as he makes one more run from the sea
to where they wait on the rose-tinted beach.
This is how it will go for the rest of the week:
I will sit at the piss-warmed swim-up bar.
I will read a novel each day before lunch.
I will graze the buffet in my flowery shirt.
I will sit in my chair sipping tropical punch,
not quite settling; in fact, with days still to go
I will notice how things have started to smell,
like that forgotten bucket left out by the door,
that one as a child I would carefully fill
with starfish, sand dollars, crab shells,
an assortment of poignant seaside mementos.
Starlings
In a nearby maple,
spanworms gnaw
leaves to their girders.
When the sun shines
they’ll rappel
down long silk threads,
like Special Forces.
And the starling,
he’s no machine gun,
he’ll run out of bullets
before he can finish them.
Waxwings
Months of winter weather
like hard labour
and tomorrow the same
all over again.
What do I care if waxwings
swoop to flense
the last few berries
from the dogberry tree?
They put me in mind
of my well-heeled friends
with their flowery shirts,
their pharmaceutical tans.
The Hinge
Sometime after the steady breathing,
like someone slowly sweeping a yard,
but sometime before the beetling eyeballs,
you move that squeaky hinge in your throat.
This is the sound of the door swinging open
and shut as you pass into sleep.
This is the sound of your going away.
I’ve heard myself make the same sound
while listening as if from underground.
And I have been known to make it as well
when I remember something painful.
This is the sound of the door swinging shut
as I heave my body against it.
This is the sound of keeping-at-bay.
The Lost Years
i.
Rip the flex from the electric clock,
braid bare wire ends to the steel sieve’s rim,
and plop it like a helmet on your skull.
Now reach and plug the three-pin in.
The shyest creatures come out to play:
wild lynx, mink and whiskered otter;
wrist-thick trout that tremble and shudder,
regale you with tales of salt water.
Now write of your fabled breakthrough,
the wall cracking open below the clock,
no Narnia fur-trimmed portal this,
but the broken teeth of chiselled brick,
with the frayed ends of one-inch slats
and fat-lip lumps of mortar hanging loose.
Earphones like moss pads over ears
with Back in Black on continuous loop,
that demolition soundtrack giving way
to something altogether country:
birdsong, and nearby a trickling brook,
sunlight filtering down through a canopy,
and awe like a shock of long thick hair:
like that aforementioned colander
hot-wired to frig the hard-wired brain,
and shock you into the free-and-clear,
so real, at three A.M., when every beer,
when every tumbler of amber rum,
lighting the way from there to here,
shone like a lantern, frail and paper-thin.
ii.
The sun that day was not the sun I knew.
Crash-test dummy amperes struck on anvil ohms
unzipping phosphorescent candles, hot-car joules.
So cruel the way its gammas sparked gamin,
the way it powered down, obliterating shade,
green-housing me, by a no-name petrol station.
Later, the fumy pumps were lanced, the tuberous
tanks dug up, the toy-land car-port canopy knocked
and carted off. The shop converted to a key & lock.
Tulk’s, a name I often think of when I think about
the interval between that pot-bound, heat-struck day,
and the day I surfaced, a hemisphere away,
sockless, shoeless, shirtless, clueless, with nothing
but a pair of check pants bunching up my balls
and the memory of wind whipping past my ears,
a bellows that fanned the embers of that sun
with everything pent up, jammed, stuck, on hold
about to rip through muscle, burst through skin.
iii.
Ashen my younger face emerging
from the ashtray’s mush of ash stabbed
with burned-out Seadogs, jack-knifed butts.
Dusty footsteps lead across the floor
between black moons of long-playing albums,
lead all the way to the double bay
that overlooks the hard-tramped snow,
the aftermath of what? a lover’s dance,
a midnight stagger around a streetlamp,
hands warming in each other’s pants,
footsteps frozen at twenty below.
We were young. Then came the thaw.
Like jump-leads, these butter knives,
their blackened tips still surface
in our kitchen drawer from time to time.
Historical
We barbered roots with trowels.
Heard in singing steel alarm.
In each opened canvas square
buried bricks made Braques.
Scoured shade for artefacts.
Dug trenches six-feet deep.
Chucked up bricks and rocks.
Bagged cloudy window pane.
Bagged rust-furred cut nails.
Bagged tin-glazed stoneware.
Took pleasure in the lore:
Punty marks on bottle bases.
Bubbles proved hand-blown glass.
Bore widths dated pipe stems.
Porous clay ware stuck to lips.
Disbelieved the archaeologist
Who said it was a hospital.
It was all one hurried backfill.
Laboured through a schism.
Acquired air of professionalism.
Found the find of the summer:
Found wrist-thick and warm.
Found swear-to-God-it-had-a-pulse.
Found rope-like-root-like thing.
Found dinged when it was hit
And where dinged winked silver,
Like lead before it darkens.
Found strong enough to stand on.
Found the main power supply
Nowhere near where it should be.
Enough juice, said the engineer,
A Scot from the Hebrides,
To melt your hands and feet,
Turn your hair to a corona of flame,
Send you home in a zip-lock baggie.
Sermon to the Immigrants
I tell them to embrace their confusion,
let the conceits of culture and place
fall away to reveal a true, new face,
a face that will last only one generation.
But they only mutter under their breath,
trade jokes about my muddled accent,
married as they are to dénouement,
married to the old idea until death.
The Memory Warehouse
Who drops these pallets stacked with boxes
on my wharf? I burp a dry dusty burp,
and my cataract glass rattles,
my shard teeth zing in putty pyorrhoea,
while my clear panes shimmer, show
dock-side bollards dripping guano,
tug-boat and tiny tanker where horizon
bends like re-bar over Punta Cana.
Inside, there’s nothing much to see.
It’s all a cube van hither and thither.
Today we are headed to where Aisle 7
memories were originally gathered
( as is the case with memories,
these memories are encased in ice ).
WARNING: the cube van’s chiller’s broken,
what comes back may be distorted!
And the drivers — Eeech! — the drivers,
old axe-faced, phlegmy Mr. Hunger,
and young Master Poverty-of-the-Moment —
sometimes the latter brings himself back.
I should say the atmosphere inside
the drivers’ lounge is gloomy: bottles
under benches, Vesuvius ashtrays,
occasional lapses into Movement poetry.
Meanwhile, out back behind the concrete wall
( my back’s unplastered,
the cement between the blocks hardened
where block weight sloshed it,
the whole retaining force aerosoled
with colourful half-truths, the ground
littered with the detritus of mind blowing:
petal shards strewn, punctured
cans, archipelagos of cigarette butts,
a rogue turd expelled when
some solvent shined a gut )
on the other side, past the partitioned
highway and over another wall,
is a neighbourhood much like the one
where it all began, where nothing much
has changed, where no one has died,
where the neighbours all look the same,
just older, where they remember you,
talk to you as if you’d just been away
a few days, where even the town
after the recent unbelievable
building boom looks much the same,
the bones still visible under tightly
stretched streets and botoxed greens.
IV
The Poet
I might say a train stopped
then started up again
I might say the engine cut
as we hurtled, express,
from resort town to metropolis
I might say the engine cut
and the train drifted
sighed, was the idle heart
at the middle of nowhere
I might say greenness
surrounded us there
and that a country silence
crept in, began to graze
on our vowels and consonants
until there came a thump
as though some outer door had shut
in the green middle of nowhere
and the engine lurched ahead
resumed its glide to speed
past banks of rhododendron
where the engine had suddenly
stopped and silence crept in
and along with silence came this boy
a family had brought to set aboard
I might call him their first born
now striding up the passageway
and searching every stranger’s
face for signs of welcome
I might say we seemed no match
for him, even as the engine ate
the silence in the green
middle of no place, where
gathering speed we slid
toward the great metropolis
while a boy searching for a seat
searched every stranger’s face
for something hidden
and I would be remiss not to say
that we kept up our indifference
our coolness to his gaze
that offered to return to us
something we had misplaced
in the great grey metropolis
and had thought to find again
in a lakeside resort town
on the edge of nowhere
at the grey green end of the line
though secretly we wondered
if we ever had possessed
whatever it was his steady gaze
promised to replace in us
something of that silent green
that grazed upon us when
the engine cut and the train
sighed, slowed, stopped
in the middle of nowhere
where a boy walked toward us
as his family walked away
The Touch Tank
The journeyman-welded crabs move stiffly
around inside the armour of their PhD’s,
and with buck-stop stares contemplate attack.
Delicate flywheel motions near their mouths
suggest the nuanced exploration of this
thought: sideways-forward or sideways back.
Nearby, artistic whelks confect ice-cream
dollop shells through which project soft
white sprouts of feeling, and extrude, below
their skeletons of fine Spode china, skirts of
same white flesh, houndstooth-flecked;
underneath, you know, they’re all vagina.
A lead-foot shellfish revs, propels its bulk
along the bottom — its square hinge denotes
a scallop not a clam. Look! says someone,
pointing to an orange marble with a turban.
That, says the interpreter, is a sea peach,
and immediately ten little hands all reach.
Nearby, a pinkish bombed-out minaret
makes to the ear an age-old invitation,
until a hermit crab extends a clutch of claws.
Above, tumescent, slimy, warty and green,
a hoisted sea cucumber deftly shucks its
dildo status by pissing gently in the stream.
Who knew the inner life was this small
aquatic town, where a slightly wavering
whitish outline around everything suggests
a time before our principles took hold,
before the whore’s egg spawned a crown,
before a maimed starfish jigged cruciform.
Basho
So this is where the lawyers go for lunch
and the arts administrator and the gallery
director soon to blow town. Rumour has it
that as haute couture is to off-the-rail
so Basho is to lunchtime fare. This is where
the poets come to celebrate and spend
their share of the public purse, a recent win.
One feels obliged to comment on the décor.
Did I mention the table’s angled edges
that suggest, from overhead, the rhombus.
There’s a salt water aquarium with living rock,
not coral — that would probably be illegal.
We could ask the lawyers, her, in pinstripe,
or him, contemplating a second run for office.
One feels obliged to remark on the food.
The poets consult the menu and order
nigiri, ten. One rice bowl. And Oh, two miso.
The muddy miso soup recalls the rice field
and the green onion swirl a magic 8 ball.
She likes it, but he does not, except for
the post-coital or oyster-like aftertaste.
Me so horny, he thinks to say, except
he fears that she might take him up on it.
Remember that scene in Full Metal Jacket,
the skinny hooker arrives on a motorbike
but will not service the African American —
he registers Sapporo’s pint-tin jujitsu,
decides to stick to the form, which is gossip.
A fin of wasabi breaches the surface of each plate.
Mix it in with the dish of s
oy, she says.
The soy sauce like fine sewing-machine oil
does nothing to mellow the mint-green wasabi
which will ride his oesophagus hard for
the next twenty-four hours. Horseradish,
the active ingredient, horseradish and fish.
Nigiri ten is a platter of ten different sushi.
His favourite’s a rice ball wrapped in tuna —
stretched labia majora lit from the inside.
And as well he likes the saddling eel slice,
surely a foreskin pan-fried to a crisp?
There is also a delicate seaweed collar
topped with roe that’s the colour of amber.
And speaking of roe, the rice bowl glitters
with tiny ruby-red eggs that pop like stitches
when bitten. From the aquarium, a whiskery
red and white racing-car shrimp watches,
and a Jagger-lipped fish who half-swims
and half-lurches around on sleeve-like fins.
Both of the poets fall in love with him.
The Children of Critics
1.
The children of critics exist as a hunger.
On stick-like legs with bulbous joints they tap
Morse code on pressure-treated lumber,
usually at dusk, in that time between
a quarter to eight and eight-fifteen,
in September, when the wind smells of tea,
when the moon’s a CD, when with a quiver
it pulls the inside out and the outside in
until neck hairs parse an authentic shiver.
2.
The children of critics delight in connection.
In the future, the father’s once sickly son
will hunger for all things Southeast Asian,
his imagination long since inflected
by a photo that smelled of pepper wood
that was planted inside the cover of a book
entitled Lost Flora of Indonesia —
an invitation from his shadow brother
whose ambrosial presence posits amnesia.
Reading
Some say it looks like a siphoning hose
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