hardened in stone, drowning

  in this star blanket this sky

  like a giant trout

  conscious how the heaven

  careens over him

  as he moves in back fields

  kissing the limbs of trees

  or placing ear on stone which rocks him

  and then stands to watch the house

  in its oasis of light.

  And he knows something is happening there to him

  solitary while he spreads his arms

  and holds everything that is slipping away together.

  He is suddenly in the heat of the party

  slouching towards women, revolving

  round one unhappy shadow.

  That friend who said he would find

  the darkest place, and then wave.

  He is not a lost drunk

  like his father or his friend, can,

  he says, stop on a dime, and he can

  he could because even now, now in

  this brilliant darkness where

  grass has lost its colour and it’s all

  fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows

  this colourless grass is making his bare feet green

  for it is the hour of magic

  which no matter what sadness

  leaves him grinning.

  At certain hours of the night

  ducks are nothing but landscape

  just voices breaking as they nightmare.

  The weasel wears their blood

  home like a scarf,

  cows drain over the horizon

                           and the dark

  vegetables hum onward underground

  but the mouth

                 wants plum.

  Moves from room to room

  where brown beer glass

  smashed lounges at his feet

  opens the long rust stained gate

  and steps towards invisible fields

  that he knows from years of daylight.

  He snorts in the breeze

  which carries a smell

  of cattle on its back.

  What this place does not have

  is the white paint of bathing cabins

  the leak of eucalyptus.

  During a full moon

  outcrops of rock shine

  skunks spray abstract into the air

  cows burp as if practising

  the name of Francis Ponge.

  His drunk state wants the mesh of place.

  Ludwig of Bavaria’s Roof Garden—

  glass plants, iron parrots

  Venus Grottos, tarpaulins of Himalaya.

  By the kitchen sink he tells someone

  from now on I will drink only landscapes

  – here, pour me a cup of Spain.

  Opens the gate and stumbles

  blood like a cassette through the body

  away from the lights, unbuttoning,

  this desire to be riverman.

  Tentatively

                 he recalls

  his drunk invitation to the river.

  He has steered the awesome car

  past sugarbush to the blue night water

  and steps out

  speaking to branches

  and the gulp of toads.

  Subtle applause of animals.

  A snake leaves a path

  like temporary fossil.

                           He falls

  back onto the intricacies

  of gearshift and steering wheel

  alive as his left arm

  which now departs out of the window

  trying to tug passing sumac

  pine bush tamarack

  into the car

                 to the party.

  Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate

  and over the car invisible insects

  ascend out of the beams like meteorite

  crushed dust of the moon

   … he waits for the magic star called Lorca.

  On the front lawn a sheet

  tacked across a horizontal branch.

  A projector starts a parade

  of journeys, landscapes, relatives,

  friends leaping out within pebbles of water

  caught by the machine as if creating rain.

  Later when wind frees the sheet

  and it collapses like powder in the grass

  pictures fly without target

  and howl their colours over Southern Ontario

  clothing burdock

  rhubarb a floating duck.

  Landscapes and stories

  flung into branches

  and the dog walks under the hover of the swing

  beam of the projection bursting in his left eye.

  The falling sheet the star of Lorca swoops

  someone gets up and heaves his glass

  into the vegetable patch

  towards the slow stupid career of beans.

  This is the hour

  when dead men sit

  and write each other.

                 ‘Concerning the words we never said

                 during morning hours of the party

                 there was glass under my bare feet

                 laws of the kitchen were broken

                 and each word moved

                 in my mouth like muscle …’

  This is the hour for sudden journeying.

                 Cervantes accepts

  a 17th Century invitation

  from the Chinese Emperor.

  Schools of Chinese-Spanish Linguistics!

  Rivers of the world meet!

  And here

  ducks dressed in Asia

  pivot on foreign waters.

  At 4 a.m. he wakes in the sheet

  that earlier held tropics in its whiteness.

  The invited river flows through the house

  into the kitchen up

  stairs, he awakens and moves within it.

  In the dim light

  he sees the turkish carpet under water,

  low stools, glint

  of piano pedals, even a sleeping dog

  whose dreams may be of rain.

  It is a river he has walked elsewhere

  now visiting moving with him at the hip

  to kitchen where a friend sleeps in a chair

  head on the table his grip

  still round a glass, legs underwater.

  He wants to relax

  and give in to the night

  fall horizontal and swim

  to the back kitchen where his daughter sleeps.

  He wishes to swim

  to each of his family and gaze

  at their underwater dreaming

  this magic chain of bubbles.

  Wife, son, household guests, all

  comfortable in clean river water.

  He is aware that for hours

  there has been no conversation,

  tongues have slid to stupidity on alcohol

  sleeping mouths are photographs of yells.

  He stands waiting, the sentinel,

  shambling back and forth, his anger

  and desire against the dark

  which, if he closes his eyes,

  will lose them all.

                           The oven light

  shines up through water at him

  a bathysphere a ghost ship

  and in the half drowned room

  the crickets like small pins

  begin to ta
ck down

  the black canvas of this night,

  begin to talk their hesitant

  gnarled epigrams to each other

  across the room.

                 Creak and echo.

  Creak and echo. With absolute clarity

  he knows where he is.

  Tin Roof

  She hesitated. ‘Are you being romantic now?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you how I feel without exposing myself. You know what I mean?’

  ELMORE LEONARD

           *

  You stand still for three days

  for a piece of wisdom

  and everything falls to the right place

  or wrong place

                           You speak

                 don’t know whether

  seraph or bitch

  flutters at your heart

  and look through windows

  for cue cards

  blazing in the sky.

                           The solution.

  This last year I was sure

  I was going to die

           *

  The geography of this room I know so well

  tonight I could rise in the dark

  sit at the table and write without light.

  I am here in the country of warm rains.

  A small cabin – a glass, wood,

  tin bucket on the Pacific Rim.

                 Geckoes climb

  the window to peer in,

  and all day the tirade pale blue waves

  touch the black shore of volcanic rock

  and fall to pieces here

           *

  How to arrive at this

  drowning

  on the edge of sea

                 (How to drive

  the Hana Road, he said—

  one hand on the beer

  one hand on your thigh

  and one eye for the road)

  Waves leap to this cliff all day

  and in the evening lose

  their pale blue

  he rises from the bed

  as wind from three directions

  falls, takes his place

  on the peninsula of sheets

  which also loses colour

  stands in the loose green kimono

  by a large window and gazes

  through gecko

  past the deadfall

  into sea,

                 the unknown magic he loves

  throws himself into

                           the blue heart

           *

  Tell me

  all you know

  about bamboo

  growing wild, green

  growing up into soft arches

  in the temple ground

  the traditions

  driven through hands

  through the heart

  during torture

  and most of all

                           this

  small bamboo pipe

  not quite horizontal

  that drips

  every ten seconds

  to a shallow bowl

  I love this

  being here

  not a word

  just the faint

  fall of liquid

  the boom of an iron buddhist bell

  in the heart rapid

  as ceremonial bamboo

           *

  A man buying wine

  Rainier beer at the store

  would he be satisfied with this?

  Cold showers, electric skillet,

  Red River on tv

  Oh he could be

  (Do you want

                           to be happy and write?)

  He happens to love the stark

  luxury of this place

  – no armchairs, a fridge of beer and mangoes

                 Precipitation.

  To avoid a story      The refusal to move

  All our narratives of sleep

  a mild rumble to those inland

                 Illicit pockets of

                 the kimono

  Heart like a sleeve

           *

  The cabin

                 its tin roof

  a wind run radio

  catches the noise of the world.

  He focuses on the gecko

  almost transparent body

  how he feels now

  everything passing through him like light.

  In certain mirrors

  he cannot see himself at all.

  He is joyous and breaking down.

  The tug over the cliff.

  What protects him

  is the warmth in the sleeve

  that is all, really

           *

  We go to the stark places of the earth

  and find moral questions everywhere

  Will John Wayne and Montgomery Clift

  take their cattle to Missouri or Kansas?

  Tonight I lean over the Pacific

  and its blue wild silk

  ringed by creatures

  who

                 tchick tchick tchick

  my sudden movement

  who say nothing else.

  There are those who are in

  and there are those who look in

  Tiny leather toes

  hug the glass

           *

  On the porch

  thin ceramic

  chimes

                 ride wind

  off the Pacific

  bells of the sea

                           I do not know

  the name of large orange flowers

  which thrive on salt air

  lean half drunk

  against the steps

  Untidy banana trees

  thick moss on the cliff

  and then the plunge

  to black volcanic shore

  It is impossible to enter the sea here

  except in a violent way

                           How we have moved

  from thin ceramic

  to such destruction

           *

  All night

                 the touch

  of wave on volcano.

  There was the woman

  who clutched my hair

  like a shaken child.

  The radio whistles

  round a lost wave length.

  All night slack-key music

  and the bird whistling duino

  duino, words and music

  entangled in pebble

  ocean static.

  The wild sea and her civilization

  the League of the Divine Wind

  and traditions of death.

                           Remember

  those women in movies

  who wept into the hair

  of their dead men?

           *

  Going up stairs

  I hang my shirt

  on the stiff

  ear of an antelope
>
  Above the bed

                 memory

  restless green bamboo

                 the distant army

  assembles wooden spears

  her feet braced

  on the ceiling

  sea in the eye

  Reading the article

  an 1825 report Physiologie du Gout

  on the artificial growing of truffles

  speaks

                 of ‘vain efforts

  and deceitful promises,’

  commandments of culinary art

  Good

  morning to your body

  hello nipple

  and appendix scar like a letter

  of too much passion

  from a mad Mexican doctor

  All this noise at your neck!

  heart clapping

  like green bamboo

                 this earring

      which

  has flipped over

      and falls

                 into the pool of your ear

  The waves against black stone

  that was a thousand year old

  burning red river

  could not reach us

           *

                 Cabin

  ‘hana’