You cannot show someone the futility of his works and days, represent a man to himself as a skull and a pair of crossed bones while there is yet a murmur of life in his veins. And how much more tactful one must be in the presence of Alamgir himself. Finger those rosaries carefully, carefully. You can never be so careful, so minutely attentive to detail, as when you are on the brink, in the heat. Watch every millimetre that your arthritic fingers trace across the coverlet, every twitch in your toes. You have been the fiercest of men; but now, under this cupola, you are waiting for death to claim you, an ageing emperor.
III
Red, all red and black on the heights; and the rest bleaching to chalk. Rock, rock in every form: jagged and smooth, gleaming like a saddle polished through many campaigns, or dull as a cyst. Scrub. Desert. Rock, again, rock ignited by the blinding sun.
She thinks I can’t hear or see her. She tends to be slightly romantic, like many angels. A touch of melodrama about the way she phrased that last thought: You have been the fiercest of men; but now, under this cupola, you are waiting for death to claim you, an ageing emperor.
Am I death’s lost baggage, that it should so imperiously claim me? And do I not hear and see her, this girl with her flushed cheeks and tawny wings? Have I not the right to resist her feathers when they tickle my nostrils, force me to sneeze? She forgets that I am, after all, the descendant of Jamshed, who was long ago King of the Angels. He may have been banished to earth, but he never forgot the winged speech that he had spoken.
It’s a gift I inherit: whisper or wingbeat, I hear it in my solitude. There are bearded, bespectacled old monks at court who have been trying, all their lives, to convince me that the apes were the fathers of men. I tell them otherwise, knowing better. If they could see past the blindfold of their doctrines, they would realize that we have not risen above the apes, we have fallen below the angels. I don’t think I shall ever convince them. They bore me, these scrabbling theologians, spittle dribbling down their ragged beards, forever poring through their crabbed volumes, finding ways of preserving my soul.
I should have had them beheaded long ago, these snivelling oracles. Not that it will matter, eventually. What will it matter whether I had a soul or not, a beard or not? In the end, all that people will remember of me, if they remember me at all, will be a name. I’ll end with a couple of phrases carved into a tomb, a portrait or two in a folio—one on horseback, the emperor formally posed for the annalist, and the other more relaxed, picturing me as I stroll through a garden, between two other figures bent over their canes.
And perhaps a city that bears my imperial title, though the names of cities are the most delicate flowers in the world. Ruffians can corrupt them with their rough tongues, vandals can hold them hostage or efface them, enemies can scratch out your titles and brand their own instead.
I have no wish to be immortal any longer. Now that the wallmaps in my head don’t agree even remotely with what’s happening in the world of events, and I’m just a rusty scabbard clanking against a column—let it all go, I say, let it all go.
My generals are dangerous men. I no longer want to hear from them, or want to read their tedious reports. Wherever they march, they loot villages and burn standing crops, slaughter and rape at will, spread the gospel of fire and darkness in my name. Here I lie under my cupola, without so much as twitching a ligament-and in all quarters, peasants who have never seen my face, traders to whom I have never been more than a head on a coin, curse me for a tyrant.
Tyrant or scapegoat? Perhaps the deep red hollow of the throne in Ashkabad was a reminder to whoever sat on it, of the earliest kings on earth—those poor fools chosen by their tribe, or those unwary strangers shanghaied to play the part, who ruled for one year before they were sacrificed to the goddess of the fields. Have I not also been a sacrifice, lean and stringy though it be? My blood has streamed to the earth, to fertilise these chapped plateaux, these clotted escarpments, these wrung-out hills. I cannot close my eyes, because from each clouded eyeball, a jacaranda has burst and spread its velvet foliage, its hooded shadow over the raw, smarting wound of the landscape.
I don’t sleep, but slide into morbid fantasies. I try to keep my eyes wide open (where have those jacarandas gone, who pulled them up by the roots?), but then the sky drips between the upper and the lower lids and hardens into a crust. A miniature sierra forms inside the eyes, and now I no longer see the angel, but only sense, feel on the parchment of my skin the light pressure of her wings.
Portrait of a Pensioner
From savouring the citron daybreak in a backstreet,
its balconies roped between anchored walls
with the gossip of clotheslines dripping
to the pavements, from the concrete canyons
through which, uncertain mariner, I used to pilot
an infirm chair,
I have been dishoused.
My skin thick as a stagnant pond’s,
I sit in the brooding heat
of the profligate vegetation,
racking sense from a map on my lap,
proving the presence, under silted toll roads,
of a river whose course I ridge on my bench.
Its pulse beats at my fingertips,
drums along vein and artery to hammer at the doors
of my dammed heart, calling to a murmur
that runs there, though low:
a daring that has trickled
out of season. A thin tributary,
the faint benchmark of the flood.
Decree
The hunters have trapped you:
Stag, the forests shall mourn!
—Osip Mandelshtam (1913)
Curtailed by November fanlights, a pair of grey eyes broods.
In the cone cast by a hooded lamp, thick hands
more used to shovelling snow or dragging ploughs
now cup to cast the black ostraka,
seal judgement on another man in another room
who, smothered by the same darkness, waits for doom
to descend.
A spider without a web,
he sits paralysed by lack of cues
in this blindfold play.
His patience gives out. Still no news.
Madly, he ignores his prudent minders
and strides past the safety nets, stands alone
on the dial of the deserted city.
Tail lights brush him; he longs for the sweeping hand
of the searchlight to make its coup de grace
but the gymnast’s reflexes tightening his grimace
have gauged otherwise.
Before the inquisitors
can clip him like a card
in their index, he leaps.
The vaulting horse of the late hour affords him leeway:
he clears the watchtowers and causeways
of smoky outskirts patrolled by hangmen.
A dissident psychonaut, he sails
across the marble-topped cantons of midnight.
They shoot him in that pose, again and again.
*
Emergencies of the small hours:
forced landings, air-raid warnings,
missions aborted by frozen runways and fog.
Saturnine, he has sorted his desk all night,
piloting by sidereal time and by charts
that have failed, like the fuel, by the drowsy mile.
He writes dandelion when he means yellow acacia,
and smells both flowers as the resin in his veins
oozes from the boles of his arms
and lays runnels upon the page.
Sonnets to be murmured, tercets to be sung:
an illicit portage clocked across a looseleaf tundra.
By daybreak, he will have addressed and stamped
that last letter, mailed it. After breakfast,
he will walk to the bridge and make his leap.
By noon, as the postman pushes the note
under a t
eak door with a brass plate but no number,
telephones will be ringing in whitewashed annexes
and prefects screaming. Outside, ambulances will be wailing,
frantic gendarmes will be looking for breaches
in the ice below the cantilevered wings.
Truncheons tap for his missing weight, grapnels plumb
for his frosted breath. But, baptized by the river,
he lies beyond the trance of prophecy, beyond arrest.
Draw the blinds. No one has permission to interrogate
the country of stone verdicts
that has risen to embrace him.
*
The Librarian at the Bureau of Missing Persons
contains multitudes,
has dossiers on ghosts from every genre:
finite clauses in an infinite chain
of xeroxed transmigrations.
In the Bureau’s warehouse,
men who’d been lamas in previous lives
share dockets with anarchist cadets,
the alumni of massacres contend for shelf-space
with retired chancellors.
And the Bureau has storytellers by the dozen,
each the sum of a malingering thorax
and a valve set damaged by shock therapy.
The Librarian is a director of souls:
he’s been here so long that pigeons fly
through his ears, and children sing
paternosters dubbed in the local language
to chase away his sleep.
At least I’m not wracked by the old physical fears,
he says, that age may be ticking like an ill-made bomb
wrapped up in a pamphlet at the back of a drawer;
and that the horses’ skulls might fall
from their safe brackets
to behead me while I doze.
I brood on the edge of a drawn sword,
he mutters, but know all the slogans.
*
Like Canaletto, muffled against the English chill,
painting speckles of gold on Venetian waves
to justify his name among churlish patrons,
the poet repeats his early motifs:
a creature of crossroads,
he peddles his songs in festive streets,
scrabbling in disguise for a couple of nickels
on the kerb outside the theatre
where the story of his life is playing.
*
Sixteen lines can cost a man
his life: a slap in the dictator’s face
paid back with punctured lungs and trapfalls in ice.
In the tundra, every poem is an elegy
to be read on the footboard of a moving train
and every train is a fatal pledge
dragging the poet to the rimlands of destiny.
When the Librarian at the Bureau of Missing Persons
shuts his catalogue with a clap,
some numbered poet’s case history gets stamped,
flattened between two neutral dates.
*
The poet is not at home.
These poems
are messages
left on his answering machine.
FROM THE SLEEP WALKER’S ARCHIVE
(2001)
Altamira
Morning wells like blood
in the stag’s hollow eye.
That horned fleece is yours, priestess;
this stone axe, mine.
I won’t wear my minotaur mask again.
I’ve spent the night carving
this ring of bone for you:
print your palm in vermilion
on this rock-face and today
spouts of fire will drive the bellowing wind
mad. Your name swells
in my mouth. Stop me
with the bloodrush of your hair,
the long ripple of your spine.
Reliquary
This altar has sent up no smoke
in a thousand years.
We climb past spurts of grass, the gulled turf above
the crypts of the bone people.
Nothing has changed the harsh ancestral faces
of the cliffs: they still spit in the eyes of the sea.
The turquoise wing, the whipping sail
brace this island against the spray
and salt, which pit the clasps and telescopes
we’ve brought along like afterthoughts.
Loom and harrow give the stubbled rock roots,
net and needle ring it in;
the dolphin dives for sagas, the raven
is a black instinct. Together, we shall fill
sun in the reef‘s raging anchor-wounds;
together, we shall climb
to the charred brake
and kindle our nakedness.
Nocturne
Nursing your silences, I watch night
wedge its broad shoulders tight
in our window.
My nerves ache with the curfew bells
ringing in your head, cradled sullenly
in the crook of my elbow.
The air of cherries, your wordless breath
fills my empty flesh with a flaming
chorus of swords.
Night Shift
All night, the whistling migration
of rumoured kestrels kept us awake:
we heard their wings beat close to our ears,
their beaks ripped cold meat such as appeared
as we undressed for a bed unmade
by bristling shadows and taloned fears.
We spoke little and could not lie
still, or in each other that night.
In the early hours we fell asleep at last
but, our pillows stained with winter sun,
awoke as soon. Outside, the roofed trees hung
in a lake of cloud; the surly lamp-posts
remained in place in the past, unshaken
by the night shift.
But we came rough,
in retreat, to breakfast, disarranged,
trimmed closer to silence, gripped and changed
by the draught of wings, night’s grey, destitute tears.
Speculum
The month slips from your shoulders like a robe.
The violin draws a sonata
from the reluctant prelude of your lips.
Then scarf, sash, chemise: unpeeling all your skins,
you brace bare before the cheval glass
(confessor to all the arms it has seen,
the flocks of hair, the peaches of breasts).
You offer it some more tangled skeins
of blood and lymph, ancestries, incests:
gifts of a brain on edge to a hinge that holds it fast.
Draw back, my lady; yet see, the further you withdraw,
the further you retreat into the mirror’s ironic eye.
Snared subject, would you step from this poised predicate
and risk your speaking body? The echo is worse than mime.
The Madman’s Kaleidoscope
Kloster Pernegg
Bless those who sleep, whose gravid eyes
may burst with the angels that they see:
unkempt angels who destroy their gift
of prophecy, before it scorches the lids
off those who sleep, burning them awake.
We suck the flowered blood of those we love,
make them real. Their fruit grows to flesh
in our cloistered thoughts,
ripens in cold gardens
that the sun has never breached.
Faith will undress us, only to find
the sorry figure of its own loneliness.
Ice has burnt our keys black and fire
plays about the door-jamb. We leave
before we can set our love in order
or stack the dreams that flicker across the bed
like patterns i
n a madman’s kaleidoscope.
Helical Histories
Osmotic as an agora,
open to storm and tide and tread,
our bed contrives, though seamless as a skin,
to simulate our every nuance in its creases
until it folds
in one calyx our separate fires, and we forge
a ring of elbow-room and breathing space
for our wants to wrestle
(my foot in your slipper, your hands
in my hair) till there is no sense
in which our speaking tongues and wet ears
are any different from those
of those strange women
washed up at Colchis swaddled in blue silk,
shearing the harbour buzz with their cries.
And how their beads glowed, like the deep eyes
of spectral cats, drunk with mystery, with watching.
And those strange men with windshocked faces
brought off the ships still mumbling spells
to calm the waves, out of mouths fallen open
like torn sandals:
men whose legs kept rocking
on land, keeping time
with the sea’s perverse, erratic swell.
But stronger, if slower, than the sandblast furnace
of the sea, a tinctured speech of gland and seed
unstoppers these jammed refugees in the agora.
Vanishing Acts Page 4
