hardened in stone, drowning
in this star blanket this sky
like a giant trout
conscious how the heaven
careens over him
as he moves in back fields
kissing the limbs of trees
or placing ear on stone which rocks him
and then stands to watch the house
in its oasis of light.
And he knows something is happening there to him
solitary while he spreads his arms
and holds everything that is slipping away together.
He is suddenly in the heat of the party
slouching towards women, revolving
round one unhappy shadow.
That friend who said he would find
the darkest place, and then wave.
He is not a lost drunk
like his father or his friend, can,
he says, stop on a dime, and he can
he could because even now, now in
this brilliant darkness where
grass has lost its colour and it’s all
fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows
this colourless grass is making his bare feet green
for it is the hour of magic
which no matter what sadness
leaves him grinning.
At certain hours of the night
ducks are nothing but landscape
just voices breaking as they nightmare.
The weasel wears their blood
home like a scarf,
cows drain over the horizon
and the dark
vegetables hum onward underground
but the mouth
wants plum.
Moves from room to room
where brown beer glass
smashed lounges at his feet
opens the long rust stained gate
and steps towards invisible fields
that he knows from years of daylight.
He snorts in the breeze
which carries a smell
of cattle on its back.
What this place does not have
is the white paint of bathing cabins
the leak of eucalyptus.
During a full moon
outcrops of rock shine
skunks spray abstract into the air
cows burp as if practising
the name of Francis Ponge.
His drunk state wants the mesh of place.
Ludwig of Bavaria’s Roof Garden—
glass plants, iron parrots
Venus Grottos, tarpaulins of Himalaya.
By the kitchen sink he tells someone
from now on I will drink only landscapes
– here, pour me a cup of Spain.
Opens the gate and stumbles
blood like a cassette through the body
away from the lights, unbuttoning,
this desire to be riverman.
Tentatively
he recalls
his drunk invitation to the river.
He has steered the awesome car
past sugarbush to the blue night water
and steps out
speaking to branches
and the gulp of toads.
Subtle applause of animals.
A snake leaves a path
like temporary fossil.
He falls
back onto the intricacies
of gearshift and steering wheel
alive as his left arm
which now departs out of the window
trying to tug passing sumac
pine bush tamarack
into the car
to the party.
Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate
and over the car invisible insects
ascend out of the beams like meteorite
crushed dust of the moon
… he waits for the magic star called Lorca.
On the front lawn a sheet
tacked across a horizontal branch.
A projector starts a parade
of journeys, landscapes, relatives,
friends leaping out within pebbles of water
caught by the machine as if creating rain.
Later when wind frees the sheet
and it collapses like powder in the grass
pictures fly without target
and howl their colours over Southern Ontario
clothing burdock
rhubarb a floating duck.
Landscapes and stories
flung into branches
and the dog walks under the hover of the swing
beam of the projection bursting in his left eye.
The falling sheet the star of Lorca swoops
someone gets up and heaves his glass
into the vegetable patch
towards the slow stupid career of beans.
This is the hour
when dead men sit
and write each other.
‘Concerning the words we never said
during morning hours of the party
there was glass under my bare feet
laws of the kitchen were broken
and each word moved
in my mouth like muscle …’
This is the hour for sudden journeying.
Cervantes accepts
a 17th Century invitation
from the Chinese Emperor.
Schools of Chinese-Spanish Linguistics!
Rivers of the world meet!
And here
ducks dressed in Asia
pivot on foreign waters.
At 4 a.m. he wakes in the sheet
that earlier held tropics in its whiteness.
The invited river flows through the house
into the kitchen up
stairs, he awakens and moves within it.
In the dim light
he sees the turkish carpet under water,
low stools, glint
of piano pedals, even a sleeping dog
whose dreams may be of rain.
It is a river he has walked elsewhere
now visiting moving with him at the hip
to kitchen where a friend sleeps in a chair
head on the table his grip
still round a glass, legs underwater.
He wants to relax
and give in to the night
fall horizontal and swim
to the back kitchen where his daughter sleeps.
He wishes to swim
to each of his family and gaze
at their underwater dreaming
this magic chain of bubbles.
Wife, son, household guests, all
comfortable in clean river water.
He is aware that for hours
there has been no conversation,
tongues have slid to stupidity on alcohol
sleeping mouths are photographs of yells.
He stands waiting, the sentinel,
shambling back and forth, his anger
and desire against the dark
which, if he closes his eyes,
will lose them all.
The oven light
shines up through water at him
a bathysphere a ghost ship
and in the half drowned room
the crickets like small pins
begin to ta
ck down
the black canvas of this night,
begin to talk their hesitant
gnarled epigrams to each other
across the room.
Creak and echo.
Creak and echo. With absolute clarity
he knows where he is.
Tin Roof
She hesitated. ‘Are you being romantic now?’
‘I’m trying to tell you how I feel without exposing myself. You know what I mean?’
ELMORE LEONARD
*
You stand still for three days
for a piece of wisdom
and everything falls to the right place
or wrong place
You speak
don’t know whether
seraph or bitch
flutters at your heart
and look through windows
for cue cards
blazing in the sky.
The solution.
This last year I was sure
I was going to die
*
The geography of this room I know so well
tonight I could rise in the dark
sit at the table and write without light.
I am here in the country of warm rains.
A small cabin – a glass, wood,
tin bucket on the Pacific Rim.
Geckoes climb
the window to peer in,
and all day the tirade pale blue waves
touch the black shore of volcanic rock
and fall to pieces here
*
How to arrive at this
drowning
on the edge of sea
(How to drive
the Hana Road, he said—
one hand on the beer
one hand on your thigh
and one eye for the road)
Waves leap to this cliff all day
and in the evening lose
their pale blue
he rises from the bed
as wind from three directions
falls, takes his place
on the peninsula of sheets
which also loses colour
stands in the loose green kimono
by a large window and gazes
through gecko
past the deadfall
into sea,
the unknown magic he loves
throws himself into
the blue heart
*
Tell me
all you know
about bamboo
growing wild, green
growing up into soft arches
in the temple ground
the traditions
driven through hands
through the heart
during torture
and most of all
this
small bamboo pipe
not quite horizontal
that drips
every ten seconds
to a shallow bowl
I love this
being here
not a word
just the faint
fall of liquid
the boom of an iron buddhist bell
in the heart rapid
as ceremonial bamboo
*
A man buying wine
Rainier beer at the store
would he be satisfied with this?
Cold showers, electric skillet,
Red River on tv
Oh he could be
(Do you want
to be happy and write?)
He happens to love the stark
luxury of this place
– no armchairs, a fridge of beer and mangoes
Precipitation.
To avoid a story The refusal to move
All our narratives of sleep
a mild rumble to those inland
Illicit pockets of
the kimono
Heart like a sleeve
*
The cabin
its tin roof
a wind run radio
catches the noise of the world.
He focuses on the gecko
almost transparent body
how he feels now
everything passing through him like light.
In certain mirrors
he cannot see himself at all.
He is joyous and breaking down.
The tug over the cliff.
What protects him
is the warmth in the sleeve
that is all, really
*
We go to the stark places of the earth
and find moral questions everywhere
Will John Wayne and Montgomery Clift
take their cattle to Missouri or Kansas?
Tonight I lean over the Pacific
and its blue wild silk
ringed by creatures
who
tchick tchick tchick
my sudden movement
who say nothing else.
There are those who are in
and there are those who look in
Tiny leather toes
hug the glass
*
On the porch
thin ceramic
chimes
ride wind
off the Pacific
bells of the sea
I do not know
the name of large orange flowers
which thrive on salt air
lean half drunk
against the steps
Untidy banana trees
thick moss on the cliff
and then the plunge
to black volcanic shore
It is impossible to enter the sea here
except in a violent way
How we have moved
from thin ceramic
to such destruction
*
All night
the touch
of wave on volcano.
There was the woman
who clutched my hair
like a shaken child.
The radio whistles
round a lost wave length.
All night slack-key music
and the bird whistling duino
duino, words and music
entangled in pebble
ocean static.
The wild sea and her civilization
the League of the Divine Wind
and traditions of death.
Remember
those women in movies
who wept into the hair
of their dead men?
*
Going up stairs
I hang my shirt
on the stiff
ear of an antelope
>
Above the bed
memory
restless green bamboo
the distant army
assembles wooden spears
her feet braced
on the ceiling
sea in the eye
Reading the article
an 1825 report Physiologie du Gout
on the artificial growing of truffles
speaks
of ‘vain efforts
and deceitful promises,’
commandments of culinary art
Good
morning to your body
hello nipple
and appendix scar like a letter
of too much passion
from a mad Mexican doctor
All this noise at your neck!
heart clapping
like green bamboo
this earring
which
has flipped over
and falls
into the pool of your ear
The waves against black stone
that was a thousand year old
burning red river
could not reach us
*
Cabin
‘hana’
The Cinnamon Peeler Page 6