this will be either
the speech of his life or words
that are never uttered.
Though he’s no pacer, there
he goes on Penn Ave., ditching
the ride to a deli
with the government driver,
insisting he’ll take
the few last blocks on foot.
He wants the air
of a summer night and an uncluttered sense
of the quotidian.
The stars might pull at time
like taffy out there, exhaling light,
but it’s reassuring to know
that in the suburbs
someone’s washing dishes, a curtain
is lifted by the breeze
and surely there’s a midget team
looking for a homer under bug-infested
ballpark lights.
At the meat counter, he watches
them shave a sheaf
of pastrami onto the waxed sheet, pop
bread and mini packs
of mustard into paper sacks,
provisions
for what’s going to be
an all-nighter in a toe-to-toe
with the typewriter.
If only he could peel
back the top of his head
to reveal slick words laid neatly
and glistening like that
cache of silver found
when a sardine key gets twisted round.
But all he can see
are two dead astronauts
canned in welded metal,
their ingress above the module’s ladder
like Jacob’s climb to heaven
and everything a question of how
anyone would spend their last few hours.
Would you stay inside, waiting till
the oxygen goes critical, tapping
the dead switch for the ascent engine
in a lonely Morse? Or, rather,
pull an Oates, and wander out into the cold
for one last stroll,
the whirling white like tickertape.
Safire slows
at the thought of it. All night
he’ll haunt his office, taunted
by shades of scenario,
the moon’s milky glow
hung in its pure potential,
stalled like those satellites of paper
balled up into the waste,
the future an empty shape
still left to fill with explanation.
In Kosovo
Berna, whose friends call her Bass Face,
looks more like a sylph with a grudge.
Her head, half-shaved and delicate, stares
and unsettles you while a fat beat drubs
through her ad hoc PA. She owns
this club, one of the few with decent sound
in war-scarred Pristina.
As the latest power cut ends,
ravers drift back to the dance floor
while a drum ’n’ bass rumble is laid down
over Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark.’
No pop snobs, they’ll shout and pump hands
at the first moaning notes, as the dj
digs in to beat-mix a long set
of minimal techno, dubstep and house.
He doesn’t scratch; this is way
post-Detroit. It’s fucking Kosovo, 2008;
even the potholes have potholes.
Air strikes from NATO sent Slobodan
packing, but left each street
with a trail of bomb damage, blackouts
and overtaxed hospitals. Call that history;
I’m sure the kids would love to give
a shit, but just now they’re too busy dancing,
each beat a real rush, every move a one-fingered
salute to the past. The trance scene’s across town,
but all the DJs mix with a shared set of decks.
There’s Legoff, Toton, Goya and Likatek.
And Berna, whose friends call her Bass Face.
Ten Years
– another for Andrea Skillen
Your massive metallic sports watch
bristled like a gunship,
so wearing it was your mutinous raspberry
to the elegant dress, necklace
and ring they were burying you in.
Your brother confided you’d set the alarm
but hadn’t said for when.
It was perfectly grand and inappropriate,
an antidote to the bathetic pageant
we’d kitted ourselves into with awkward suits
across the solemn tones
of the parlour’s coloured carpet.
This morning I’ve been listening
to some Buffalo Tom and ‘the Man in Black,’
calling back the summer
we hung in hope for you,
the autumn, the winter, the spring ...
I housesat all your things, most in boxes
for the move to Winnipeg you never made,
a lease you had to break, those vacant rooms
still waiting like Virgil’s version
of the Cumaean Sibyl’s cave,
her prophecies writ on oak leaves
and kept in order, unless some mortal
should open the door and scatter them.
The Tennis Courts in Winter
From Christmas through the end of March
I’d been trying to find some clever way to start
a poem called ‘The Tennis Courts in Winter.’
I passed them every day on my snowbound lurch
up Delaware and Cartier, the east-side court
still posting rules of play, the stiffened board off-kilter
where the zip ties snapped. But every chance
I’d get to jot the title down was stopped by white below.
My unwritten poem had become the tennis courts,
frozen to a stop inside a chain-link fence,
blocked and blank, the obliterating snow
like revelation in reverse, which, of course,
is just forgetting. But I don’t forget, and don’t know why
the title haunts me; it might have something to do
with potential. Yesterday I thought of it again,
though it’s been years since I moved away
to this other neighbourhood and the snow
has come and gone at least a hundred times since then.
So Far, So Stupid
All those selfies I posted
look really great. So spontaneous. Arm
tentacled through bad light past the frame,
an umbilical toward my ego.
Freud, meet Descartes. Intentions,
like airports, look deceptively the same,
then you get a security pass
for the doors just off the escalators.
Inside my mind, there’s another mind,
like a prop warehouse,
dramatically cluttered at times.
I go there, for the wind machine
and free-standing door
I just slam and slam.
Somewhere, Nowhere
There was little time left to be young
and stupid, so I hitched due west
on the 17, cold thumb to autumn.
Outside Sault Ste. Marie, ground mist
and the turned-up collar.
I slept in a ditch.
A man from Provence waved
me toward a camper van; we traded
goals of getting to the coast,
though he talked of Fresno,
Oaxaca, and the way south to Chile.
North of Superior, the going
was rough on gear and brake, flashes
of lake between terraces of the Seven’s
granite and pine. Past dark,
we found a side road, parked, ate
sandwiches, bet almonds on cards,
talked origins of Mad Hatter
and Winnie the Pooh. Inside
my sleeping bag, with no bleed
from the usual streetlights,
it was an inkwell cave.
It was medieval night
and I ceased feeling any links
to what was real, just a stinging
trust at being in the middle of nothing
but my life. It was like that for days,
until I was dropped off near Golden,
the boot knife velcroed to my ankle,
symbol of how luck and stupidity
ride the same edge.
No One
No one knows what’s going on
in your head; we just watch
the slow stir behind your eyes
like granola through yogourt.
Outside the clubs we spilled from, taxis
ushered us from our shame
to fraught mornings we’ll have to own
for all the good they do.
And I still haven’t heard from you.
You’re not nowhere. You’ve eaten
the crumbs of some trail.
Odd jobs and broken homes
deflate us. The air isn’t all gone,
though we sag with our lies
like used mattresses. And anything
improves but not without effort.
Horseshit doesn’t just turn into pizza.
You’ve stopped answering doors,
disappear further behind DVDs
and baseball stats. Like you,
I’m no natural, but I hold on with
dumb hope I might poke one
out of the infield on a funny bounce.
Our trust is more than shaken,
though we’ve been through the wars,
the nights, the birthdays.
I’m grateful, it’s true,
and no one can speak for you.
Reclining Figures
‘… you must experiment. You do things in which you eliminate something which is, perhaps, essential – but to learn how essential it is, you leave it out.’
– Henry Moore
1 Michelangelo, Night (1526–31)
She still lolls, propped on the pediment
of the Medici tomb in Florence.
Her right elbow rests on a thick left thigh
that twists from the edge, half-aware
she must stay balanced there.
She’s tired. Is she catching some shut-eye
so she’ll stay fresh and be admired
for the next five hundred years? Stare
at the braided clump of hair that drops
across a breast, the white stomach
like stepped folds of sand left by the tide.
Has flesh ever been more alive
than in this marble? We touch a hand
against her neck; she starts and lifts her eyes.
2 Moore, UNBSCO, Reclining Figure (LH 416, 1957-58)
Its sea-stack
vertical tatter. Dry rills
and dints squirrelled themselves
from worked boulder –
into shoulders, hips, elbows – a shape
hurrying to the surface
only once the mind has turned
and turned to find it.
The loosely
knotted sign for the self
ghosted from a stab
at what he guessed
might show itself, form
or the starving aperture at its centre.
3 Moore, Reclining Figure (LH 608, 1969–70)
A phone call from my buddy
one night in Southend
about some work
that might be worth a few.
We rolled up to this estate
past midnight, in a stolen
Mercedes flatbed – some kind of museum,
barns in a dark farmyard,
and right there in the field
this blob of bronze
we had to hoist with a fucking crane,
tuck beneath a tarp,
then speed away, not exactly
clean, our labours saved
for Interpol and Scotland Yard
on CCTV.
Three of us, unlikely
to sell it intact, drove
out to a lock-up
of this scrap man, and cut
the lot up for easy passage
through Her Majesty’s ports
to Rotterdam. Eight hundred
each, tax free.
A drop of it might be
in your cellphone,
’cause they shipped it on to China
and melted down
all that it’s accrued
from what its meaning is
and what it gestures to
for something clearly useful.
4 Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà (1552–1564?)
Moore liked best
what wasn’t finished, no
‘happy fixed finality.’
He eventually found Night’s skin
thick, too leathery and polished.
Instead, he feted the pitted heads
of Michelangelo’s failed, last à,
its original stonework torn
down like an expensive set of drapes
to show thinner, exhausted
but Gothic, more solitary
than his greatest forms, Christ’s nose
and mouth chiselled flat,
Mary’s supporting hand
a broken edge of marble
as if the sculptor had run out
of material space to describe their pain
so left them there to rest.
A great question, Moore claimed
of the Master’s failures:
they taught me what happened
in his mind, the ideal
and its fracture both
scratching for the light.
Loot
Mushin Hasan, head in hands, is tableau
on the cuneiform tablet. He saw it coming. How
could he not, counting off the precedents,
from the Elamite sack of Babylon,
umpteen sacks of Rome – Visigoth,
Saracen, Norman – to all that stuff
carted back for an empire’s
display cases, Lord Elgin
or Napoleon. What’s been left alone?
Like Layard outside Mosul, camped near villages
the locals built on grass mounds,
their houses framed by giant stones
inscribed with script
turned out were the walls of Nineveh.
Clay tablets from the Gilgamesh saga
shipped up the Thames,
the Ishtar Gate to Berlin. Power
on display as the power to take and then curate
into ownership. More subtle than just
charging past the coat check
with axes and iron pipes,
screaming there is no government or state,
but the same result.
FOX TV loops
of looters make us forget how families
were squeezed between a no-win/no-win
of the home regime, overseas’ sanctions
and systematic deployment
of Tomahawk missiles.
Among computers, AC and chairs
stripped from storerooms are plates
from the royal tombs
of Ur, and a headless limestone figure
chiselled in Lagash 4,400 years ago.
Nearby, soldiers told to hold
a traffic control point, wait
on a news crew
to get the best side of a tank-round
whacking the statue of Saddam
on horseback. No montage
of Donny George and museum staff
chaining the museum’s front doors, taking shifts with clubs
against gan
gs organized in supply chains
for the profit of foreign
collectors. Only days
after Baghdad’s invasion, fresh artefacts
surface on the Parisian
black market. The top three
metres of southern Iraq now pockmarked,
ransacked past dark to the clatter
of generators and shovels. What we had
of the unexcavated sites of Adab,
Zabalam, Umma and Shuruppak
are now empty spaces in human narrative.
The stone head of King Sanatruq,
2nd century CE,
recovered by luck when an Italian archaeologist
told police he’d spotted it on a mantelpiece
of an Al Jazeera decorating show.
If my family were starving, I’d rifle
through the storerooms.
Coalition forces pour a fresh helipad,
Chinook rotors blast sand and rattle
the remaining walls
of ancient Babylon. The Temple of Ninmah’s
roof collapses, the halls of the Temple of Nabu.
War’s aftermath: no power, no water, no work.
So what good is art?
Near the city’s edge,
a crowd in dishdashas wears stethoscopes,
dragging around OR gear
lifted from the hospital.
What is ‘preserving the past’? Bread flour
bakes in dried mud, near corpses from sectarian
killings. One man, a shoe repairman,
digs up an artefact, solid gold,
of a cow, so sells it
for a silver BMW. Every day soldiers come
to have their pictures