Titus Books, Auckland, New Zealand
publication date:
September, 2005
http://titus.books.online.fr
from Either Side The Horizon
YELLOW DOG STORY
One man’s life is not meant to be wasted
thinking on the failure of others, surely that’s
a job for accountants, today’s stonemasons.
Occasionally, clouds make a festival,
move left to right like in a child’s picture book
with a pop-up sun, maybe,
where man-made tunnels pucker from the
cheeks of bloated hills, rouged purple heather.
What waits in the next chapter
might be sirens in a pastel neighbourhood.
Look! over there in the corner, someone’s yellow
dog playing with something big as a thigh bone.
That’s a lop-sided plane, too,
all that flaming crayon crashing
over the slumped building with square pocket windows.
And someone with frightful burning hair, arms
held up stiff, as if waiting for your arresting gaze,
ending an already half-forgotten story.
“Madam, I’m Adam”
And he who lived singly in a palindrome on bio-time
(taken from any elevated perspective, most things in God’s
perfect world were) felt wholly self-referential, geometric,
circular, within the mind’s eye, and in the beholder’s.
The world shone, answered as mirror, provoked in him the
exclamation: “I am that I am that I am” that smelt sweet
as any rose given every breath lasted long as a millennium.
Even as the autochthon became upright, self-reflexive
(cloud-tablets scripted by lightning, throat-clearing thunder-
bolts, etc) the telling prompted another story, most likely
the greatest one ever foretold; that history as the great
tautology is condemned to endless repeats in the cul-de sac
of time’s particle accelerator (a mirror image) wherein the
the Garden of Eden echoes the Exodus, echoes Noah’s ark
echoes the deluge, echoes Golgotha echoes Auschwitz -
alpha and omega judged by the shifting lights of self-reprisal
and self-appraisal; no swords were turned into ploughshares,
no lion lay down with the ass - the lying down was done
out of sheer, bloody-minded conspiracy. So it is this chorus
adds up to a curious, utterly dark nostalgia, a yearning toward
the open maw of the grave become, in fact; an unsatisfied
and unsatisfiable hunger that precipitates, not the loving of one’s
neighbour, but a whole-hearted dedication to the gnawing on
his bones and the sucking out of his marrow. Yea, the
mind is a rank garden whose exits switch back on themselves
that lead inward to the fabled, fiery rose placed slap bang
dead-centre, the eternal rose is a rose is a rose by all counts,
hotly sought though rarely if ever sighted though mimicked
more than glimpsed through ritual and paradox while current
aggressions favour the desert - a domicile for the madman
who would raise his arms up as conductor rods to unyielding air
and, anguished, cry: “gnosis grows spirally, earth’s occupied
by difference”. Ah, but the best we can come up with is the toxic
waste dump - terminal outcome for the Roman de le Rose.
DANGER, IMAGIST AT WORK (2)
(The gentleman, having thrown her car keys into bush,
decides that he will be the one to walk home.)
I cannot say, my darling, whether that spangled glitter
caught in the coupe’s yellow headlights on this lonely stretch
of country road truly constitutes our love’s demise -
where you hurled bare toothed oaths, and I, - keys out into the
night beyond possible retrieval and hope, or that morning’s
triumphal light, lifting its lid on this horror show, will discover
your lifeless body, broken-limbed, crumpled in the middle
of this fennel-edged back road, once I get my hands on you?
A SIMPLE TALE
On the destruction of two giant, ancient Buddha statues, near
Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, by the Taliban militia in the
Year of Our Lord, March 12, 2001.
In this stark country where light can be yellow
it is difficult to measure time.
Bare mountains, seemingly carved, overlook
ancient sea beds called deserts.
The Silk Road, or a tributary of it, drifted
this way past the cliff face -
for a generation men on rickety scaffolding
worked at the sandstone
to fashion the image deep into the cliff’s face
of a fifty metre high statue.
The mountain became grotto to the Buddha
homaged by 1,700 years of dawns
and sunsets until the coming of the Iconoclasts
in a drought-stricken land.
In two unhurried afternoons, much like any other,
between the braying of donkeys,
with mortar fire and dynamite, they turned to
dust and rubble the false idol.
The last piece to dissolve before dusk which is
the traditional time for prayer -
was the impassive smile of the Buddha, and 500
tons of face fell under the blast.
THE GREY GLAS SONG
I am the cold watery current of the air,
I am the wreathing hand of mists,
I am the many-windowed firmament,
I am the coloured winds on the cloth of night,
I am the cloudy shell around the earth,
I am the four chief winds of creation,
I am the speckled winds riding the world,
I am the beaked-boat emerging at dawn,
I am the eight encircling servant winds,
I am a thousand lamps breaking in the wave,
I am the weight of a waterfall from a cliff,
I am the red plain of the earth at sunset,
I am the spear thrust of streams from a hill,
I am the lake bursting forth upon the plain,
I am the tall stones circled for strong memory.
Who counts the stars at the well’s bottom?
Who is it follows the sun in his circuit?
Who is it keeps the sun fixed on his path?
Who thrice blesses the tides lifting and falling?
Who welcomes the morning of grey dews
knows fiery arrows pierce the breast for vision.
The poet’s breath empties up into the night
who calls his answer across deep waves.
PRELUDE TO A TIME MACHINE
Tin goods sheds, the cantilevered skyline reconfigure throughout the day, the airport busy as a pavement. From here it's twenty four hours in the air to the Northern Hemisphere; older foundations, battle thick walls, multi-layered atmospheres, studded and embossed. One regime after another - history’s gargantuan form from whose ‘rybes they make bowes to shoot with’. Sheep graze the old battlefields pretty as a picture, amongst the hawthorn and pylons.
Looking south toward Botany bay, sinking beneath long rooflines, planes drift a bright tail fin along the east-west runway, or suddenly appear before you stuck on the sky like in a child’s drawing, cushioned on volumes of engine roar, big colours loading the foreground, movement that is the elongated removal of time in the lifting sweep, diminuendo to a quiet speck, climbing out over the ocean - silvered shafts from a yeoman’s bow falling far off to become traffic somewhere.
The mind says that memory is filtered through gauze. And immediately you are there. Banked up yellow soil-rubble along the coastline toward Jaffa port, fuel storage depot tabernacled in the Mediterranean light, winding through the dockside at Piraeus, (backstreets of Newtown reminiscent of Ano Petralona) and the air sweet with petroleum. The day shimmering in youthful heat.
EMPTINESS WITHOUT REGRET
Our most recent dictator toppled today but not without a show of strength.
A sulky withdrawal to the presidential villa surrounded by his private guard,
a few shots were exchanged with the government troops, a few salvos
with the world’s media camped outside around burning tin-drums, muffled
hand-slapping in the dead of winter. Arrested, he became a footnote.
A few thousand of his people killed, a successful ethnic cleansing programme
where even the local shopkeeper had a future - no need to travel beyond
the national borders, all expenses paid. Did he calculate terror? Our dictator
fallen today will miss his millions stashed in mountainous bank accounts.
His wife, Mira Markovic, will miss good coffee and the world that was her
drawing room, lacquered hairstyles that became a favourite. Mostly, she will
miss the lake side retreat of her childhood, not in Kosovo, but in neighbouring
Montenegro; she begged Slobodan to take the country before summer ended.
Was his evil calculated? We know that he started out with the idea of redressing
historical wrongs, unifying his people; soon his wish became a firing squad.
His was an emptiness-sans-regret, he goaded psychosis into anger, bloated like
a corpse to feel replete, plotting his appetites from a leafy Belgrade suburb;
a patriot nonetheless, for no evidence was ever put forward of an escape route.
4 am, April 1, 2001
STALIN’S COTTON SOCKS
Joe, you drank the Aral Sea dry.
Fishing boats came to rest, tossed aside like old shoes.
The lips of the sea stretched over rotten gums,
its tongue cracked, lay speechless on a dusty sea floor.
The Aral Sea shrunk to a dirty stain miles off;
all to make your cotton socks, Joe, to cover your cloven hoof!
Pretty cotton socks, warmer than a pool of blood.
Local children play for one day before they die.
An old man stands before his cottage, stares at the desert.
Salt eats away at the town. Folk are free to leave but there’s
nowhere to go. Central Asia’s largest inland sea,
and whole civilizations camped here.
LATTICE-WORK
[A cypher for Mark Pirie]
I dream I’m up to my eyelids in concrete.
Glass vials of skyscrapers fill up with
red-gold light. It might be dusk. I could be
a medievalist come back, time-looped.
It’s then I reach for your book, NO JOKE
to lift myself up into these coruscations.
Your poems create a lattice-work, Moorish,
a courtyard garden. I see the world pass by,
a frieze of pleasant and not so pleasant things.
It’s then I come across the phrase tessera:
‘past the mosque where shoes light up /
the pavement like undiscovered jewels.’
It’s then I say, this book is rich in pirietics -
the gangster poet at the margins of the city.
Words lit as on a digital billboard turn about,
bringing the news home to Times Square.
Tuesday, June 5, 2001
A DREAM LIKE A TORN POSTER
The posse out to hunt down
God’s kingdom,
hoofbeats respond to
the plains like shibboleth
and testing ground for those who
hear the coming of the Word.
Prayer is a vast silence that
follows hard upon an auto accident.
A breeze twitches in the joints
of trees, something scuttles through
the grass within earshot.
Arguments bunch and abound on
the horizon,
darkening the day’s mood.
The moon barks its shins against
a tree stump.
Dugouts and trenches in cloudbanks -
a machinegun nest of lightning busies itself
in one corner of the sky - empty,
except for the blazed signature at dawn.
CALL OF THE WILD
Nudge a molecule with heat.
There are gaps in everything if you get
close enough.
Even the solid insides of sky
boiling its pebble at noon.
Rooftops and the crystalline structures
of terra cotta.
Slate for colder climates
coloured the underside of waterfalls.
The trapper diagonally crossing
mountain streams, dragging skeins of
snowmelt from deerskin boots,
river stone locking under his feet.
Hugely the grey mountain running out of
spruce before, and behind him,
paddocks of snow, small as patches -
in places blurred, in others clear as water
off a whetstone.
Rutger Hauer has finally broken camp
in Canada’s North
heading into black bear country - feathered
arrows of snow storms,
and the feathered shaft that hits his chest
ends it there in the wastes,
gold nuggets left on the river bed.
LITHGOW
One clump of pine, dark green,
in coal country, behind the escarpment;
in a hollow, the other side of town,
along the Great Western, furrows
of coal-bits, drift of steam, state houses,
scattered about like spilled boxes.
One clump of pine, dark green,
amongst tailings, by the pit-town that lies
low as a stifled cough, into the hills
black as tumours, into hill-shadow;
further on, Lake Windemere, half appears,
smudged hillocks, earth a dull yellow.
One clump of pine, dark green,
needles at the base, as thick as a door-mat,
coppery glow against the sun’s shield
that drops over the Blue Mountains -
mining-town behind, slurried, on this high
dark falling off the rising ramparts.
