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,
Vanishing Acts Page 7
