The Cinnamon Peeler

a man who roared on an island for ten years,

  whose body grew banal

  while he stayed humane

  behind the black teeth and withering hair.

  Imagine in his hands – black

  from the dried blood of animals,

  a bow of torn silver

  that noised arrows loose like a wild heart;

  in front of him – Paris

  darting and turning, the perfumed stag,

  and beyond him the sun

  netted in the hills, throwing back his shape,

  until the running spider of shadow

  gaped on the bandaged foot of the standing man

  who let shafts of eagles into the ribs

  that were moving to mountains.

  PHILOCTETES ON THE ISLAND

  Sun moves broken in the trees

  drops like a paw

  turns sea to red leopard

  I trap sharks and drown them

  stuffing gills with sand

  cut them with coral till

  the blurred grey runs

  red designs.

  And kill to fool myself alive

  to leave all pity on the staggering body

  in order not to shoot an arrow up

  and let it hurl

  down through my petalling skull

  or neck vein, and lie

  heaving round the wood in my lung.

  That the end of thinking.

  Shoot either eye of bird instead

  and run and catch it in your hand.

  One day a bird went mad

  flew blind along the beach

  smashed into a dropping wave

  out again and plummeted.

  Later knocked along the shore.

  To slow an animal

  you break its foot with a stone

  so two run wounded

  reel in the bush, flap

  bodies at each other

  till free of forest

  it gallops broken in the sand,

  then use a bow

  and pin the tongue back down its throat.

  With wind the rain wheels like a circus hoof,

  aims at my eyes, rakes up the smell of animals

  of stone moss, cleans me.

  Branches fall like nightmares in the dark

  till sun breaks up

  and spreads wound fire at my feet

  then they smell me,

  the beautiful animals

  ELIZABETH

  Catch, my Uncle Jack said

  and oh I caught this huge apple

  red as Mrs Kelly’s bum.

  It’s red as Mrs Kelly’s bum, I said

  and Daddy roared

  and swung me on his stomach with a heave.

  Then I hid the apple in my room

  till it shrunk like a face

  growing eyes and teeth ribs.

  Then Daddy took me to the zoo

  he knew the man there

  they put a snake around my neck

  and it crawled down the front of my dress.

  I felt its flicking tongue

  dripping onto me like a shower.

  Daddy laughed and said Smart Snake

  and Mrs Kelly with us scowled.

  In the pond where they kept the goldfish

  Philip and I broke the ice with spades

  and tried to spear the fishes;

  we killed one and Philip ate it,

  then he kissed me

  with raw saltless fish in his mouth.

  My sister Mary’s got bad teeth

  and said I was lucky, then she said

  I had big teeth, but Philip said I was pretty.

  He had big hands that smelled.

  I would speak of Tom, soft laughing,

  who danced in the mornings round the sundial

  teaching me the steps from France, turning

  with the rhythm of the sun on the warped branches,

  who’d hold my breast and watch it move like a snail

  leaving his quick urgent love in my palm.

  And I kept his love in my palm till it blistered.

  When they axed his shoulders and neck

  the blood moved like a branch into the crowd.

  And he staggered with his hanging shoulder

  cursing their thrilled cry, wheeling,

  waltzing in the French style to his knees

  holding his head with the ground,

  blood settling on his clothes like a blush;

  this way

  when they aimed the thud into his back.

  And I find cool entertainment now

  with white young Essex, and my nimble rhymes.

  She said, ‘What about Handy? Think I should send it to him?’

  ‘He’s supposed to call in a little while. I’ll ask him.’

  ‘He retired, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She waited and then said, ‘Say something, Parker. God to get you to gossip, it’s like pulling teeth.’

  ‘Handy retired.’ Parker said.

  ‘I know he retired! Tell me about it. Tell me why he retired, tell me where he is, how’s he doing. Talk to me, Parker, goddamit.’

  RICHARD STARK, The Sour Lemon Score

  DATES

  It becomes apparent that I miss great occasions.

  My birth was heralded by nothing

  but the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s marriage.

  No monuments bled, no instruments

  agreed on a specific weather.

  It was a seasonal insignificance.

  I console myself with my mother’s eighth month.

  While she sweated out her pregnancy in Ceylon

  a servant ambling over the lawn

  with a tray of iced drinks,

  a few friends visiting her

  to placate her shape, and I

  drinking the life lines,

  Wallace Stevens sat down in Connecticut

  a glass of orange juice at his table

  so hot he wore only shorts

  and on the back of a letter

  began to write ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’.

  That night while my mother slept

  her significant belly cooled

  by the bedroom fan

  Stevens put words together

  that grew to sentences

  and shaved them clean and

  shaped them, the page suddenly

  becoming thought where nothing had been,

  his head making his hand

  move where he wanted

  and he saw his hand was saying

  the mind is never finished, no, never

  and I in my mother’s stomach was growing

  as were the flowers outside the Connecticut windows.

  BILLBOARDS

  ‘Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic.’

  My wife’s problems with husbands, houses,

  her children that I meet

  at stations in Kingston, in Toronto, in London Ontario

  – they come down the grey steps

  bright as actors after their drugged four hour ride

  of spilled orange juice and comics.

  Reunions for Easter egg hunts.

  Kite flying. Christmases.

  All this, I was about to say,

  invades my virgin past.

  When she was beginning

  this anthology of kids

  I moved – blind but for senses

  jutting faux pas, terrible humour,

  shifted with a sea of persons,

  breaking when necessary

  into smaller self sufficient bits of mercury.

  My mind a carefully empty diary

  till I hit the barrier reef

  that was my wife—

                           there

  the right bright fish

  among the coral.

  With her came the locusts of history—

  innuendoes she ha
d missed

  varied attempts at seduction

  dogs who had been bred

  and killed by taxis or brain disease,

  Here was I trying to live

  with a neutrality so great

  I’d have nothing to think about.

  Nowadays I get the feeling

  I’m in a complex situation,

  one of several billboard posters

  blending in the rain.

  I am writing this with a pen my wife has used

  to write a letter to her first husband.

  On it is the smell of her hair.

  She must have placed it down between sentences

  and thought, and driven her fingers round her skull

  gathered the slightest smell of her head

  and brought it back to the pen.

  LETTERS & OTHER WORLDS

  ‘for there was no more darkness for him and, no doubt like Adam before the fall, he could see in the dark’

                           My father’s body was a globe of fear

                           His body was a town we never knew

                           He hid that he had been where we were going

                           His letters were a room he seldom lived in

                           In them the logic of his love could grow

                           My father’s body was a town of fear

                           He was the only witness to its fear dance

                           He hid where he had been that we might lose him

                           His letters were a room his body scared

  He came to death with his mind drowning.

  On the last day he enclosed himself

  in a room with two bottles of gin, later

  fell the length of his body

  so that brain blood moved

  to new compartments

  that never knew the wash of fluid

  and he died in minutes of a new equilibrium.

  His early life was a terrifying comedy

  and my mother divorced him again and again.

  He would rush into tunnels magnetized

  by the white eye of trains

  and once, gaining instant fame,

  managed to stop a Perahara in Ceylon

  – the whole procession of elephants dancers

  local dignitaries – by falling

  dead drunk onto the street.

  As a semi-official, and semi-white at that,

  the act was seen as a crucial

  turning point in the Home Rule Movement

  and led to Ceylon’s independence in 1948.

  (My mother had done her share too—

  her driving so bad

  she was stoned by villagers

  whenever her car was recognized)

  For 14 years of marriage

  each of them claimed he or she

  was the injured party.

  Once on the Colombo docks

  saying goodbye to a recently married couple

  my father, jealous

  at my mother’s articulate emotion,

  dove into the waters of the harbour

  and swam after the ship waving farewell.

  My mother pretending no affiliation

  mingled with the crowd back to the hotel.

  Once again he made the papers

  though this time my mother

  with a note to the editor

  corrected the report – saying he was drunk

  rather than broken hearted at the parting of friends.

  The married couple received both editions

  of The Ceylon Times when their ship reached Aden.

  And then in his last years

  he was the silent drinker,

  the man who once a week

  disappeared into his room with bottles

  and stayed there until he was drunk

  and until he was sober.

  There speeches, head dreams, apologies,

  the gentle letters, were composed.

  With the clarity of architects

  he would write of the row of blue flowers

  his new wife had planted,

  the plans for electricity in the house,

  how my half-sister fell near a snake

  and it had awakened and not touched her.

  Letters in a clear hand of the most complete empathy

  his heart widening and widening and widening

  to all manner of change in his children and friends

  while he himself edged

  into the terrible acute hatred

  of his own privacy

  till he balanced and fell

  the length of his body

  the blood entering

  the empty reservoir of bones

  the blood searching in his head without metaphor.

  GRIFFIN OF THE NIGHT

  I’m holding my son in my arms

  sweating after nightmares

  small me

  fingers in his mouth

  his other fist clenched in my hair

  small me

  sweating after nightmares.

  BIRTH OF SOUND

  At night the most private of a dog’s long body groan.

  It comes with his last stretch

  in the dark corridor outside our room.

  The children turn.

  A window tries to split with cold

  the other dog hoofing the carpet for lice.

  We’re all alone.

  WE’RE AT THE GRAVEYARD

  Stuart Sally Kim and I

  watching still stars

  or now and then sliding stars

  like hawk spit to the trees.

  Up there the clear charts,

  the systems’ intricate branches

  which change with hours and solstices,

  the bone geometry of moving from there, to there.

  And down here – friends

  whose minds and bodies

  shift like acrobats to each other.

  When we leave, they move

  to an altitude of silence.

  So our minds shape

  and lock the transient,

  parallel these bats

  who organize the air

  with thick blinks of travel.

  Sally is like grey snow in the grass.

  Sally of the beautiful bones

  pregnant below stars.

  NEAR ELGINBURG

  3 a.m. on the floor mattress.

  In my pyjamas a moth beats frantic

  my heart is breaking loose.

  I have been dreaming of a man

  who places honey on his forehead before sleep

  so insects come tempted by liquid

  to sip past it into the brain.

  In the morning his head contains wings

  and the soft skeletons of wasp.

  Our suicide into nature.

  That man’s seduction

  so he can beat the itch

  against the floor and give in

  move among the sad remnants

  of those we have destroyed,

  the torn code these animals ride to death on.

  Grey fly on windowsill

  white fish by the dock

  heaved like a slimy bottle into the deep,

  to end up as snake

  heckled by children and cameras

  as he crosses lawns of civilization.

  We lie on the floor mattress

  lost moths walk on us

  waterhole of flesh, want

  thi
s humiliation under the moon.

  Till in the morning we are surrounded

  by dark virtuous ships

  sent by the kingdom of the loon.

  LOOP

  My last dog poem.

  I leave behind all social animals

  including my dog who takes

  30 seconds dismounting from a chair.

  Turn to the one

  who appears again on roads

  one eye torn out and chasing.

  He is only a space filled

  and blurred with passing,

  transient as shit – will fade

  to reappear somewhere else.

  He survives the porcupine, cars, poison,

  fences with their spasms of electricity.

  Vomits up bones, bathes at night

  in Holiday Inn swimming pools.

  And magic in his act of loss.

  The missing eye travels up

  in a bird’s mouth, and into the sky.

  Departing family. It is loss only of flesh

  no more than his hot spurt across a tree.

  He is the one you see at Drive-Ins

  tearing silent into garbage

  while societies unfold in his sky.

  The bird lopes into the rectangle nest of images

  and parts of him move on.

  HERON REX

  Mad kings

  blood lines introverted, strained pure

  so the brain runs in the wrong direction

  they are proud of their heritage of suicides

  – not just the ones who went mad

  balancing on that goddamn leg, but those

  whose eyes turned off

  the sun and imagined it

  those who looked north, those who

  forced their feathers to grow in

  those who couldn’t find the muscles in their arms

  who drilled their beaks into the skin

  those who could speak

  and lost themselves in the foul connections

  who crashed against black bars in a dream of escape

  those who moved round the dials of imaginary clocks