The same window sticks. I push hard and sometimes it gives, lets in a distant sea, a child’s laughter in the waves. Mostly I can’t decipher the songs on the locked baby grand. Death has stolen their keys. The metronome still works. I slide its weight to the end, watch it pole-vault back and fore across the chasm between each tock. The sea rolls closer, the child laughs louder. Mother, father and sister sing to him from the shore.
‘Love and war are the same thing...’ — Miguel de Cervantes Somewhere over the tiled foothills of our council estate A man and a woman are arguing. The focus of the argument is something brutally trivial A TV programme choice, that sort of thing, Yet the air is a hot Isandlewana of big and small wounding And a silence follows, with one avoiding the other While the battleground wounded are hauled away. Unremarkable people go to war like this, see the fracture In the fence and tear at it Making broader access to unremarkable places Left unguarded. (Who slept on duty?
He felt brave, capable and full of duty He went out with the rest of them and scoured the high grass And the tide-step and low sandy grass He saw how early morning on the river had its beauty They spread out in a loose crescent form Each man could hear the other’s high rubber boots Squeak like rats where the floppy boots Twitched the tall common reeds lightly and moved on Wading birds woke up in a gust of running Out of the way of the new monstrous movement too near And he didn’t any longer want to be near The water, grasses, birds, or whatever was coming No one stumbled on anything, they all went home She wasn’t found that day or any day that ordinary summer Of small cold rain showers and wet sun, a summer That had its useless.
Night is returning to teatime. Soon a coneof orange streetlight will be all he has to see her byas she touches her laurel, steps inside her homeon which he’s been keeping an eye while she’s at work, as no one else will.Only the postie or Amazon opens that gateand once he saw the latter with a parceltoo big to fit through the letterbox, knock, wait the stipulated minute or so, knock harder,step back, look up to blank windows for clues,check his handheld, try next-door – no answeralso – and finally make the walk of doom back to the white Transit. Adrenalin pumping,he considered intervention, but how?‘Did you need – sure, I live opposite, I’ll take it in…’He’d learn her name; teatime would bring her round.
Open the front door into waterBrown water with no heart in itOne side of the street to the other – Small shops drowned in itOur car drowned in itThe sun gleamed down on it like a joke Unseasonal, climate change thingAt an upstairs window an old womanStaring down like a question Water in the hall, the kitchen, floor-Boards bending, everything meltingOr seeming to, the roof crackling – The thin river was fat and roaringUnder the block-stone bridge and thenOver it. Reek of old mud. By evening the surge was downThe flood was a lover reachingFor a cigarette. It got what it came for.
The gutters glutted:rusty, fallen, ferrous stars. An avenue of beeches,gaunt, grey, naked, majestic on their red carpet,in a dream of dethronement.
I’m sailing to Tarshish as usual. The air is thick, Its walls are greyish white, This desk light flickers intermittently. Let me be plain: Being good in your sort of way Does not appeal to me. Why would I go to Nineveh? The parking’s diabolical And the people there Are not my type. Some send out for Domino’s every night, Most have no notion of eternity. How could you care for them? I have a feeling that you prefer them Which doesn’t seem right. They have no ear for music And why should they need to hear my voice When there’s always a catch to it? No one likes me on this ship But I’m indifferent. I’d rather suffer as I want.
(after Baudelaire) In order to write such undefiled poemsI must lodge in the suburbs of the sky,companion to the steeples, steeled by dreams,the bells’ mystic clamour flooding my mind. Awake in this eyrie, chin on arms, I see how the citizens toil and sleep,the towers, the chimneys – the city’s masts –vast cloudscapes evoking eternity. I can just make out through the squalid darklove’s fire-freckled night, bowed lamps in attics, sulphurous smoke-rivers aimed at the stars,the moon declaring its spectral magic.I witness the spring, June haze, pure autumns,Decembers sealing the city with ice;I hide away behind shutters, curtains,bringing the brain’s fairy palace to light.
Some endings have such richness in their flow,the night taking its temper from the day.You sport a smile when love gets up to go. Mirrors of time hold all you need to know,haloes of stars sustaining casual clay.Some endings have such richness in their flow. Far-off appointments, comet-like, will growinto your week-to-view, pointing your way.You sport a smile when love gets up to go. Sweet long goodbyes precede the sharp hello,foreseen, embraced and prompting one to saysome endings have such richness in their flow. Your hearth and home’s an archipelago,wild oceans calling all the while you stay.You sport a smile when love gets up to go. Resting, you relish teeming tides below,a gathering of kin, a quietening of play.
Busy little hammer on your block of wood,dark wine setting the house on fire,how diligently you work, how tirelessly, what scant attention I have given youtill now, unveiled – ba-boom –inside your tiny shed on a screen before surgery that will slow you almost to standstill.In an antenatal room, twice,I saw my daughters’ hearts tucked in below mine, and listened as your pink bouquetfell softly open, closed again.Through the clinic windows, winter darkness shuffles slowly in. The cardiologist is ticking offhis checklist, night is ringing its bells,the echo of their tolling bounces off the walls: busy little hammer on your block of wood,how perfectly compatible we are,how I’ll love you until that final nail.
Bad dreams ignoredlit raindrops on windows of the midnight busthen a footstep behind you like the girl on a Sydney beachwho picked up a tiny blue-ringed octopusmost dangerous creature in the seafor a selfie. It rested in the cup of her hand one small jelly spidertwo legs folded underas if it were on its knees praying.
We left in a hurryand I had to leavemy solid-wood mahogany and spruce guitar. They said to bring only what we could carryand it would have taken both my armsto protect it from knocks and scrapes as I would a baby –for it too was made with love and in the belief it would last forever. Now I’m more sorrythan I should say, to know I will never hold it againand pluck the bass string and feel the low humtravel through me, earthing me. At night I crouch awake and worryabout the fire that melts and blackens and harries to ashall the carefully crafted truths we once lived byand which made life beautiful.
We have stockpiled umbrellasand old-fashioned radiatorsa heap of mad grinsreminding me of so many school mornings fog pearling my regulation scarfas I walked from the stationpast grainy ice-sheaths of dead reedsaround the swan’s nest yearning for a glimpseof last year’s mystic swan bride.The wild ballerina. The last chancehaunting the mist.
Have you ever held a gun before?I once fired a revolver, point-blank at Mark Stoneley,loaded with a roll of paper caps. He cried,and told his mum, who told my mum. So, No, not really.We drove towards Mexico, through sand duneslittered with shoes, a rag doll snagged on a barbed wire fence.He said, It’s not a toy, and then made me put it togetherlike a puzzle. Barrel, slide, frame, and the jet-black magazine.Heavy as the dark in a folding star. Along a dirt tracklined by cholla and scrub, the road signspeppered with lead, I snapped in the rounds. Here. We stoppedby a runnel and a pockmarked fridge, where he pinned upa target, and showed me how to aim. Squeeze off the noise,he said, pumping out shot. The desert took the soundand buried it. Your turn.
Folk on the mainlandare tightytighty.Folk on the mainlandwalk a rope. No listening on the mainland,only talking.To walk while you talkand to talk while you type. What use for the mainland?Polystyrene and mattresses.Bad juju on the mainland.Bad eating. Bad faith. What use for the ocean?For swallowing questions.Who when why what NO:shh shh on the shingle. Conundrum: how to slipthrough the mainland’s fingers.A few who have done this.A few who have known. What happens on leaving?The end of the story.The start of a new one:wingbeats, wind.
It’s gruelling to be wanted – the desirer’s eyesall over you, his lips mouthing your namelike a benediction. His love is a prison, or a roomwith flocked wallpaper where a mad aunt sleeps,her dreams fettered by demons. The desirer carves your name in trees and walls,letters trapped in love hearts piercedby feathered arrows. You no longer recognise itor come when called. You never owned it,only a name, shared with strangers pressed into those thin White Pages,like Frank and Bill and Jack – manly namesthat pack a punch, American nameswith ten-gallon hats and loaded guns.
The past is unzipped, like the backseat loverloosening your tie. You were crazy about himin June, sleeping past noon in the grass,singing all night out of tune. By Septemberhe’d split, without so much as a goodbye kiss. It’s tough to be the one who’s ditched, the scrub who gets bumped from the nest. Now you’re adrift in the city, its brick pilesblotting out sky; you’re not fit for this life, the sulky drama of the street. You want to killthe taste on your tongue; green fairy, bitter pill,whatever gets you by. Clouds mass as the curtain rises on the last act,you know already how it ends.
What Martine had learned in acting school over the summer,about tone, emphasis, inference,is all useful in the con —herself as charming, consoling Ms. Real Estate Agent.Martine’s clientele — flush widowerswanting to sell the family home,move to a manageable apartment. Walking through the properties,noting brand name dresses hanging in wardrobes,pearl necklaces lying on bedroom dressers,a diamond ring in a no longer used ashtray…Martine tries not to grin, show her hyena teeth. She lets two – or three – months elapse…then when the widower’s out on the golf course,or hospitalised, in for a hip replacement,or wintering in Florida,Martine disables security cameras, alarms, gains entry.The clean sweep of valuables fills a laundry sack.
In hibernation and a huff. No work for six months. Will I have to invent an illness as explanation? My desires are simple — a pot of English breakfast tea, a piece of nougat. I can’t affect ‘a lifestyle’. I am sick, though, of this view. Brick wall. Drainpipe. Grey tracksuit pants on clothes line. Norbert hasn’t telephoned. Best get a new agent. Tony will know someone. Introduce my name into conversations. ‘The theatre needs invigoration.’ That sort of thing. Young. Is that plausible? I can play young. The wonders of makeup. What do I want to read? I want to read a script.
Bukowski’s ghostis horsing in the garden – careening crazily –a grounded Red Baron flying a Fokker Eindeckerdrunken-legged – arms thrown out as wings,then elbows hunched, hands close together,forefingers squeezing triggers, letting them have ittwin machine-gun style – teeth and lips spittingbursts of rapid fire – his face splits laughing,shirt and eyes wine-stained.