unhindered by passion or pity,
makes the picture, not ours.
The gods bear witness to our still-born thrusts,
to action that never attains its heroic end
but hangs in the grudging balance
of opportunity: the mace about to fall,
the sword half-drawn, the thick-veined hand
hacked away from its wristed scabbard.
Subtle historians, the gods record our draining pulse.
The wind sucks the marrow from our arms
and a forest of needles pricks its seeds
along our neutered bones.
Was it this sky that mantled the Aztec priest
when, with obsidian knife, he bent to prise
his victim’s heart from its faint calyx?
Watch it quiver, you voyeur gods,
it is your feast.
Breath inflamed, vital juices quickened,
you drink the martyr’s blood that slops
from the dupe’s ragged clavicle.
But will it appease your gaudy hungers,
this blood that quenches the deafened altar
and darkens to the colour of Poussin’s sky?
Addenda
The red rag presumes the bull
when function tags after form.
Turn the tables so that the porcelain
presumes the bull, as the teacup does the storm.
A doctor today would be addled to pit
his feeble wits against fate by straining
to keep a hail of rusted forceps away
from a pair of tonsils on a silver tray
and sly the skipper’s wife who hoists a red sky
in the morning, counterfeiting the sailor’s warning.
Kept from his yawl, the skipper pounds at the sea gate,
stumbles over the radium grass to the wharf.
Grenades blow up in his ear. At the ferryhouse,
the blind harlequin throws him a twisted coin,
tells him to catch the first wind home.
*
Don’t say the song didn’t touch off the swan,
or that you missed
the last pealing call of salmon, egg and teeth
before they passed forever from sight beneath
the herringbone textures of speech.
*
Strange ways the watchmaker winds us up,
with side effects for mainspring. We forget
what we know, and out of turn come up
with brittle hours, skeleton keys we never knew
we possessed. But turn them
when the dew papers the flagstones
and these keys release
a swallow that is all the summer we need:
a thaw of colours
that have worked quite free,
as we have not, of words.
First Signs
for Peter Nazareth
Light scrapes the skin,
searching for the knobs of bones
like a language that has lost its grip
and must start over again,
looking for first signs:
a fork in the road, a bend in the river,
ash where lightning felled a camphor tree.
It fastens on the prickly coat of mould
that a barrel left out in the rain has grown,
fingers the scars that bushfires have brailled
on the shoulders of hills.
No, not for it the usual games,
the cyclic rutting of plough and snake.
Rustling from former skins,
it chews those once and future berries
half-nibbled for it by the old woman
whose eyes are full of whispers.
She brews her bitter herbs, draws diagrams
in pitch, and asks the light:
What would you be? The preening swan
in the ballad of the blacksmith’s bride?
Or would you be the matted prodigal,
the brigand who steals the yellow moon
in midwives’ tales?
By nightfall, a cicada sibilance pours
down your gorge, till swirlpools swill
and roar in your mouth, a thousand militancies.
Name what you touch, the old woman says,
and watch it shatter:
to name is to curse with identity.
At your command, the stranger’s art
of dispute will divide the chambered heart,
set free the tongue to coin its lies:
the fork, the bend, the camphor tree
and hard after them, the living, the deadly verb.
Questions for a Biographer
How to phrase what must be told,
how force the seals, twist back the locks,
burgle the cabinet of his soul?
How to rifle his cupboard of masks
and then to squeeze into the damp
between costume and true colours?
And who will break the sawdust news
to those who survive, tell them why
he’d withdrawn and what, if anything,
the alien had meant after all?
All this you learn, in jerks and stammers,
halfway to the sad wisdom that comes
from listing a dead friend’s letters,
sorting his desk, watching his diaries burn.
I do not envy you this brief, biographer.
To you his grief is so much code
to scan in the mirror (the square-nibbed O
a wasted vigil; the fine X, a lover met).
A sharp task you have set yourself,
safecracker of private language:
though with frank hands you unbolt his fame,
the pain tricks you, and that it is hard
to place his ashes in an urn
and, weeping, mock them: this you learn.
And hear, again, his baffled voice
growling a refrain to these afterlife rites
of murder and rebirth.
Spy, tailor, your golem works.
It shakes the smug who think they knew
the dead man inside out: that scorn is brave,
but has the séance taught you how to soothe
the lovers he’d stripped with patient sneers?
What brittle pride can you restore
to the friends he’d cast off, sketched in slurs?
Laughing, you shrug off as cravats of gossip
the nightmares he’d sutured into his flesh
and when the cocaine nights grow louder claws,
you pretend they’re a pension of records he’d saved.
At the book release, the mannequin’s on test.
Toying with anecdotes,
you slit his windpipe, render his sour brogue
in the fluted accents of civility.
But in the end, you cannot char the heartwood.
Spurning the genteel syringe of tact,
you tighten the gauntlet till it chafes
the bare wrist to bruising, till you say:
He was a damned shabby sort of man
but I loved what I knew of him.
The Studio
for Mehlli Gobhai
You must set it straight,
this collage of troubled yesterdays,
this study in which you pace about.
Retrieving a violin from the case
that has muffled its strings,
soloist of nerves,
you dust it with jagged touches.
You have salvaged the grandfather clock
that stopped at four one afternoon,
stood the tribal icons that you found
in a roofless village on a basalt altar
hewn from Himalayas of contrition.
Your penance kindles before neglected gods
of fire and faunal water.
This workshop: its alchemic alloys regulate
the fallacies of the corrosive weather
.
On an easel glazed by halogen northlight,
in an alcove stacked with dried leaves,
crayon jars and pendulums, you stage
your departures. The slide rule cannot level
the still lives the spirit leads.
*
Your fist clenches around a bronze mango.
Warmed by your palm, the metal regains
the living kernel’s obduracy:
shaman-cast, a grenade that announces
a thunderstorm of parakeets
bearing down from every quarter
on this T-squared paper secured by force
of will alone. As you betray the event
to the palette, you ask yourself:
Can the image contrive
the secular miracle of flight?
Anonymous tourist in your own warren of lanes,
looking for an exit, you take a U-turn
and swerve through a screech of hell-bent cars.
Later, shutting out the chain-linked assonance
of thought’s gaudier catastrophes,
you stand bloodless at the window
while forefathers in black capes
pencil their missives on the glass:
they hold you hostage,
their dead copperplate hands making notes
for brief and intimate histories
of China clippers, merchants who sold silk
in Calcutta, the family curse, the opium trade.
*
In the morning’s embers, you will find a name,
and written in the dust on the rosewood cabinet,
a legal notice for a torn sleeve.
This Palestine where you run your hands over iron birds,
wrap fresh images in Coptic bindings,
how long will you guard it
from the crisis of arrows in your flesh?
Outsider, the wild god you saw in the mirror
this morning as you shaved
is yourself, invoked by the hymns
you neither list nor discard.
On this April afternoon,
the canvas like a dark twin on a stretcher waits
for your axe to fall, bringing it fierce release.
The axe falls instead on a rack of sheets
stained with red lead, burnt umber, tangerine.
It hacks at the thickest of parchments,
digging canals through crusted soils
compacted from drained swamp, blistered wood,
the blighted skins of harpy winters
and cut-throat summers, recusant sins.
As the paper cracks, edges touch off
further edges; where angles meet in peaks,
the light filters through, spreads and fills
the dungeon where the ageing turnkey has kept
in silence, all this while, an unnamed prisoner:
faithful to the nimbus of secrecy,
the unfinished painting.
Anomalies
Find me a tailor whose needles can mend
the sky’s ripped tent.
Or find me a mimic who can report
the taste of sugar on his dry tongue.
I was a simple basket-maker
until, one day, a lion roared
through my mouth and my fingers bent
into claws around the cane.
The lion has now learned to cleave and rein
the rattan staves to fit a bright ring
in his head: the lion has learned
to finger a rosary, wear a green robe.
He is turning into a saint, this lion.
He is learning to weave the perfect basket,
a basket that can hold
the water that homes in on thirst.
Cautionary Tales
after Kabir
I
Beware, my sons, of towns founded by gold miners,
now abandoned in the saddle of a valley.
Before long, parting ways with your muleteers,
you’ll stumble on routes
no caravan has used for decades.
Stone monkeys point north to the foothills.
Below spread pastures flecked with ash, outposts
snuffed out by crossed signals, crooked guides.
Those who reach this town have taken
the wrong direction, been taken for a ride.
And come here without risking their necks
on the slopes, without seeing that other country
of high passes which do not clear,
where the mist hovers, a wry hawk.
Who talks of that other country
misses the point.
II
Beware, my daughters, of men who say:
I’ve forgotten the name of my village,
I’ve forgotten the way back;
tomorrow, I’ll cross the river
in an iron canoe
with rocks for ballast.
Starving pioneers, prospectors duped
by brindled stream and hacksaw ledge,
may the swooping hawk
wish them well.
III
A splinter from the fair tree of that other country
once lodged deep in my thigh. I’ve carried
that broken spear-point around for years.
Fetch me, from the mines of that other country, a lodestone to pull it out.
Fronds of fire above, roots winched
in the running transparence of a brook:
homage to that phoenix,
the fair tree of that other country,
on which the image is about to flower.
IV
Broken staircase. Blue lotus afloat
on the surface of imagined water.
My words are pinpoints,
spots of light shot through the wormholes
in the pages of my grandfather’s journals.
My words are foxes gone to ground
in the maze of his cellared notes.
The man who wrote those testaments
didn’t notice when his pen fell back,
slow-paced turtle to the hare of his song.
His speech, like mine, was eastern:
if you were quicker, you’d catch his words
before they melted on my tongue
and trapped us in writing once again.
Hunt on, coroner of rhymes, among library shelves
in the west, where no one can follow us
except the anthologists of curious dialects.
Treasure Map with Na Spat Marked ‘X’
Master of first drafts,
mason of untrowelled walls,
frugal householder,
he hoards the coinage of poems.
Circling the ruins, you hunt for his lost
clearing house of fonts,
chase the smell of his clay horses
with patents.
The original minotaur, he bellows,
savage in a labyrinth of versions.
A magneto coiled in his own rage,
he melts the hall of mirrors you’ve devised
to catch him, retreats chafing from your locksmith gaze.
You’ll never tell concave from convex in this hell
of inversions. I tell you, wherever you look
is the wrong place.
The camera lucida moves to screen him.
Slashing through its jammed celluloid, you hope
to grab the missing guru, the stable truth
metallic behind the moving frame.
The projector, agape, spews reams
of looped film at you: a mujahid machine gun
clipping out magazines
of staccato laughter.
He has married a sleeping audience,
turned projectionist, mixed up the reels,
escaped among the garbled images.
You docket the proof to build a case
of polygamy: Garbo, nautilus, carbon, woodrose.
; But when it’s time to pin the blame,
turn your satchel inside out
and you’ll shake loose only shadows.
His trademark. Next, with vetch and kale,
blue-green travellers’ tales, he sows
a garden on the beach.
Caretaker of crumbling manuscripts, he needs
neither cartridges nor identity cards:
he is the turnings of the maze,
the flickering instants on the screen.
You are the catatonic, he the genius:
he masks himself as you, you face yourself
as him. Kabir weaves a shawl
with no edge: the horizon
is his garden’s boundary.
Headlines
for Vilas Sarang
The woman in the wheelchair thanks God in Heaven
she wasn’t asleep in the stucco-fronted house
when the bomb went off in the letter-box.
Parts of her face
stare back at her from the row
of shattered windowpanes.
She assesses the damage done
to candlesticks, Victorian blackwood chairs
and her favourite one-eyed cat.
Listening for freak broadcasts,
the telepathic translator in the room upstairs
has caught a pirate station:
the Voice of Thunder
claims responsibility.
*
The helicopters play a crafty game.
Armed with whirling shadows for warrant,
they dodge among firemen
Vanishing Acts Page 8
