From guarded beginnings in the barter of furs
—even a golden fleece, taken off a wreck—
they work up to the trading of franker glances.
And then the taut psalm of sails and the salt veins branching
till man and woman are no more than the moment when a tree,
cast adrift, comes abreast of a bridal shore.
So wine-ripe, later, they go
to lock one another in slow, spiralling dances:
helical histories of their old countries,
unscrolled, clenched, wept over, wound tight,
grafted in the warm hiding-place of the thighs:
electricities that arc again and again in the gap
between bodies breaching tribal defences
to conspire against the stone-eyed tyranny of events
in the narrow province of a bed.
Effects Of Distance
for Nancy
Call it providence if the day should turn
upon its hinges, letting light colonize
this empire of jars and shutters, this room.
A telegram on the rack spells hands that burn
because you did not reply, did not realize
that some words are too proud to remind you they came.
Blue is the colour of air letters, of conquerors’ eyes.
Blue, leaking from your pen, triggers this enterprise.
Never journey far from me; and, if you must,
find towpaths, trails; follow the portents fugitives trust
to guide them out and back. And at some fork,
pause; and climbing in twilight though you may be,
somewhere, address this heart’s unease,
this heart’s unanswered wilderness.
Coronation
They set you on a high chair, the masseur’s hands,
then wrapped your shoulders in a white burnoose,
tucked it under your chin. Then, jug upraised,
spoke blessings of water, anointed your scalp.
Soap-scented, those baptismal palms were soft,
so soft that hawks would fear to cross
their blinding will: they closed
fast around the eyes, caressing but chill.
For the first time, boy-king, blinking through tears,
you stared at walls that multiplied your gaze
as a rim of tawny curls
crested the scissors’ jabbing V
and quick brooms swept it as it fell
to the floors of four mirrors.
You walked through the glass door towards yourself
many times after, stride longer each time
and your hair grown darker beneath the sun
of a lath-and-plaster country slumped in eclipse,
this waterfront where your marooned ancestors
had never meant to drop anchor, in the first place.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse, your swung beams go morse in the dark:
tuning the tide, are bleeps my prow
can’t catch. And not knowing how
to tell the deeps from the shoals,
I run aground,
come home.
Squelching in the clogged clay, my boots
make contact with older codes
of split axe and taciturn bone
that signal their own subterranean edicts
to which I must kneel before I nail up
my claim, a notice to the ghosts
who drag their histories about this beach:
a crystal bracelet held up like a star
polished by the emeries of four weathers,
a spell on the tongue of the wind.
Parable of the Red Horse
A teardrop deposits its grief
at the round foot of the flame.
Capillaries hive it, drive tunnels and caves
through the glass membrane before it flashes
in the wick’s womb, tallowed, coppered:
the last child of the speckled flame
that lunges out before it drowns
in the tidal censorship of the dark.
*
The dervish in the marketplace stops up his eyes
with coins. He dreams he is standing
neck-deep in water; when he howls,
his words are an almanac of falling turrets,
suns breaking the contract
of their orbits
and extinct lines of princes.
In the square, the tail of the red horse
swishes a splendid disregard
for the manic augur
but on those shoulders, that fine head,
plague-black, the eclipse spreads.
I take the bit from the horse’s mouth,
slip it between my teeth: a talisman
for my escape through scorpion thickets.
*
In the square, the wind continues to gallop
in the empty stirrups of trees.
Noon skulks in back alleys,
a shadow cracking on tar, tripping
on tarpaulins. All the squares in the city
are roundabouts, all the streets
dead ends.
The traffic recycles itself.
Refugee
in memoriam: Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1888)
Shuffling from a shore deepened by the tumult
of the sea’s homecoming, a marooned sailor
flees towards inland storms.
What is he: asthmatic monk, madman,
seducer of fishermen’s daughters?
Scourged by the mistral, his ears mocked
by batteries of sea-pronged cannon,
he has seen his chances swim away
like black fish below the corded gangplank.
Behind him lists the Ship of Fools,
sailing without hope of arrival
or port of call. Before him stretch
the unsolved algorithms of arcades
drained of people, the repeated mouths
of houses, whistling express trains,
campaniles that toll a knell:
the remains of a city that someone imagined
and forgot to build.
*
He flings out his arms, which are the arms
of a stowaway nation, a people without a flag
who disguise their customs, forge their passports,
mumble a mongrelled tongue.
Chance has brought him here,
this man of shadows taken off a galleon,
this widower of a kelp-strangled idea,
duped by the treason of images.
Those images come to rest, to rot
in the copper diving-bells of his lungs.
He crumbles as he moves on, carrying
tombstones on his breath.
You can feel his sweet white marble skin,
cowled and stitched over sand-stiffened ribs.
And you can hear the black cat howling
inside his chest, a witness woken from the dead.
He does not flinch when you test his wounds.
His words are spores, the wind’s hostages.
Trespasser’s Song
for H. Masud Taj
Picture this city in reverse:
the arches dim, the domes bulge and turn,
people back away from you, smiling.
A crow skirls, dragged back in time.
The wind’s an elastic band drawn tight
by unseen hands that push past you and place
a red skull-and-crossbones sign three steps
from the glass door you were about to open.
A concrete mixer grinds its teeth and groans.
But before the stone lion on the stair can add
his roar to the chorus, a boy gags him
with a black rag that began life as a crow.
The gatekeeper’s on holiday; warnings rule.
Between you and the rubble of the construc
tion site,
this one splits your shadow:‘Danger. Road Closed.’
Apostrophe to an Architect Raising the City of God
Architect, how gravely you plot your weightless sections,
found a Republic
among the shelved elevations of a topography that banks
in puzzling segments of mortgage and ruin.
You sanction an austere axis here, commence
on a stiff oratory of grids;
ban vagrant shrubs from the avenues and square
the cracked colonnades in line with your prospect.
And let no catwalk trespass upon the majesty of the rise;
let drawbridges strike out, couriers of the perspective.
This record you trace bears the watermark of fable.
In a mason’s translation, it acquires a gloss
of earthworks. Its ammonia tints fade, its edges rot.
Brigands stalk the City of God.
Conquest and retreat. Condottiere priests.
No goldleaf glazes, but chalk encrusts
the stained palimpsest.
You fly the design you did your best to fix
but cannot escape the radii of that well-laid plan.
And harsh your own words of counsel scatter like tares
from the splitting pod of that perfect State:
bullets, they sting your present tact.
Across the drumming trade routes of blood, they give you chase.
Distance fails, and at the antipodes, you pull up short.
And this is purgatory, an arsenal of sorts
where the flintlocks and mortars moulder, that first shot
those false alarms, signals of distress:
Hope and Reason. Spent shadows on a verge of grass,
they mourn the remorseless tramp of the Idea in History,
sputtering, in deep old age, like aspic fire.
The Ambassador’s Report
I
Don’t take this document by my hand for a sign
of finality, or this compass on the table
for masterful repose, or this globe
on the sill for order.
This room is a pose
of glass nouns.
Don’t ask how we dragged the caravan across the desert,
hauled the cannon over the rim of the sand,
rafted the gulf, kept the gunpowder dry,
the ribs warm, the vultures
hungry.
II
An undertow of questions throws up its barbed hooks,
reversing the protocol of current behaviour.
My report digresses from the fishing of answers
in well-sounded depths. I have heard the westering sun
spit curses, the sudden calls
of momentary, blaspheming pheasants.
Back in the region called home, the highways have set
askew in the plastercast plain. Our pack mules limp.
After the pounding of the howitzers,
the gaunt lions looking out to sea
are looser-limbed, looser-lipped,
straw-maned, somewhat toothless.
III
An ambassador in an enemy country
must practise the austerities
of fable. He sees what he sees
through the Trappist eye
of the needle.
He cannot remember why he first set sail:
for trade, or better terms, or was it
in search of Eden?
He tries to reconstruct his longings
from the potsherds of his discoveries:
at the desert’s farthest extremity,
he will close his notebook with a few tribes
bickering over dung heaps, boulders,
patches of yellowed grass, a few goats.
And two very old and withered trees.
Figures in a Landscape by Doppler
Earthquakes thunder past, but the canary survives,
a yellow phrase on the perennial.
Whirlwinds sunder our lives
but small things still matter,
and these have been of consequence after all:
clocks without cuckoos, daemons wrestling in brass,
the hiss of mowers, the spiky warmth of grass.
So how should it pan out if, as patterns wreathe themselves
on the smoky glass, as the party sways gently, sways
in its aureoled bath,
someone should turn away from it all,
turn her eyes to night’s dolphin-ride
on a sea that babbles in its sleep?
And a child’s fingers, drumming on the pane
from the green outside, say all you wanted to say
and all you wanted to say
cradles itself in parentheses
at the bottom of your throat.
Where did we pick up the art of hedging,
of plucking the ice-moon fruits of fate? You tell me
the heart of growing is learning to stay
in finite provinces you used to hate;
is learning to stay in a kind of leaving,
and leaving, be everywhere ruled by the game;
to put seas and suns between ourselves
and us,
till distance is a railroad dividing our freight
between China and Chile.
We float out on the cosmic ripple
and the blue palaces that rode towards us
scatter at tangents, crimson gunfire:
time blows more than our minds in Doppler’s landscape;
each year we grow perfect in a widening knowledge.
Each year, the windmill and Don Quixote
drift further apart in the grisaille print,
leave the picture behind, wrapped up in a house
on a hill:
the heart of growing is going away.
Grandfather’s Estate
Steam of hard-ridden horses, squelch of crab apples
under hooves: these filter through the lattices.
Mouldy ashlars. Crackling of leaves being fired
in the yard; swishing of billhooks
in the fields. Peat smoke; moths flit, unpeeled
from lanterns. For months now, the vexations
have piled up and nothing has worn a name
except the chirping of finches, the damp
creeping up the drains like a gaseous ivy.
Ripe wine, bitter almonds. He sits and listens
for the garnet drop to fall
at sunset on the open diary.
The tap-tapping of walking-sticks
on Minton floors upstairs, as if
queues of old men were conducting
discreet negotiations with outlined Ming
vases and the upturned corners
of Isfahan carpets. The transoms are a music
of whisperings, a serenade of strings,
the gurgling nuptials of doves.
He hears the refrain of rain, his fingers
trickle down the page: moves in the dusk,
stratagems disarmed, the tentative devices
of a blind man’s poetry.
A Poem for Grandmother
A door. A stair. And two steps inside that dark,
the straight-backed chair my grandmother sat in,
a lace net draped across its mahogany arm.
And on the table, a volume of stories
open at the flyleaf, its tissue quill-scarred.
The photographs seal her in a shell of relations:
the sepia corset would have her no more
than an empress delegating domestic chores;
in this room, imagine her gravely accepting
tributes of porcelain and sparkling brass
or setting tiger lilies afloat in bowls, or stocking
pots of pickled mango in the attic of summer.
But the wrong word kills, and empress is wrong,
an acrid graft on a del
icate stock. Empire
was never her creed: grandmother had to learn
the principles of governance from practised hands.
She had to whet the brusque words of command
on waspish crones in the inner courtyard,
had to tame the peacocks in the garden
and dry the raisins of tact with aunts-in-law,
invalids who ruled from brass-bound chests
and serene beds of illness.
She grew up with her children, kept house
in a city of merchant ships and parade-ground strife,
made a home in the rain-gashed heart
of that world in whose lanes stowaway Chinese sang
the praises of their silk, and coolies peddled
cartloads of spices plucked for colder ports.
Like the poets of that city, she wrote in two languages,
spoke a third in polite company, the lines enjambed
over the trellises, the words trapped in porous stone.
She died giving birth to a daughter
on Armistice Day, 1931.
She grew into the earth, then, a storied fig tree
whose roots shot to heaven and branches burrowed
so deep they seeded a forest.
Giving consumed grandmother. Connected to her
by nothing more substantial than a spiralled thread
of protein, I wake some nights to find her eyes
Vanishing Acts Page 5