It’s evening, when malevolence lingers
in every bulbous and rotting green thing
and marsh lights flicker out across the fields.
I wade home through the stubble, press my face
to the ground-floor window to see a man
inside Tracy, the bed an unmade nest,
the air violet with flying splinters.
A sudden inhalation from the crowd.
Their bodies can’t figure what to protect,
who is dream, who is real, what here, what there.
As I climb through the bloody broken glass,
Uncles grab Tracy’s arms so I can tilt
my cock to her open mouth. Amazement.
We are all harmed by what we have made clear.
Overall
And so her face grows shy, her eyes drop mine.
Nipples finger the coarse denim. A white
half moon shines each side of the blue tunic.
She says, “Look at it this way.” Visible
waist a milk-curve down into the garment’s
dark scoop and deeper, sharp hips and deeper:
tide line on a still sea, a clean red row
of tiny rose buds, the tattoo artist
crouched intent over low-slung beads of blood.
Her belly. Her breath a rise and fall. “You
wouldn’t want me if you hadn’t lost me.”
When we met in philosophy she said
Ludwig Wittgenstein was sexy. I said
Herakleitos of Ephesos said war
was the father of all things. She said leave
that be. We hit my place because she was
living in her Volvo. Her dentist was,
she said, the image of Ludwig. I said
Herakleitos lived in the same city
all his life. Ephesos, she said, and whipped
out a brand new toothbrush. Bless you, I said.
After olives and beer we fucked six times.
The curtain rises and the room’s full of
long shadows rippling as she floats across
roofs and through windows to rooms where couples
lit by television come apart or
together and mean something. Her back wears
a cross: this is yours always: these wrists in
the circle of your fingers against wood –
trees or walls. This blood is yours and the quiet
of the city. A country’s thousand long
nights. Cock’s crow outside the house of ribbons
returned to after an absence of life.
Home
Again I knock at the door, lose myself
a moment in the storm. The house seems still,
a sombre pile of hollow rooms, while wind
behind me hurls debris against cars and
trees and amplifies the clatter and roar
of the mall. I knock again, everything
in turmoil – sticks, leaves, bags, cans, foil wrappers,
branches groaning huge in the tumbling dusk.
All Grandfather’s best friends died under fire
in the war. Long lines of cars undulate
as they skewer the mall. This is the gate
between two worlds. Icy fingers catch at
the roots of my hair. Then the door opens
with a click and I’m a child diminished
in the muted light that bathes and haloes
the calm silhouette in the hallway. “Yes?”
She will not recognize me so I kick
shut the door, pin her arms to the wall. “Stay.”
This is the atomic state of affairs.
Wittgenstein of the trenches come. Kneel at
her feet to pick each thread of each seam with
the sharp knife from the telephone table.
The cat pads through the hallway, purrs against
my thigh and Tracy does not stare at me,
transfixed, but looks down pityingly while
winter blows against the house and her legs
bloom goosebumps. I don’t know what to do so
rattle the door in its hinges and track
the fat snow along the concession road
to the men in town to exchange rounds of
whisky chased with beer, check out the barmaid,
fuck this and fuck that, cat got your tongue? If
you want pussy here’s what. Tracy always
wears overalls and nothing else when she’s
aiming to get laid, and if her hair’s in
a pony tail she’s into something quick
as frost, I mean, you can open her like
a ripe tomato, a fresh fig, a grape,
the way the dentist did her mouth to check
her bite, see what makes the enterprise tick,
belly, tits and. Lord save us. This forest
protect us, amen. Let rain follow sun.
Only words. Wittgenstein, Herakleitos,
come to the disco, come. She will dance like
a cat on hot coals. We will be uncles
who want more than skin, more than blood, who want
each rib snapped free, the cage open to see
what flies out and what’s sucked in, unlawful
lungs and heart, our own dark secrets. We’ll bare
muscle, sinew, our dry girl on the street
to flirt and flick her skirt, show her pelvis
and spine. But she’s gone. Puff! Gone for a smoke
between dances. Mountains hidden by night,
night by cloud. Adult by child. Villagers
shiver as they pass her by. Each time less,
she’s dressed in rags at the bottom of war.
Herakleitos of Ephesos come. Come.
Forget her hair, forget her face, forget
her tits and her waist. Every girl is young.
Uncles are famous and want her taken
until days flicker twenty-four flames
a second and wankers arrest themselves
in the act and hike down from the mountains.
Trees of this river valley protect us.
Remember the gentle spring, the hawthorn
leafing. The chorus of frogs in the pond.
Light Blinds the Helm
For the cast & crew of The Winter’s Tale, Vancouver 2006
History
Hurricane. Yellow islands. These are true.
Slaves escape into equatorial
waters, are swallowed. The Master survives
a mutiny off the Blue Coast, the ship
becalmed for twenty-three days, hurricane,
yellow hills. These are true. Slaves dive into
southern waters. The sailors mutiny.
The ship is becalmed for twenty-three days.
Very true, the Captain’s story, not tame
before it’s written. Bare hills. Hurricane.
Twice I exit the ship, enter the waves.
My father wants light in the world, a path
sparking water to nearest land, same light
that blinds the helm this third voyage into
open ocean. I have never been here
before. All is new except the water,
except the light. What shows the way confounds
the senses. When we turn to instruments,
we refuse nature, we doubt our bodies.
My father wants light. My father wants light.
I can’t let what happened happen again.
Light is nothing but what it hits upon.
I cast about, still blinded by the sun
that set an hour ago, for the North Star,
and hot vivid winds blow up from the south,
the churning deck too quick for my square bones,
yet slow for the new dog at heel, engrossed
with my foot, her big paws gaining purchase
where there’s none. She looks through me. I can’t see
the en
d of her, nor profit in being
lost again, the ship framed by hurricane
that seems to speak of home and sleep, silk slide
of sky across the mate’s worried stubble.
Nature’s ruin refuses our eyes. Once.
Uniforms swaying on hangers and words
floating backward, whence, whence? Notice I give
the world notice instead of noting salt
on my skin? Yet on this ocean no war
rises or sets. Clouds drift, wrack above wrack.
Nature’s ruin refuses our eyes. Twice.
At home the principals await jewels,
and zoological societies
expect specimens to prove their theories.
The rock headlands refuse my hands three times.
Rescue
Actors – stage a deck, custom overturned –
are sailors, seabirds scratching the tide wrack
for dropped lines and cues and hurricane lamps
while carpenters unfurl the torn rigging.
This dream. That audience. Even the play.
All made out of scraps of old scaffolding
from earlier storms. This rowboat intact.
Miraculous oars raised high like palm fronds,
their varnish a mirror in which I see
eight versions of my old weak face tricky
as a coconut almost howling glee.
Comedy No
We’re rehearsing a tragedy, later
days, centuries on, director calling
for consciousness of ideas, more nose
and eyebrows, and less wind in the tent, for
the performance will be in a small cove
on the coast, above the rocks, even though
it is late in the year. They expect me
to take the role of son and king. Funding
is mine because they have borrowed against
my return. The celebration hopeful,
tragedy incomplete, my friends all here.
‘Play, boy, play’
And the word is carved inside a cartoon
heart on the 1926 sidewalk
the southwest corner of Third and Blenheim
and I go there most nights before falling
asleep to bring the Tale, my family,
from time into Time. We have never seen
such light in the world. Such light in the world.
Autolycus rubs hands and face in dirt.
The shepherd and the shepherd’s son run lines
outside the green room. And Mamillius,
my boy, rides his bike through the summer night.
This Is True
Dog
You are wrapped in a green blanket the soil
presses down, paws folded so, nails too long,
whiskers as puzzled as ever. Trees rise
from broken rock in green old age, the themes
now obvious to all, even to me,
my arms locked around my body, its bones,
to keep breath at bay, the blanket’s smell gone
with the rest of you. The cold weather breaks
and instead of snow it rains hard, and rain
pools the ground where you get set for spring and
for us to hike over the hills again.
After the Wreck
Granddad comes in a dream to tell me, “What
you work on works on you.” When I ask him
how he is, he says fine thanks, pretty good,
he has been pressing black olives in Greece.
You swam by my side into the shell beach,
then shook, wagged your tail, and put your nose down.
The swell-fed sailors roll ashore next day,
pragmatic, assuring me with their eyes
that I’m no use here. Past the farthest rock
the tide runs fast and surf leaps in the air.
Out there we flailed in a monstrous current.
Unlost dog. Black-eyed Susan. Running stream.
What are we? Brown hills. Dislocated palms.
Still cogent in a land where nothing is
familiar. I’m the body of sadness,
homesick, while you find the path and lead me
through the bush, torn between signals, your nose
a mouse across just-cooled magma, that old
evolution chestnut and the sweet heart
song: lost and going where your master goes,
as old as the moon in thrall to this world.
And for a moment I can see us both
as bureaucrats and connoisseurs of sin
on the hunt for gold and a piece of tail,
all clues gone. We don’t belong here. Not lost,
just jittery and unoriented.
A cigarette would do the trick. I dreamed
of a standing ewe with lamb in a field
in America. A thin woman past
forty against the black-and-white skyline.
Gaunt pieces. I don’t recognize myself.
On the white-shell beach crows huddle to pull
bones over the dead regardless of tide.
What We Have
Not much longer now. A joke. Small waves, hills,
horizon, hills, horizon, all gathered
for the straggler, the newcomer. Heron
boredom, glitter fish, inadequacy.
With whole shells from the beach I try to mark
my place. When I was young I’d walk into
a forest and be in a magical
of life by new paths that led to clearings
thick with incense, with walls of climbing vines.
Years later the story continues. Time
doffs its wings, abandons its abacus.
Exile breathes in the fat shadows of trees.
I give up listing my different selves,
measuring the distance from outside to
inside, from urban to rural. The thump
of a grouse intersects the jet’s thin jazz.
The walls of this world are quite soft and rain
on palm fronds whispers like people coming
through the forest whose floor unleashes green
heads of new ferns. I keep going over
the same ground. Ghosts, music, all under wraps.
Where’s the ribbon to prettify things now
there’s nowhere that is not connected to
everywhere else? Grass will cover the tracks
of whatever has passed. There is no end
to the love of animals. Story’s not
empty either. Wild mint, sage, licorice.
At home cilantro escaped into lawn
so next year’s mowing smashed the air with spice.
The warmth of stepping into your brown gaze.
In the middle of the bird call is this
difficult task of husbandry. Inside
the forest is a tower of bones, moss-
green, and an alley wide as a desert.
We call this emptiness, at least I do,
not knowing what else to hold, having lost
the need to nurture and all of the names
but yours, dog. And after you go I’ll have
these non-sequiturs visit like demons
each time I set out from the shell beach, you
at heel, in memory or metaphor
no matter, to wind up at this clearing,
this heap of bones resembling less and less
the building I once fooled myself into
believing I’d made, mnemonic tower,
my beginning and end, my dead fellow
sailors. Green! All season the ferns shout green!
In the bone room bats fly. I remember
finding something hidden in a drawer.
Hard among soft or soft in hard. Secret.
You killed a duck. Yes, true, you killed a duck.
She was dying anyway, disembowelled
by an eagle. You brought her to me, so
warm in my arms, a bundle of feathers.
I feel the weight lift sometimes as we walk.
All is not quite lost or not quite all lost.
A specific here. Lifting joy when you
run and something in me links to something
in you. But always when we are alone.
Alone is the trick. Alone is the trick.
What particulars about the universe
are we hungry for? You’re the only way
to my forgotten self, my human self.
I dreamed I found you in a Banyan tree.
Love me? I would, Master, were I human.
Meanwhile
Back home my parents wait on the hillside
for a sign. Meanwhile the creditors play
poker. Meanwhile I grow older and cry
hard at night because a dog will not live
as long as a man. You sleep hard against
my body, state fluid, metamorphic,
neither here nor there nor illusory,
and wake to regard me as though the world
assembles itself just for us and we
are its gods. Gentle mist on the water,
no other land beyond. The tide creeps in.
In my mouth a bitter taste. Fingers quit
fretting eyebrows, mouth, cheek; instead demand
ribs, scapulae, skull. For three days crows and
pigeons, disturbed not at all by you, dog,
have sat their nests. Meanwhile a man murders
his wife, their young, himself. Meanwhile fortunes
raise palaces and temples and vandals
tear them down. We know what we are doing.
But here, among ragged trees and smoking
sun, I find a stone with a white circle
as drops of rain fall from the sky’s belly.
Today I am angry. You know to keep