you don’t judge distances by milestones,
you judge them by serenades.
I halve myself with the last season
and lie, a sliced apple
in the austere palm of the continent.
*
&nb
sp; Every field trip is a bringing back
of notes about yourself that an earlier explorer
forgot in a cleft or left by a brook:
the key to the code is the mould on your shoe.
And shall we reach the city of gold,
swap fables, find the source of the Nile?
And shall we, stepping ashore in a new world,
summon its bison and elms to life?
*
It’s like stepping off a trapeze
and being impaled,
for a moment,
on a javelin of air.
A ring of churches dancing around the sun,
trails leading up to the long solitude
of nowhere to turn:
hunting for stones to weigh your feet,
will you always be
a foreigner in the city marked X?
Damp and silverfish. Among his smudged visions,
the mapmaker forgives the illusion.
He knows himself betrayed
by the look of things.
*
There’s a crane in this shot that you can only tell
from the rippling wheat-field it’s touched off behind.
To find the true image is to find
the signature on the colophon
of a second-hand book,
to find your authorized biography
in a volume of mediaeval folklore.
The Red Cockatoo
after Po Chü-i
Tribute from the south where rabid shadows
yap at the sun-emperor’s heels:
this red cockatoo,
its feathers dyed the shade
of peach-flower juice,
its tongue versed in human speech.
From the corner of its eye,
it sees the southern islands meet
like teeth in the mainland’s ivory throat.
The emperor cages the doomsaying bird,
rips out its feathers as quills to sign
his warrants of massacre in the south.
The Last Annal of Alamgir
I
When the heat takes over, I am its creature, and no more a man with a mission. The bomb that has been ticking away for years in the head stops. The hoopoe that used to tap its long digger beak on the windowpane every morning has flown away; it isn’t there to cock its brown crest sharply, to warn me where the next attack might come from. Half the day wasted on an idle game of chess, and now I walk briskly past mansions whose owners have disappeared, empty houses that have wilted, collapsed to the dusty grass of the sidewalks.
Something of their defeatism enters the soul: blood straining at bone, half phantom and half stubborn desire to keep going, I stagger up the long shadows that the streets throw at me. Keep to the right and look out for rogue drivers: even a sleepwalker must keep the law, even as he staggers up those tilted shadows, all the way into the sun at the end of the square.
This, now, is noon. All this and a bell tower that launches itself from a red-tiled roof. The wind flings a rain of silver coins through a crab-apple tree that has squeezed what water it could from this earth, and now makes its last stand. It was here long before my grandfather’s soldiers first rode through this province, along roads they had lined with the impaled heads of rebels. And its branches rustle, as branches should in welcome, till the leaves become a single shimmer of tigered green. When you lie alone with yourself, as I have, over so many summers, it isn’t surprising that only first things and last things should come to matter. Over all that intervenes, a discreet veil is drawn. A whirr of helicopters, the harsh sound ripping through the prudent clauses of history. And a burst of bugles that strums the tangled telegraph wires. Curious signals from the future, but not a crow in sight.
I don’t sign decrees any more. I can’t waste my fading energy trying to unscramble lines of hieroglyphics that are as barren as the highway to Ashkabad. I don’t know the country as well as I once did: which happens when lackeys stop bringing you decrees to sign. Then you can no longer tell which way the two-headed god of time will point. You lose your gift of prophecy, and cannot predict the future from the patterns that form in the red wax of your seal. It’s a sacrifice, but I accept it with stoic grace. A principle of growth: as you age, your needs grow fewer and fewer. Or should. But I shouldn’t moralize. It’s never been my custom, nor have I the authority to coin precepts for others.
When I was young, not more than seventeen, I had wanted Ashkabad and Deha in the east and Shrath on the faraway western border, and Gelesh, that place of vanishing horizons where the sky dips into the sea, and the captains of high-masted ships cannot say whether they are navigating along the tides or the clouds. In brief, the whole sprawl of the empire, not a district less. And I got it too. I couldn’t wait, so I killed all my rivals, real and imagined, on the battlefield or by deceit, in single combat or on the rack. That’s the way my father went, and my brothers, my cousins, in other words, contenders and pretenders, and later, my own cautious advisors. That kind of slaughter was sanctioned by custom, of course. My father had done it before me, and his father had, before him: so who was I to break with family tradition?
And here I am now, the precipitate of these complicated desires, these bloody genetic spirals: I lie under this cupola, dried to a yellow husk by the heat of the south. My vista is empty, except for a rock, and at last, a crow. And then a thunder-blue cloud, chanting to itself, although it will sail elsewhere to deliver its burden of rain.
Not even the mind can be tethered here: I drift into dreams. The cupola folds itself around me like a marble placenta. The sun speckles the brown of remembered eyes with gold. All is chill and marmoreal to the touch. I drift further. A chalk-white face and the slanting fall of a steel crescent. Then a band of sawtooth mercenaries hacking their way through the gaps in the hills, plunging into valleys where the blacksmiths have forgotten the gentle arts of the cutlass and the bridle. I drift northward to meet my mother’s ancestors as they come down again, over the east slopes.
The sky is the thinnest of tissues today. If I could, I would wet it with what tears I have, and watch it crumple and tear along its creases in my hands. Who would believe that I am the emperor Alamgir?
II
He lies under his cupola, the cruellest of old men. His grandfather had tried to weave the empire together into one tapestry of races and religions, stone-worshippers and fire-worshippers, heretics and priests, shepherds from the mountains and oarsmen from the backwaters. The Empire of the Sun did not outlive its founder; perhaps it had never really existed outside his edicts and communiques and the periodic speeches he addressed to his loyal subjects from the imperial balcony. By the time his grandson took the throne, the tapestry had frayed at the edges, and moths had nibbled it through. The skeins had come apart, hissing and striking at one another like vipers.
The grandson had no intention of repairing the tapestry. A curious emperor he made, an emperor who stitched caps and knit his calligraphy into banners, who spent half the day in prayer, and the other half treating the itch of conquest that afflicted him in the same degree that other men are afflicted by the more easily remedied fever of the thighs.
The peninsula, extending into the ocean like some fugitive whale, was his particular obsession. He wanted to harness it, if he could; and if he couldn’t, he would harpoon it. So southward he went, to drive the people of the parched hills and agave-scattered plateaux from their fortresses, to pike their camouflaged bivouacs, to break their rebellion and yoke them to the war-chariots of the Empire of the Sun. He had never understood their instinctive hatred for him: for twenty years, he had lived among them, punished them for their temerity, burned their homesteads and exiled them into slavery, and still they remained adamant.
Occasionally, an afternoon on the campaign finds the emperor under a tent, looking out over one of those dead plains of salt that punctuate the long sentence of the southern peninsula. These salt plains are an agony: their crystal outcrop
s catch the sun’s glare and throw it back with a vengeance; jewelled daggers, they burn through the retina until they reach that dark place behind the eyes, where the terror of dreams is born.
Sometimes, in such hours, the emperor is visited by Ashraf, the oldest of his murdered brothers. Ashraf whispers in his ear what a fool he was to succeed, what a fool he had been to outlive his brothers. Caught between the hiss of his brother’s voice and the glare of the salt plain, Alamgir loses his philosophical calm; his guards think he is finally losing his mind when he cries out for Ashraf to go away.
But for many days now, no one has come to him, not even the unwelcome spectres of his youth. No one has brought him news. Not from Gelesh, where he had expected the navy to revolt two, no three, perhaps even four months ago. Nor from Ashkabad, the capital that he has not seen in twenty years. The pungencies of its spice markets, the cries of the hawkers in those labyrinths, its blue domes and promenades and fountains are all marked as vignettes on the daguerreotype wall-maps of his mind, where nothing has changed by even so much as a trifling mosaic, no rivers have changed direction and flooded the long-entrenched earthworks of settlements, no borders have been breached by intrepid raiders. In his mind, the guardians of the gates stand alert and the Empire of the Sun reigns, immune to eclipse.
I pass him often, touching his wrinkled face with the tips of my wings. He can’t see me, though, and flicks his fingers at a fly that he thinks has committed the sacrilege of settling on the bridge of his aquiline nose. If he could understand the language of angels, he would have heard me say: The lava plain stretches out all around you, like a tideless sea. Every muscle in your body is worn out; your nerves are frayed; you can’t even see very clearly any longer. But I whisper, because I do not want you to lose faith in yourself. On the brink, in the heat: these are dangerous places for an old man to be.