The Last House
Page 3
away and sulk at the treeline or limp
ahead on the path. You are a faker.
What happens next has to be made out of
the rhythm of life. Not the life we’ve left,
but this experiment in paradise,
this repository of deficits.
You’re not listening. Whatever moves is
alive, destined for wisdom. What is still,
say death, will be optioned purely as flesh,
immutable, decay offset by this
saturated fantasy. The dog who
drowned, this one alive. Not letting go is
the same as never starting anything
new. This is new. This is. And this. And this.
I never look at you the way you look
at me. I can never see our palm hut
beside the beach by the groaning ocean
without being on the ocean. The sea
ahead is empty; the dark land behind,
after an hour’s wait, fills with loud birds.
The hardest thing to bear is night and cold.
After Rescue
And after your own journeys you come to
my side when I call and curl at night by
my bed on the street in the doorway, rain
a river down the sidewalk, passersby
another weather harder to fathom
than solitude or family. That’s it
then. Morning grey in the sky. That’s it then.
No more voyages. Another beggar
among beggars all done with stories. No
need to prove faithfulness, what life itself
never could prove, no need to look further
than the tiny waves of illness rolling
from the horizon, blue and silver, that
will slowly drown us. And we will go down
easy, man and dog, red and pale, go down
into the green following dark, chased light,
down derry down by all that has and has
not served, in spite of doom, in spite of lives,
and together most important, fishes
quick from our starry shadows blooming
last pale and last red, last lazy spin slow
together and dim, each I remember.
III
Lost Countryside
Chimney
Here is a nice house with the right number
of bricks and fourteen windows, seven up,
seven down, one door in and one door out
and a chimney top left as you face front.
The west wall is plumb, sheer, perfectly smooth,
the east a jagged series of platforms.
A man in the upper storey gazes
north from the topmost window at nothing.
He’s interested only in himself.
The stairs are dark, thick with ghosts. Old questions
hang in the air with dust from the woodstove.
The south-facing rooms shimmer with angled
light that liquifies time and space. His wife
sweeps through a sun lozenge to the kitchen.
Manchester
Mothers weave Lancashire cloth, fathers dig
the Ship Canal to mix rivers with sea,
and I slip away down and past the locks,
hands in pockets, from that epitome,
caricature of human endeavor,
institution, before I get a chance
to read the writing on the wall or jot
a word or two about the sacrifice.
I sail away and buy a house and fall
in love. In a new country you neither
belong nor don’t but hope to guess your soul’s
purpose. Maybe a bright stillness, a kind
water, a safe cave for your flesh and blood,
a future with history as a slub.
Cheshire
Fresh tulips grey with dust on a flat rock,
sea and sky west, a faint track east all green
across the continent to the sunrise
we sailed past, and Liberty into New York,
a sea path to our teapot home where hours
old I clung to black fury, dark bruises
from the forceps that hauled me out, Mum on
tiptoe on the hospital bed, twenty-
six and shocked by the garden’s black tulips,
first she’d seen, an after-shock of Granddad
in France, a rumble deeper than normal
trench terror, and here they come together,
fairy-tale siblings headed home from war
along the faint road west to this hillside:
Granddad’s black tanks, mother’s coal-black tulips,
and my own black fury, the first ever.
When Hawks Stop Hunting
When hawks stop hunting the farmland I make
a cage of my forearms and trap my chest,
then chest and neck, then chest and neck and skull.
How pointless to hunt when expectation
of disappointment dominates the kill.
I will steal a cabbage and snap flowers
from the bloody hedge, and on my way home
will practice what I know – cultivation
of disappointment – and tonight in bed
will perfect the cage and trap my life and
death so none of my soul will leach away
(the problem is how to spend time and flesh
until nothing stands between bones and sky),
and all I ask is you avert your eye.
Vernacular
Not a big story, a little one, of
down into dark, only wind and sun off-
stage to provoke the heart-shaped flicker
across a line not to be crossed, quicker
along the watery path and then deep,
fast beneath the tremor of yellow leaves,
end of an era, start of a new phase –
no story at all but a new species
of quiet. And so the hills of Dad’s bed
in September sunshine. Sea at the end
of the road. Curtains quietly open
to cottonwoods against the slow green slope.
No matter. A perfect, perfect blue day.
He took forever to leave me this tale.
Lost Countryside
A springtime of rain and not much sun, one
death amid thoughts of death, grief a constant
ache in the throat, the word sing, prefix of
single, and the walnut in the cracked shell.
I pry it open with a knife. Hemi-
spheres. Two halves of something adored for its
wholeness. Hawk overhead quite curious.
I taste the crumbs of white flesh, familiar,
yes, I’ve been here before. The black walnut
and guardian woodpecker watched me crouch
to collect nuts while guiding the mower
with one hand. I filled my pockets each fall.
A cloud climbs the sky and someone down
the valley blows a muffler. You know, a thing
of importance will never end, never
be final. I forgot the nuts till one
rolled out of my summer trousers, hung on
the line at the start of spring.
Dumpster
This latest device is for the thin man
without a home, a surefire public boon
I dare say, but not mine, not yet. I read
obituaries as my own although
a raindrop into sea is more my style
as I hike the hills of the old man’s farm,
original fields once woods now slated
for new housing me and sis will turn to
profit. Signs nod in September sunshine.
Unheard sea at the end of the blacktop.
But the road is no matter. Mum and Dad
taught us to deflect blame and to save face
a
nd to stay away from fortune and fame.
They took forever and left us this place.
Subdivision
I’m pinned to the back wall of the room by
the blast and when the smoke clears there’s a track
out of all we’ve built. The swamp is foul to
wade through. Where is the sweet meadow? How do
we get there? What force but that which flung us
here will know we sang a garden, sanctus,
a grapevine at the pivot point. Atom-
smashers, we hunted the crack in the use
of it all and forgot the bloody news
till air exploded. Pissed, we yodelled heart-
break raw enough to snag the universe.
Wake up, dizzybones, keep your pecker up –
it’s too late maybe but you catch the drift.
Step by stagger by step will find the path.
Direct Totem
I’m sorry for the fort we made of steel
because it will reach and cut children who
run through years from now when trunks have rotted,
butterflies gone west, sunlight got lost, and
grey cinders have replaced leaves, nothing in
the rock, nothing in the ruins, no one
to remember how inside metal walls
we slept, the girl by herself and the man
by himself, kept from falling by beak and
talons, our backs to the south wall, heads turned
right for the sunrise, then backs to the north,
faces flamed with sunset, night terrors crouched
amid the shadows of oaks and tigers,
loosestrife, instinct, quartz hunter, firelight.
Broken Roof
In the spring when hedges have leaves again
I’ll watch for my mum in the wild places
and look for Dad in faces of strangers,
every village and town, this winter far
too cold to try much but shift pots, skins, tools,
carvings and traps, my library of books,
into the south barn, only our horses
for warmth, nothing and no one to stop me
guiding my life away from damaged ground,
no covered well anywhere in the land
but this. Mum grew pale and died. Candlelit,
Dad sat vigil, then rose up the stone wall
under the timbers my great-grandfathers
used to truss our roof when the valley was
full of trees big enough to fashion masts.
Tenement
Mobile Home
A crick in my left hip as if I need
to walk and walk into night till sun-up
paints the island red. This tin caravan
is full of wind and fire like something wants
out and I guess it is time for that, time
even for murder. Stunning low-back pain
begs the question: Who, me? So from the eyes
coiled up in my gut, right after the monk
walks over my grave, erupts the fury,
cold snake, to curve my body to the spin
of the well she’s coiled around. From the eyes’
light comes the shoulder wound. Chrysanthemum.
From the eyes of those around me comes light.
And in the nest of light rests fledgling light.
Cellar
The bottom dark though starlight above.
And alone and cold so dying takes
ages while people up top come and
go, send down a bucket on a rope,
send down a question, and are always
fine with my answer. In time the world
flips and I’m shucked and start to fall and
don’t want to go. The stairs corkscrew. Pink
umbrella opens. Friends are pebbles
in a stream and it’s over, done. All
my fast talk. Swallows. The mallard pair
in the daisy field. Bulrushes. Pond.
Willow. I used to talk a lot. Bridge.
The last hot sticky taste of. Yes? Yes?
Tenement
What is behind the door but other doors,
one open, where we see a girl and boy,
dust and slanting sun, startled oak trees, deep
forest, river. Change the lock and we’re safe.
Remove windows, stairs, walls. Stars will outgrow
all we love because we set and stars
will always star. They love one another. These
two love each other, the woman and man
fast asleep downstairs between streetcars and
office windows, between sky and pavement,
and we lose them when we look ahead or
back at things outside this world, deep forest,
river. Sleep leaves the impression of words.
Water drips from green moss into a pool.
Basement Suite
Everything looks wet, the barmaid’s belly,
the drowned trunks of pool tables, her felt skin
between T-shirt and jeans time and again
blonde, till Uruguay loses, Sweden wins,
and the familiar alley comes sooner
than expected and home too, a grey day
in June, the rest of the family away
rehearsing the end of The Winter’s Tale.
She eclipsed the screen during set pieces
time and again, the narrow path submerged
past the drowned pool tables to the back door,
out into summer still underwater,
all skies dark and scruffy for an old man,
a football fan at the end of the world.
Hotel Garden
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Are you so far?”
The fishes in the pond when it empties
empty themselves and when it fills again
they fill not as full, not as orange, not
as bright, yet before it empties again
invite others in. They’re numerous and
thin as needles. I call but you don’t hear.
Again and silence; again, no answer.
Why do we open the door and invite
others to enter when the door’s not real?
They won’t find what we tell them to find, nor
say in words what they do find. “Hello?
Are you so far?” And in the quiet night
a fish answers water: Goodbye, goodbye.
James Bond Above the Palace Gate
Lo, la, this tenebrific decline.
Bojabo! I want to be on top.
Poof. Daylight. The rest. Stop
mithering at every cloud-bitten sign
of trouble. Leap or die –
whoops, damn – before I’m killed off
by their worships’ topnots’
hatjinx. What’s the chance, by
the by, of falling on your feet when most
of the scheme is littered with slag,
pedestal, platform, dais, throne,
the air clogged with marble dust
and gravity territorial, in love
with itself or a rogue moon at best?
Townhouse
for Dave and Sue
Distilled forest, trees around a clearing
caught inside water’s heart that falls and will
fall to great water and find in itself
that which will join and that which will divide;
and strength-to-meet equals need-to-divide,
and light shines from a window set in trees,
a cottage perhaps, a girl at the sill,
but he can’t tell her purpose, and she sees
only the drop, a boy at the centre,
and trees falling in the clearing that each
supposes a circle, itself complete,
that includes their new self and body. And
joy in them looks out at the round falling
shared
world because it can’t do otherwise.
The Ruined Cottage
for Bronwen and Jo
The sorry way she sits the wall is not
at all in line with the large history
of crows who now and then taught carpentry
to settlers, yet I watch her caw aloft
in a fresh breeze while my fingers pluck moss,
a small history, aimless and alive,
a fist of green, a fist of stars, a hive,
and so begin, we begin, a clear thought.
To pray for the Old World that died when I
was young and my body bobbed along like
a feather on a stick. To tell stones why
they house and roof nothing but mortal life.
Her wings stutter over the burning land
in a child’s attempt to catch the first wind.
IV
Quit This Ground
1.
Winter this year has been too cold
and bright with wind and untold
snow. My knees are chafed red-raw,
my nose drips and my hands are sore,
and all the homestead roofs leak.
Daughter in her coffin is dressed
for a spring wedding, at rest,
they say (I’ll see them goddamned),
her last word an O, fingers fanned
like rivers across her breast,
which I hold, chill egg, the last
of the clutch, nipple a beak.
I curried her old horse the night
of the hurricane in spite
of demons, then lay perplexed
all day while flies indulged in sex
in every cranny and nook.
2.
Coffin, bed, lamp and this table
I carted to the stable.
Nearly killed me. Now, on the floor,
I sort my daughter’s ribbons
from the pinto’s steaming dung,
and curse every board and rung