those who fell asleep and never woke
who never slept and so dropped dead
those who attacked the casual eyes of children and were led away
and those who faced corners for ever
those who exposed themselves and were led away
those who pretended broken limbs, epilepsy,
who managed to electrocute themselves on wire
those who felt their skin was on fire and screamed
and were led away
There are ways of going
physically mad, physically
mad when you perfect the mind
where you sacrifice yourself for the race
when you are the representative when you allow
yourself to be paraded in the cages
celebrity a razor in the body
These small birds so precise
frail as morning neon
they are royalty melted down
they are the glass core at the heart of kings
yet 15-year-old boys could enter the cage
and break them in minutes
as easily as a long fingernail
RAT JELLY
See the rat in the jelly
steaming dirty hair
frozen, bring it out on a glass tray
split the pie four ways and eat
I took great care cooking this treat for you
and tho it looks good
and tho it smells of the Westinghouse still
and tastes of exotic fish or
maybe the expensive arse of a cow
I want you to know it’s rat
steaming dirty hair and still alive
(caught him last Sunday
thinking of the fridge, thinking of you.)
KING KONG MEETS WALLACE STEVENS
Take two photographs—
Wallace Stevens and King Kong
(Is it significant that I eat bananas as I write this?)
Stevens is portly, benign, a white brush cut
striped tie. Businessman but
for the dark thick hands, the naked brain
the thought in him.
Kong is staggering
lost in New York streets again
a spawn of annoyed cars at his toes.
The mind is nowhere.
Fingers are plastic, electric under the skin.
He’s at the call of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Meanwhile W. S. in his suit
is thinking chaos is thinking fences.
In his head – the seeds of fresh pain
his exorcising,
the bellow of locked blood.
The hands drain from his jacket,
pose in the murderer’s shadow.
‘THE GATE IN HIS HEAD’
for Victor Coleman
Victor, the shy mind
revealing the faint scars
coloured strata of the brain,
not clarity but the sense of shift
a few lines, the tracks of thought
Landscape of busted trees
the melted tires in the sun
Stan’s fishbowl
with a book inside
turning its pages
like some sea animal
camouflaging itself
the typeface clarity
going slow blonde in the sun full water
My mind is pouring chaos
in nets onto the page.
A blind lover, dont know
what I love till I write it out.
And then from Gibson’s your letter
with a blurred photograph of a gull.
Caught vision. The stunning white bird
an unclear stir.
And that is all this writing should be then.
The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment
so they are shapeless, awkward
moving to the clear.
TAKING
It is the formal need
to suck blossoms out of the flesh
in those we admire
planting them private in the brain
and cause fruit in lonely gardens.
To learn to pour the exact arc
of steel still soft and crazy
before it hits the page.
I have stroked the mood and tone
of hundred year dead men and women
Emily Dickinson’s large dog, Conrad’s beard
and, for myself,
removed them from historical traffic.
Having tasted their brain. Or heard
the wet sound of a death cough.
Their idea of the immaculate moment is now.
The rumours pass on
the rumours pass on
are planted
till they become a spine.
BURNING HILLS
for Kris and Fred
So he came to write again
in the burnt hill region
north of Kingston. A cabin
with mildew spreading down walls.
Bullfrogs on either side of him.
Hanging his lantern of Shell Vapona Strip
on a hook in the centre of the room
he waited a long time. Opened
the Hilroy writing pad, yellow Bic pen.
Every summer he believed would be his last.
This schizophrenic season change, June to September,
when he deviously thought out plots
across the character of his friends.
Sometimes barren as fear going nowhere
or in habit meaningless as tapwater.
One year maybe he would come and sit
for four months and not write a word down
would sit and investigate colours, the
insects in the room with him.
What he brought: a typewriter
tins of ginger ale, cigarettes. A copy of Strangelove,
of The Intervals, a postcard of Rousseau’s The Dream.
His friends’ words were strict as lightning
unclothing the bark of a tree, a shaved hook.
The postcard was a test pattern by the window
through which he saw growing scenery.
Eventually the room was a time machine for him.
He closed the rotting door, sat down
thought pieces of history. The first girl
who in a park near his school
put a warm hand into his trousers
unbuttoning and finally catching the spill
across her wrist, he in the maze of her skirt.
She later played the piano
when he had tea with the parents.
He remembered that surprised—
he had forgotten for so long.
Under raincoats in the park on hot days.
The summers were layers of civilization in his memory
they were old photographs he didn’t look at anymore
for girls in them were chubby not as perfect as in his mind
and his ungovernable hair was shaved to the edge of skin.
His friends leaned on bicycles
were 16 and tried to look 21
the cigarettes too big for their faces.
He could read those characters easily
undisguised as wedding pictures.
He could hardly remember their names
though they had talked all day, exchanged styles
and like dogs on a lawn hung around the houses of girls.
Sex a game of targets, of throwing firecrackers
at a couple in a field locked in hand-made orgasms,
singing dramatically in someone’s ear along with the record
‘How do you think I feel / you know our love’s not real
The one you’re made about / Is just a gad-about
How do you think I feel’.
He saw all that complex tension the way his childr
en would.
There is one picture that fuses the five summers.
Eight of them are leaning against a wall
arms around each other
looking into the camera and the sun
trying to smile at the unseen adult photographer
trying against the glare to look 21 and confident.
The summer and friendship will last forever.
Except one who was eating an apple. That was him
oblivious to the significance of the moment.
Now he hungers to have that arm around the next shoulder.
The wretched apple is fresh and white.
Since he began burning hills
the Shell strip has taken effect.
A wasp is crawling on the floor
tumbling over, its motor fanatic.
He has smoked 5 cigarettes.
He has written slowly and carefully
with great love and great coldness.
When he finishes he will go back
hunting for the lies that are obvious.
CHARLES DARWIN PAYS A VISIT,
DECEMBER 1971
View of the coast of Brazil.
A man stood up to shout
at the image of a sailing ship
which was a vast white bird from over the sea
now ripping its claws into the ocean.
Faded hills of March
painted during the cold morning.
On board ship Charles Darwin sketched clouds.
One of these days the Prime Mover will
paint the Prime Mover out of his sky.
I want a … centuries being displaced
… faith
23rd of June, 1832.
He caught sixty-eight species
of a particularly minute beetle.
The blue thick leaves who greeted him
animals unconscious of celebration
moved slowly into law.
Adam with a watch.
Look past and future, (I want a …),
ease our way out of the structures
this smell of the cogs
and diamonds we live in.
I am waiting for a new ship, so new
we will think the lush machine
an animal of God.
Weary from travelling over the air and the water
it will sink to its feet at our door.
THE VAULT
Having to put forward candidates for God
I nominate Henri Rousseau and Dr Bucke,
tired of the lizard paradise
whose image banks renew off the flesh of others
– those stories that hate, which are remnants and insults.
Refresh where plants breed to the edge of dream.
I have woken to find myself covered in white sheets
walls and doors, food.
There was no food in the world I left
where I ate the rich air. The bodies of small birds
who died while flying fell into my mouth.
Fruit dripped through our thirst to the earth.
All night the traffic of apes floats across the sky
a worm walks through the gaze of a lion
some birds live all their evenings on one branch.
They are held by the celebration of God’s wife.
In Rousseau’s The Dream she is the naked lady
who has been animal and tree
her breast a suckled orange.
The fibres and fluids of their moral nature
have seeped within her frame.
The hand is outstretched
her fingers move out in
mutual transfusion to the place.
Our low speaking last night
was barely audible among the grunt
of mongrel meditation.
She looks to the left
for that is the direction we leave in
when we fall from her room of flowers.
WHITE DWARFS
This is for people who disappear
for those who descend into the code
and make their room a fridge for Superman
– who exhaust costume and bones that could perform flight,
who shave their moral so raw
they can tear themselves through the eye of a needle
this is for those people
that hover and hover
and die in the ether peripheries
There is my fear
of no words of
falling without words
over and over of
mouthing the silence
Why do I love most
among my heroes those
who sail to that perfect edge
where there is no social fuel
Release of sandbags
to understand their altitude—
that silence of the third cross
3rd man hung so high and lonely
we don’t hear him say
say his pain, say his unbrotherhood
What has he to do with the smell of ladies,
can they eat off his skeleton of pain?
The Gurkhas in Malaya
cut the tongues of mules
so they were silent beasts of burden
in enemy territories
after such cruelty what could they speak of anyway
And Dashiell Hammett in success
suffered conversation and moved
to the perfect white between the words
This white that can grow
is fridge, bed,
is an egg – most beautiful
when unbroken, where
what we cannot see is growing
in all the colours we cannot see
there are those burned out stars
who implode into silence
after parading in the sky
after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway
‘Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks – ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes – which he arranged in front of him …’
ITALO CALVINO
THE AGATHA CHRISTIE BOOKS
BY THE WINDOW
In the long open Vancouver Island room
sitting by the indoor avocados
where indoor spring light
falls on the half covered bulbs
and down the long room light falling
onto the dwarf orange tree
vines from south america
the agatha christie books by the window
Nameless morning
solution of grain and colour
There is this light,
colourless, which falls on the warm
stretching brain of the bulb
that is dreaming avocado
COUNTRY NIGHT
The bathroom light burns over the mirror
In the blackness of the house
beds groan from the day’s exhaustion
hold the tired shoulders bruised
and cut legs the unexpected
3 a.m. erections. Someone’s dream
involves a saw someone’s
dream involves a woman.
We have all dreamed of finding the lost dog.
The last light on upstairs
throws a circular pattern
through the decorated iron vent
to become a living room’s moon.
The sofa calls the dog, the cat
in perfect blackness walks over the stove.
In the room of permanent light
cockroaches march on enamel.
The spider with jewel coloured thighs the brown moth
with corporal stripes
ascend pipes
and look into mirrors.
All night the truth happens.
MOVING FRED’S OUTHOUSE/
GERIATRICS OF PINE
All afternoon (while the empty drive-in
screen in the distance promises)
we are moving the two-seater
100 yards across his garden
We turn it over on its top
and over, and as it slowly
falls on its side
the children cheer
60 years old and a change in career—
from these pale yellow flowers emerging
out of damp wood in the roof
to become a room thorough with flight, noise,
and pregnant with the morning’s eggs,
a perch for chickens.
Two of us. The sweat.
Our hands under the bottom
then the top as it goes
over, through twin holes the
flowers, running to move the roller, shove,
and everybody screaming to keep the dog away.
Fred the pragmatist – dragging the ancient comic
out of retirement and into a television series
among the charging democracy of rhode island reds
Head over heels across the back lawn
old wood collapsing in our hands
All afternoon the silent space is turned
BUCK LAKE STORE AUCTION
Scrub lawn.
A chained
dog tense and smelling.
50 cents for a mattress. 50 cents