Vanishing Acts

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Vanishing Acts Page 7

by Ranjit Hoskoté


  a physician:

  he knots himself in the sheets,

  muttering fevered curses, fighting off

  the mountains flying through his sleep.

  Logbook

  At night,

  whose eyebright touch

  seals the peak with an olive tree,

  lays a table with the balance of stone?

  Who folds the hills in a napkin of twilight,

  catches a splash of bay

  with a hook of shingled shore?

  Who brings me these reeds,

  missives knotted with threads of wax?

  A yellow acrobat

  whose fingers

  tip the jug

  till night

  is everywhere and all over and I

  am a line, the spasm of a line

  grooved along a shell:

  the logbook

  of my ancestors.

  Corrida

  in memoriam: Miguel Hernandez (1910–1910)

  The bull’s eyes droop in blue eclipse,

  lead weighs down his cartilage;

  the thick heart pumps a throb of mercury,

  the nerves are a hiss of dry tongues.

  Unpurged, his five stomachs rage,

  red hells scourged by thorny cud;

  the harrying temperature hovers, stings,

  hornet to the sentenced blood.

  Swaying, impaled on his own broken horns,

  head driven almost into the earth, the bull

  surrenders to the prancing matador

  of fever: the glare wicks down

  in his lampblack eyes. The sand ring tightens,

  a rictus around his throat.

  Cape and barb offer his choked groan

  no franchise: noon-struck, it goes hoarse

  in an acid dream of home.

  *

  Sand, blood, thunder: a shroud

  whirling to shreds, to metaphors.

  Ritual of dust, don’t let those eyes

  turn glimmer-pools for clustered flies.

  Half twitch of smoke, half gust of stone,

  green as rust on a river’s blade,

  I swing from a gibbet, blinding hour of day:

  I know the brocade thigh

  that I’ll plough with a rut

  of searing burgundy.

  *

  Like the bull, I was branded by the seed in my groin:

  it would swell its shell till I burst

  under the lash, garlanding my gore-wet neck

  with the screaming of cardinals.

  Like the bull, I’d stamp the earth

  to the miracle of fire; like the bull,

  I’d chase you, leave the horror of my want

  on the salt tip of a sword.

  And, though ripped like a sail by bruising tides,

  the horned catastrophe of my hide

  would, by a headlong instinct, charge

  the churning sea, its catafalque.

  *

  A volcano roars in my lungs, my mouth belches

  shards of flame, white breakers.

  The atolls cry out. The next twelve hours

  are wings torn to shadows of surf.

  Pale sulphur, a minotaur stares

  with masked eyes at the settling ash

  of his dead disguise.

  Trailing the Horse-tamer

  I stumble into a widowed wood

  where trees born of women

  have suffered the knives of drought.

  Flinty comets score points across a blacked-out sky,

  their bird-of-paradise tails streaming

  behind them.

  From the steaming belly of the sacrificed ox

  the augur pulls the looped entrails:

  at their end dangles

  the future of the tribe.

  *

  Horse-tamer, I have followed you from the chalky cliffs

  to these lakes gridlocked in ice.

  I have crossed the pyramids of skulls you built,

  eaten mulberries among the lean-hipped corpses

  of fishermen driven south by winter.

  Now I flag. I feed my days

  with the nectared resin that bears snatch

  from claw-punctured maples,

  warm myself in pungent furs.

  Horse-tamer, ancestor, kindler of fire,

  fix my bridle, tighten my saddle-girths,

  sharpen the frost-bitten stumps of my language.

  Wolf

  A wolf snarls in the sumac-stripped darkness.

  Across the snow-driven prairie that is

  a famine of trust, a man

  steps from his cabin, cocks his rifle

  in reply. His boots sink and the ice

  swirls around him. The wolf

  wades into his eyes.

  Teach me to cleave the steel-jawed pain,

  take my words, give me memories of smell:

  charred pine, first-blooded fur, dying elk.

  Time gets the hunter in the end,

  freezes his bones among the stars

  but you will never be flaunted,

  a trapper’s crippled exhibit:

  a fanged hunger, you will survive.

  Small Countries

  for Maria van Daalen

  You came from a flatland held in trust

  by dykes against a brooding sea

  to this open plain where blizzards drive

  the snug clapboard houses

  before them like ninepins.

  When you go back in spring

  will Carnival have won the war, or Lent?

  Would the peasants be dancing to the tin-pan tune

  of obscene proverbs, smashing pitchers of ale

  at long tables, toasting the bride?

  Or will the blue china reflect the low horizon

  and wait for the laconic painter to fix

  the soldier in his red coat, the laughing girl

  against a map torn up by vengeful duchies?

  And will the lens-grinder be whistling a madrigal

  as he polishes the universe into a rose?

  These are small countries, our hearts:

  in them, women read letters or tell their rosaries

  by open windows framed in frost,

  waiting for the poplars to grow.

  The Murder of the Genie

  in memoriam: Rene Magritte (1898–1898)

  Deep scar, the ash-white day

  brands itself on lavender walls.

  The gulls strike deep

  in crane territory.

  A clock ticks in a robot’s head,

  mindful of its destiny.

  The fan spins till the breeze begins

  to slap the blinds. In the squeeze between

  iris and lid, the window feels

  the first stir of unrest.

  Who let the assassin spirit in?

  Who armed him, who bailed him out?

  He must have rehearsed his catgut lines

  before putting on his ski-mask,

  turning the doorknob.

  An inkpot drops in a sailor’s head,

  a letter comes to rest

  in the cradle.

  The mullions framing the gantry

  ten miles away by skiff

  are phantoms of mutiny

  but don’t show it.

  They hold their dignified pose.

  Nothing connects.

  A parrot ransoms the clock for a song.

  They repeat each other faithfully, translate

  as two chiming alibis.

  The curtains shush the piercing needle

  of the chime; the flash-gun springs

  from behind a wrinkled tiger mask.

  The curtains catch fire

  even as the grammarian gropes

  for crucial evidence, signs of a struggle

  in the thick undergrowth of prescribed tropes

  and the flowering false pretences

  of language.

  In the
tanglewood, I leave a few odd cinders,

  the spoor of a maple, the trace of a tune,

  an eyeful of pale water,

  my guillotined feet.

  Draw and quarter fact.

  Fight clues with clues.

  This wisdom shall be proverbial

  in the room’s unforgiving folklore.

  Anatomy Lesson

  The surgeon is a precise man. His blade

  makes incision in the puffed skin,

  dissects the frame straight down

  till wet manroot impedes.

  And fibres and vessels,

  the scarlets and purples, lesions, odours

  of groin and mouth, the waste and flesh and bile

  of an extinct life spill over.

  Among those strange colours of panic, exposed

  to grim light of day for the first time,

  the students like eager partridges search

  for the kernel of that sinning, singing self

  whose existence they are taught to doubt

  by eunuch scholars who have ripped it out

  of their syllabi, torn the subject to twitching strips

  with their gloved yet septic fingers.

  But disease is monist: cancers, viruses do not respect

  the privacy of plural, self-created selves

  and invade the citadel that they share, the body.

  It is death defeats the scepticism of apostles:

  a deconstruction by gambits, stabbing degrees

  that snaps every yoke of cartilage,

  stamps every limb with scar tissue

  and, thumping the table, declares its curt absolutist will,

  claims the afflicted whole. Then the apostles,

  hemlocked in the cells of their hermetic regime,

  learn that death takes the church of the body entire,

  recognizing no schisms.

  On their knees, too late, they hear

  the scalpel-wild glee of the ghost they swore

  to lay for ever: the raw pope of the physical church,

  resurrected in its collapse, proved by its mortality:

  Old Master of Sorrows, the hormonal, the irreducible I.

  Snarl

  in memoriam: Francis Bacon (1909–1992)

  Who can paint grass the cannibal shade of hair?

  Who can paint water as if it were

  a leper scarfed in black? Who can sit back

  and with chill eyes condemn a table of drunks,

  chalking up the blessed and the damned?

  Who, slouching in doorways, can pluck

  every man’s fate, chess-player’s and lout’s?

  He can, whose gamester hand treats life

  as a shackle of terse hair around a wound.

  He knows that when the plastique of lust explodes,

  every mouth screams: cardinal and wart-hog

  are sewn in one itching, muck-mottled skin,

  and even the gilded angels wind up grilled,

  a snarl of rare meat you can fork off a plate,

  a cradle of bones.

  Fairytales

  for Jerry Pinto

  You retch, and the watchtowers gloat

  like fathers grown younger in their dreams,

  their Prussian heels snapping to attention,

  their Rottweilers growling for prey.

  The commandant is a delicate psychologist

  who soothes your fears with his chamois voice.

  He rinses his hands, gloves them, delivers

  a whipcrack that lifts the skin clean

  of the bone. You can’t hide the wince

  or the sentence of blood that begins.

  *

  Stay away, the horsehead warns you.

  Stay away from your father, or he’ll lead you

  to the witch’s wood.

  Don’t open that closet, the horsehead warns you,

  or your husband’s six wives will fall out.

  Father, husband, he sits guarded by cannon-ball trees

  on a tropical island: there he breeds

  fantail pigeons and albino tigers,

  watches his cyborg children play,

  writes his memoirs under a pseudonym.

  But each time you hit the brain’s erratic keyboard,

  his face flashes up in a looped program:

  commandant of the camps, smiling doctor

  who flicks his blades with gloved hands,

  puts you to sleep with his chamois voice

  and reaches for your gut with his pliers.

  *

  The shirt fits you: a chill armour,

  its collar a pair of metal wings.

  You turn your scared eyes on a pair of hands

  that have grown into gleaming cleavers.

  Now you yourself are ready to stride

  into the night, a sorcerer’s apprentice

  poisoned by love’s denial,

  armed with the technologies of death.

  You go from house to house, twisting

  the guts of children who sleep.

  Requiem for an Infanta

  after Pavel Antokolsky

  I

  The painter knew the child was only a picture.

  He heard in the tattoo of the pulse in her veins

  the kettledrums of kings waiting to be born again.

  He knew the false note struck among them was not

  the cough that screens the byblow or the mule:

  hers were not heraldic stains but taints occult

  to the physician’s drooping eye. But to the painter,

  native of his own and others’ skins,

  nothing is secret: he saw the gristled flesh,

  the corrupt prayers, the bitter lusts

  that kept the ten-year-old girl alive.

  The sliver of an old and varnished stock

  was mouldering before his eyes, the bemused passion

  of dwarves and clowns, the scourge of confessors.

  In the child squeezed dry of her juices,

  he saw a portrait of her country.

  The drapery fluttered when he set brush to it,

  the oriels glowed with martyrs, imperious chaperones

  of the spirit, but the palace was empty.

  On every side, doors opened on doors opened on doors

  and at one end of the hall, the drapes

  parted to disclose a satinwood annexe

  where silver gazelles leaped from the tapestries

  to the mirrors, the mirrors tossing them to the gaze

  of feline eyes behind a veil.

  And the painter with his palette played

  the unchaste abbot of this cloister.

  The duennas filled the room with the froufrou

  of their skirts, turned, caught their own glance

  in the painting. He shrank from their florid moans

  of praise. The jaw of the king, her slow-wit father,

  sagged at the miracle. He croaked:

  ‘Marvellous, Velasquez! What nuances you’ve captured!

  How real we seem!’ Bowing, the painter backed out

  of the life he had framed.

  His years went by, a wanton dance of cares and hopes,

  of light on the subject: urbane princes, future popes

  sat for him. Behind the velvet, a flight of stairs

  ended in a vortex. Clear-eyed, he stepped into the dark.

  The artist needs more youth than the gods will grant

  to carnal man’s agilities of love and work:

  he aged swiftly, till the burnished studio

  deepened to the colour of nothing, and he was blind.

  II

  Three centuries have warmed and cooled her cheeks.

  The sombre Infanta lets nothing disturb her composure.

  She regards the dissolute skyline with disdain,

  stares past the voices of surprise

  that would detain her, praise her hair, her dress,

  her complexion. S
he ignores them all,

  faithful to her painter’s instruction.

  On every side the museum stretches,

  a parquet serenity broken by the hum

  of backpack tourists and lean curators

  who breathe culture, take notes, or pet and caper

  like the pages and courtiers at the Escorial.

  The little girl sees clearly from all the eyes

  that try and catch her gaze, that she has lost

  nothing since the Escorial:

  neither dwarves nor dukes nor dolls nor saints.

  The world is still mixed from the humours she knew.

  And the sun’s arrows lose a little gold

  each time they notch the turquoise masks

  torn off strangled Incas, or when they rebound

  from Aztec totems: chimes carved from a clock

  with a cross for pendulum.

  Once more, at closing time, the chimes have died away

  on the waters of receding footsteps.

  She is alone, still dressed in the same stiff brocade,

  mute as an idol, unquestionable as the grass

  that sprouts in the gaps between desolate graves.

  The little girl is older than she could ever have been

  and she is laughing, laughing

  with the strength the gods give only to the dead.

  Sacrifice

  Poussin painted this sky. Its cannonfire blue

  reminds us that the gods look down

  at our wars and that their view,

 

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