(the sounds like static; the silences
thin as razorblades between)
at the next one there will be
a lady and a man,
some other face or evidence
to add to the
collection in my suitcase.
The world is turning
me into evening.
I’m almost ready:
this time it will be far.
I move
and live on the edges
(what edges)
I live
on all the edges there are.
An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems
My younger sister at the chessboard
ponders her next move
the arrangement of her empire
(crosslegged on the floor)
while below her in the cellar
the embroidered costumes, taken
from her mother’s storage trunks
and lined against the walls
lose their stiff directions in
the instant that she hesitates
above the armies
The shadows of the chessmen
stretch, fall across her: she
is obsessed by history;
each wooden totem rises
like the cairn of an event
(but)
Outside the windows of this room
the land unrolls without landmark
a meshing of green on green, the inner
membrane of the gaping moment
opening around a sun that is
a hole burnt in the sky.
The house recoils
from the brightedged vacancy
of leaves, into itself: the cellar
darkness looming with archaic
silver clocks, brocaded chairs, the fading echoes
of a hunting horn.
The white king moves
by memories and procedures
and corners
no final ending but
a stalemate,
forcing her universe to his
geographies: the choice imposes
vestiges of black and white
ruled squares on the green landscape,
and her failed solution
has planted the straight rows
of an armoured wood patrolled by wooden
kings and queens
hunting the mechanical unicorn
under a coin-round sun.
Her step on the stairs
sounds through the concrete mazes.
In her cellar the mailed
costumes rustle
waiting to be put on.
In My Ravines
This year in my ravines
it was warm for a long time
although the leaves fell early
and my old men, remembering themselves
walked waist-high through the
yellow grass
in my ravines, through
alders and purple
fireweed, with burrs
catching on their sleeves,
watching the small boys climbing
in the leafless trees
or throwing pebbles
at tin cans floating
in the valley creek, or following
the hard paths worn by former
walkers or the hooves
of riding-stable horses
and at night
they slept under the bridges
of the city in my (still)
ravines
old men, ravelled as thistles
their clothing gone to seed
their beards cut stubble
while the young boys
climbed and swung
above them wildly
in the leafless eyelid
veins and branches
of a bloodred night
falling, bursting purple
as ancient rage, in
old men’s
dreams of slaughter
dreams of
(impossible)
flight.
A Descent Through the Carpet
i
Outside the window the harbour is
a surface only with mountains and
sailboats and
destroyers
depthless on the glass
but inside there’s a
patterned carpet on the floor
maroon green purple
brittle fronds and hard
petals
It makes the sea
accessible
as I stretch out with these
convoluted gardens
at eyelevel,
the sun
filtering down through the windows
of this housetop aquarium
and in the green halflight
I drift down past the
marginal orchards branched
colourful
feathered
and overfilled
with giving
into the long iceage
the pressures
of winter
the snowfall endless in the sea
ii
But not
rocked not cradled not forgetful:
there are no
sunken kingdoms no
edens in the waste ocean
among the shattered
memories of battles
only the cold jewelled symmetries
of the voracious eater
the voracious eaten
the dream creatures that glow
sulphurous in darkness or
flash like neurons
are blind, insatiable, all
gaping jaws and famine
and here
to be aware is
to know total
fear.
iii
Gunshot
outside the window
nine o’clock
Somehow I sit up
breaking the membrane of water
Emerged and
beached on the carpet
breathing this air once more
I stare
at the sackful of scales and
my fisted
hand
my skin
holds
remnants of ancestors
fossil bones and fangs
acknowledgement:
I was born
dredged up from time
and harboured
the night these wars began.
Playing Cards
In this room we are always in:
tired with all the other games
we get out cards and play
at double
solitaire:
the only thing
either of us might win.
There’s a queen.
Or rather two of them
joined at the waist, or near
(you can’t tell where
exactly, under the thick
brocaded costume)
or is it one
woman with two heads?
Each has hair drawn back
made of lines
and a half-smile that is part
of a set pattern.
Each holds a golden flower
with five petals, ordered
and unwilting.
Outside there is a lake
or this time is it a street
There’s a king (or kings)
too, with a beard to show
he is a man
and something abstract
in his hand
that might be either
a sceptre or a sword.
The colour doesn’t matter,
black or red:
there’s little choice between
heart and spade.
The important things
are the flowers and the swords;
but they stay flat,
are cardboard.
Outside there is a truck
or possibly a
motorboat
and in this lighted room
across the table, we
confront each other
wearing no costumes.
You have nothing
that serves the function of a sceptre
and I have
certainly
no flowers.
Man with a Hook
This man I
know (about a year
ago, when he was young) blew
his arm off in the cellar
making bombs
to explode the robins
on the lawns.
Now he has a hook
instead of hand;
It is an ingenious
gadget, and comes
with various attachments:
knife for meals,
pink plastic hand for everyday
handshakes, black stuffed leather glove
for social functions.
I attempt pity
But, Look, he says, glittering
like a fanatic, My hook
is an improvement:
lowers his arm: the steel questionmark turns and opens,
and from his burning
cigarette
unscrews
and holds the delicate
ash: a thing
precise
my clumsy tenderskinned pink fingers
couldn’t do.
The City Planners
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.
But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things;
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows
give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster
when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.
That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;
guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air
tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows.
On the Streets, Love
On the streets
love
these days
is a matter for
either scavengers
(turning death to life) or
(turning life
to death) for predators
(The billboard lady
with her white enamel
teeth and red
enamel claws, is after
the men
when they pass her
never guess they have brought her
to life, or that her
body’s made of cardboard, or in her
veins flows the drained
blood of their desire)
(Look, the grey man
his footsteps soft
as flannel,
glides from his poster
and the voracious women, seeing
him so trim,
edges clear as cut paper
eyes clean
and sharp as lettering,
want to own him
… are you dead? are you dead?
they say, hoping …)
Love, what are we to do
on the streets these days
and how am I
to know that you
and how are you to know
that I, that
we are not parts of those
people, scraps glued together
waiting for a chance
to come to life
(One day
I’ll touch the warm
flesh of your throat, and hear
a faint crackle of paper
or you, who think
that you can read my mind
from the inside out, will taste the
black ink on my tongue, and find
the fine print written
just beneath my skin.)
Eventual Proteus
I held you
through all your shifts
of structure: while your bones turned
from caved rock back to marrow,
the dangerous
fur faded to hair
the bird’s cry died in your throat
the treebark paled from your skin
the leaves from your eyes
till you limped back again
to daily man:
a lounger on streetcorners
in iron-shiny gabardine
a leaner on stale tables;
at night a twitching sleeper
dreaming of crumbs and rinds and a sagging woman,
caged by a sour bed.
The early
languages are obsolete.
These days we keep
our weary distances:
sparring in the vacant spaces
of peeling rooms
all the expected stairs, our voices
abraded with fatigue,
our bodies wary.
Shrunk by my disbelief
you cannot raise
the green gigantic skies, resume
the legends of your disguises:
this shape is final.
Now, when you come near
attempting towards me across
these sheer cavernous
inches of air
your flesh has no more stories
or surprises;
my face flinches
under the sarcastic
tongues of your estranging
fingers,
the caustic remark of your kiss.
A Meal
We sit at a clean table
eating thoughts from clean plates
and see, there is my heart
germfree, and transparent as glass
and there is my brain, pure
as cold water in the china
bowl of my skull
and you are talking
with words that fall spare
on the ear like the metallic clink
of knife and fork.
Safety by all means;
so we eat and drink
remotely, so we pick
the abstract bone
but something is hiding
somewhere
in the scrubbed bare
cupboard of my body
flattening itself
against a shelf
and feeding
on other people’s leavings
a furtive insect, sly and primitive
the necessary cockroach
in the flesh
that nests in dust.
It will sidle out
when the lights have all gone off
in this bright room
(and you can’t
crush it in the da
rk then
my friend or search it out
with your mind’s hands that smell
of insecticide and careful soap)
In spite of our famines
it keeps itself alive
: how it gorges on a few
unintentional
spilled crumbs of love
The Circle Game
i
The children on the lawn
joined hand to hand
go round and round
each arm going into
the next arm, around
full circle
until it comes
back into each of the single
bodies again
They are singing, but
not to each other:
their feet move
almost in time to the singing
We can see
the concentration on
their faces, their eyes
fixed on the empty
moving spaces just in
front of them.
We might mistake this
tranced moving for joy
but there is no joy in it
We can see (arm in arm)
as we watch them go
round and round
intent, almost
studious (the grass
underfoot ignored, the trees
circling the lawn
ignored, the lake ignored)
that the whole point
for them
of going round and round
is (faster
slower)
going round and round
ii
Being with you
here, in this room
is like groping through a mirror
whose glass has melted
to the consistency
of gelatin
You refuse to be
(and I)
an exact reflection, yet
will not walk from the glass,
be separate.
Anyway, it is right
that they have put
so many mirrors here
(chipped, hung crooked)
in this room with its high transom
and empty wardrobe; even
the back of the door
has one.
There are people in the next room
arguing, opening and closing drawers
(the walls are thin)