Wet moonlight
recalls childhood
the long legged daughter
the stars
of Wichita in the distance
midnight and hugging
against her small chest
the favourite book,
Goodnight Moon
under the covers she
reads its courtly order
its list of farewells
to everything
We grow less complex
We reduce ourselves The way lovers
have their small cheap charms
silver lizard,
a stone
Ancient customs
that grow from dust
swirled out
from prairie into tropic
Strange how the odours meet
How, however briefly, bedraggled
history
focuses
Skin Boat
‘A sheet of water near your breasts
where I can sink
like a stone’
PAUL ELUARD
HER HOUSE
Because she has lived alone, her house is the product of nothing but herself and necessity. The necessity of growing older and raising children. Others drifted into her life, in and out and they have changed her, added things, but I have never been into a home that is a revelation of character and time as much as hers. It contains those she knows and has known and she has distilled all of her journey. When I first met her I saw nothing but her, and now, as she becomes familiar, I recognize the small customs.
The problem for her is leaving. She says, ‘Last night I was listening to everything I know so well, and I imagined what if I woke up in a year’s time and there were different trees.’ Streets, the weight of sea air, certain birds who recognize your shrubbery, that too holds you, allows a freedom of habit, is a house.
Everything here is alien to me but you. And your room like a grey well, your coat hangers above the laundry machine where you hang the semi-damp clothes so you do not have to iron them, the green grey walls of wood, the secret drawer which you opened after you knew me two years to show me the ancient Japanese pens. All this I love. Though I carry my own landscape in me and my three bags. But this has become your skin, and as you leave you recognize this.
On certain evenings, when I have not bothered to put on lights, I hit my knees on low bookcases where they should not be. But you shift your hip easily, habitually, around them as you pass by carrying laundry or books. When you can move through a house blindfolded it belongs to you. You are moving like blood calmly within your own body. It is only recently that I am able to wake beside you and without looking, almost in a dream, put out my hand and know exactly where your shoulder or your heart will be – you in your specific posture in this bed of yours that we share. And at times this has seemed to be knowledge. As if you were a blueprint of your house.
THE CINNAMON PEELER
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers …
When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.
WOMEN LIKE YOU
the communal poem – Sigiri Graffiti, 5th century
They do not stir
these ladies of the mountain
do not give us
the twitch of eyelids
The king is dead
They answer no one
take the hard
rock as lover.
Women like you
make men pour out their hearts
‘Seeing you I want
no other life’
‘The golden skins have
caught my mind’
who came here
out of the bleached land
climbed this fortress
to adore the rock
and with the solitude of the air
behind them
carved an alphabet
whose motive was perfect desire
wanting these portraits of women
to speak
and caress
Hundreds of small verses
by different hands
became one
habit of the unrequited
Seeing you
I want no other life
and turn around
to the sky
and everywhere below
jungle, waves of heat
secular love
Holding the new flowers
a circle of
first finger and thumb
which is a window
to your breast
pleasure of the skin
earring earring
curl
of the belly
and then
stone mermaid
stone heart
dry as a flower
on rock
you long eyed women
the golden
drunk swan breasts
lips
the long long eyes
we stand against the sky
I bring you
a flute
from the throat
of a loon
so talk to me
of the used heart
THE RIVER NEIGHBOUR
All these rumours. You lodge in the mountains
of Hang-chou, a cabin in Portland townsh
ip,
or in Yüeh-chou for sure
the dust from my marriage
wasted our clear autumn
This month the cactus
under the rains
while you lounge with my children
by the creek snakes, the field asparagus
Across the universe
each room I lit
was a dark garden, I held
nothing but the lamp
this letter paints me
transparent as I am
One dead bird in the hall
conversation of the water-closets
company of the leaf on the stairs
I pass her often
Moon leaf memory of asparagus
I find her earrings
at the foot of curtainless windows
In the kitchen
salt fills the body
of an RCA Victor dog
Let us nose our way
next year with the spring waters
and search for each other
somewhere in the east
TO A SAD DAUGHTER
All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
– all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.
When I thought of daughters
I wasn’t expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say ‘like’
I mean of course ‘love’
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.
One day I’ll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.
I don’t care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don’t be fooled by anyone but yourself.
This is the first lecture I’ve given you.
You’re ‘sweet sixteen’ you said.
I’d rather be your closest friend
than your father. I’m not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.
Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with a loss
– but that is greed.
And sometimes I’ve gone
into my purple world
and lost you.
One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
– all those possible worlds! –
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.
I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets for ever.
If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers,
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon’s
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.
ALL ALONG THE MAZINAW
Later the osprey
falling towards
only what he sees
the messenger heron
warning of our progress
up Mud Lake
a paddle is
stranger
to what it heaves out of the way
Wherever you go
within a silence
is witnessed,
touches.
Everything aware
of alteration but you.
Creatures who veer. The torn leaf
descending into marsh gas
into an ancient breath.
In bony rapids
rock gazed up
with the bright paint
of previous canoes.
with the clear river water heart
the rock who floats
on her own deep reflection.
Female rock. Limb. Holes of hunger
we climb into and disappear.
One hour in the arms of the Mazinaw.
Those things we don’t know we love
we love harder.
Tanned face
stern rock the rock lolling
memorized by the Algonquin
Mohawk lovers. Mineral eye.
O yes I saw your dear sisters too
before this afternoon’s passion
those depot creek nights when they
unpacked their breasts
serious and full of the fever of loon
for whoever stumbled
young onto the august
country waters.
PACIFIC LETTER
to Stan of Depot Creek, old friend, pal o’mine
Now I remember that you rebuilt my chicken coop
north of the farmhouse along the pasture fence
with fresh pine from Verona.
In autumn you hid a secret message under floorboards
knowing we would find it in spring.
A fanciful message. Carved with care.
As you carved you imagined the laughing.
We both know the pleasures art and making bring.
And in summer we lounged for month on month
letting slide the publishers and English Departments
who sent concerned letters that slept in the red mailbox.
Men and women came drifting in
from the sea and from the west border
and with them there was nothing at cross purpose.
They made nothing of mountain crossing
to share that fellowship.
The girls danced because
their long sleeves would not keep still
and I, drunk, went to sleep among field rocks.
We spoke out desires without regret.
Then you returned to the west of the province
and I to the south.
After separation had come to its worst
we met and travelled the Mazinaw with my sons
through all the thirty-six folds of that creature river
into the valley of bright lichen,
green rice beds, marble rock, and at night
slept under croaking pine.
The spirit so high
it was all over the heavens!
And at Depot Creek we walked
for a last time down river
to a neighbour’s southern boundary
past the tent where you composed verses
past the land where I once lived
the water about it clear in my memory as blue jade.
Then you and your wife sang back and forth
in the mosquito filled cabin under the naphtha.
The muskrat, listening at the edge,
heard our sound – guitars and lone violin
whose weavings seduced us with a sadness.
The canoe brushed over open lake
hearing the lighted homes
whose laughter eliminated the paddle
and the loon stumbled
up sudden into the air beside the boat
shocked us awake and disappeared
leaving a ripple that slid the moon away.
And before the last days in August
we scattered like stars and rain.
And I think now that this
is what we are to each other,
friends busy with their own distance
who reappear now and then alongside.
As once you could not believe
I had visited the town of your youth
where you sat in your room
perfecting Heartbreak Hotel
that new place to ‘dwell’ – that
gentle word in the midst of angry song.
All this comes to an end.
During summer evenings
I miss your company.
Things we clung to
stay on the horizon
and we become the loon
on his journey
a lone tropical taxi
to confused depth and privacy.
At such times – no talking
no conclusion in the heart.