for doors that allowed privacy.
A rain
swollen copy of Jack London
a magazine drawing of a rabbit
bordered with finishing nails.
6 chickens, bird cage (empty),
sauerkraut cutting board
down to the rock
trees
not bothering to look
into the old woman’s eyes
as we go in, get a number
have the power to bid
on everything that is exposed.
After an hour in this sun
I expected her to unscrew
her left arm and donate it
to the auctioneer’s excitement.
In certain rituals we desire
only what we cannot have.
While for her, Mrs Germain,
this is the needle’s eye
where maniacs of earth select.
Look, I wanted to say,
$10 for the dog
with faded denim eyes
FARRE OFF
There are the poems of Campion I never saw till now
and Wyatt who loved with the best
and suddenly I want 16th-century women
round me devious politic aware
of step ladders to the king
Tonight I am alone with dogs and lightning
aroused by Wyatt’s talk of women who step
naked into his bedchamber
Moonlight and barnlight constant
lightning every second minute
I have on my thin blue parka
and walk behind the asses of the dogs
who slide under the gate
and sense cattle
deep in the fields
I look out into the dark pasture
past where even the moonlight stops
my eyes are against the ink of Campion
WALKING TO BELLROCK
Two figures in deep water.
Their frames truncated at the stomach
glide along the surface. Depot Creek.
One hundred years ago lumber being driven down this river
tore and shovelled and widened the banks into Bellrock
down past bridges to the mill.
The two figures are walking
as if half sunk in a grey road
their feet tentative, stumbling on stone bottom.
Landscapes underwater. What do the feet miss?
Turtle, watersnake, clam. What do the feet ignore
and the brain not look at, as two figures slide
past George Grant’s green immaculate fields
past the splashed blood of cardinal flower on the bank.
Rivers are a place for philosophy but all thought
is about the mechanics of this river is about
stones that twist your ankles
the hidden rocks you walk your knee into—
feet in slow motion and brain and balanced arms
imagining the blind path of foot, underwater sun
suddenly catching the almond coloured legs
the torn old Adidas tennis shoes we wear
to walk the river into Bellrock.
What is the conversation about for three hours
on this winding twisted evasive river to town?
What was the conversation about all summer.
Stan and I laughing joking going summer crazy
as we lived against each other.
To keep warm we submerge. Sometimes
just our heads decapitated
glide on the dark glass.
There is no metaphor here.
We are aware of the heat of the water, coldness of the rain,
smell of mud in certain sections that farts
when you step on it, mud never walked on
so you can’t breathe, my god you can’t breathe this air
and you swim fast your feet off the silt of history
that was there when the logs went
leaping down for the Rathburn Timber Company
when those who stole logs had to leap
right out of the country if caught.
But there is no history or philosophy or metaphor with us.
The problem is the toughness of the Adidas shoe
its three stripes gleaming like fish decoration.
The story is Russell’s arm waving out of the green of a field.
The plot of the afternoon is to get to Bellrock
through rapids, falls, stink water
and reach the island where beer and a towel wait for us.
That night there is not even pain in our newly used muscles
not even the puckering of flesh
and little to tell except you won’t
believe how that river winds and when you
don’t see the feet you concentrate on the feet.
And all the next day trying to think
what we didn’t talk about.
Where was the criminal conversation
broken sentences lost in the splash in wind.
Stan, my crazy summer friend,
why are we both going crazy?
Going down to Bellrock
recognizing home by the colour of barns
which tell us north, south, west,
and otherwise lost in miles and miles of rain
in the middle of this century
following the easy fucking stupid plot to town.
PIG GLASS
Bonjour. This is pig glass
a piece of cloudy sea
nosed out of the earth by swine
and smoothed into pebble
run it across your cheek
it will not cut you
and this is my hand a language
which was buried for years touch it
against your stomach
The pig glass
I thought
was the buried eye of Portland Township
slow faded history
waiting to be grunted up
There is no past until you breathe
on such green glass
rub it
over your stomach and cheek
The Meeks family used this section
years ago to bury tin
crockery forks dog tags
and each morning
pigs ease up that ocean
redeeming it again
into the possibilities of rust
one morning I found a whole axle
another day a hand crank
but this is pig glass
tested with narrow teeth
and let lie. The morning’s green present.
Portland Township jewellery.
There is the band from the ankle of a pigeon
a weathered bill from the Bellrock Cheese Factory
letters in 1925 to a dead mother I
disturbed in the room above the tractor shed.
Journals of family love
servitude to farm weather
a work glove in a cardboard box
creased flat and hard like a flower.
A bottle thrown
by loggers out of a wagon
past midnight
explodes against rock.
This green fragment has behind it
the booomm when glass
tears free of its smoothness
now once more smooth as knuckle
a tooth on my tongue.
Comfort that bites through skin
hides in the dark afternoon of my pocket.
Snake shade.
Determined histories of glass.
THE HOUR OF COWDUST
It is the hour we move small
in the last possibilities of light
now the s
ky opens its blue vault
I thought this hour belonged to my children
bringing cows home
bored by duty swinging a stick,
but this focus of dusk out of dust
is everywhere – here by the Nile
the boats wheeling
like massive half-drowned birds
and I gaze at water that dreams
dust off my tongue,
in this country your mouth
feels the way your shoes look
Everything is reducing itself to shape
Lack of light cools your shirt
men step from barbershops
their skin alive to the air.
All day
dust covered granite hills
and now
suddenly the Nile is flesh
an arm on a bed
In Indian miniatures
I cannot quite remember
what this hour means
– people were small,
animals represented
simply by dust
they stamped into the air.
All I recall of commentaries
are abrupt lovely sentences where
the colour of a bowl
a left foot stepping on a lotus
symbolized separation.
Or stories of gods
creating such beautiful women
they themselves burned in passion
and were reduced to ash.
Women confided to pet parrots
solitary men dreamed into the conch.
So many
graciously humiliated
by the distance of rivers
The boat turns languid
under the hunched passenger
sails
ready for the moon
fill like a lung
there is no longer
depth of perception
it is now possible
for the outline of two boats
to collide silently
THE PALACE
7 a.m. The hour of red daylight
I walk through palace grounds
waking the sentries
scarves
around their neck and mouths
leak breath mist
The gibbons stroll
twenty feet high
through turret arches
and on the edge
of brown parapet
I am alone
leaning
into flying air
Ancient howls of a king
who released his aviary
like a wave to the city below
celebrating the day of his birth
and they when fed
would return to his hand
like the payment of grain
All over Rajasthan
palaces die young
at this height
a red wind
my shirt and sweater cold
From the white city below
a beautiful wail
of a woman’s voice rises
300 street transistors
simultaneously playing
the one radio station of Udaipur
USWETAKEIYAWA
Uswetakeiyawa. The night mile
through the village of tall
thorn leaf fences
sudden odours
which pour through windows of the jeep.
We see nothing, just
the grey silver of the Dutch canal
where bright coloured boats
lap like masks in the night
their alphabets lost in the dark.
No sight but the imagination’s
story behind each smell
or now and then a white sarong
pumping its legs on a bicycle
like a moth in the headlights
and the dogs
who lean out of night
strolling the road
with eyes of sapphire
and hideous body
so mongrelled
they seem to have woken
to find themselves tricked
into outrageous transformations,
one with the spine of a snake
one with a creature in its mouth
(car lights rouse them
from the purity of darkness).
This is the dream journey
we travel most nights
returning from Colombo.
The road hugs the canal
the canal every mile
puts an arm into the sea.
In daylight women bathe
waist deep beside the road
utterly still as I drive past
their diya reddha cloth
tied under their arms.
Brief sentences of women
lean men with soapy buttocks
their arms stretching up
to pour water over themselves,
or the ancient man in spectacles
crossing the canal
pulling something we cannot see
in the water behind him.
The women surface
bodies the colour of shadow
wet bright cloth
the skin of a mermaid.
In the silence of the night drive
you hear ocean you swallow odours
which change each minute – dried fish
swamp toddy a variety of curries
and something we have never been able to recognize.
There is just this thick air
and the aura of dogs
in trickster skin.
Once in the night we saw
something slip into the canal.
There was then the odour we did not recognize.
The smell of a dog losing its shape.
THE WARS
Dusk in Colombo
the Bo tree dark all day
gathers the last of our light
and in its green rooms which yawn
over Pettah stores
is its own shadow
– hundreds of unseen bats
tuning up the auditorium
in archaic Tamil
Trincomalee
they whisper
is my brother
source of my exile
long slow miles to the scrub north
whose blossoms are dirty birds
so bright they are extracts of the sea
Swim
into the north’s blue eye
over the milk floor of ocean
that darkens only with depth
The Ray
flies in silence
muttering bubbles to himself
Tread over his
avenue
The ancient warrior
whose brother
stole his operatic tongue
plunges
in pure muscle
towards his neighbours
bloodless full
of noon moonlight
only his twin
knows how to charm
the waters against him
SWEET LIKE A CROW
for Hetti Corea, 8 years old
‘The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossi
ble to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm’ PAUL BOWLES
Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a hundred
pappadans being crunched, like someone
trying to light matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.
LATE MOVIES WITH SKYLER
All week since he’s been home
he has watched late movies alone
terrible one star films and then staggering
through the dark house to his bed
waking at noon to work on the broken car
he has come home to fix.
21 years old and restless