Measures of Expatriation Read online

  like a newish smoking, asphyxiation by kilometres;

  the disembarking heterosexuals pit

  picador arms against the heads of females,

  high-end climate-change cologne;

  they have vetivered and tidalled out.

  Two women, seated, remain

  like money, like any underground objects,

  like a philosophy of inexistence, like earliness, unperceived.

  Soya latte meets box handbag

  meets lack of a glossy magazine

  meets lightweight summer brastrap,

  countenance facing another, scarlet and opposite.

  Laptop Blue Screen Rationalization

  I need to delete the shortcut that is Timothy. He sold me the one and only futureproofed summer of my experience. Standing ankle-deep in wild garlic in a Sussex lane he spoke of roses, and I almost bought it; I almost bought it right then and there when a 4X4 careened down the middle of the national speed limit lane sprung with Tudor-looking hedgerows almost spiky enough to stick a row of heads on, and in a whiff of gasoline one of those very common rabbits paid the price of someone else’s rich misuse of private transport and screamed time no longer.

  I need to delete the shortcut that is Timothy. It was down the river that he sold me that summer. Wearing the feminist Germaine Cellier’s Bandit perfume, which she formulated after sniffing the knickers straight off the models on a post-World War II runway… I actually bought it; I actually bought it, a scent that accelerates from a whiff of gasoline only to end in the cabinet, medicinal dead wood branching out into fatherly hangers.

  I need to delete the shortcut that is Timothy but first I must delete Linda, because he added her, but if I delete Linda, I need to delete Susan, because they were on a jobshare and they were never more than workfriends, who should not have had any shortcuts anyway.

  I didn’t rightclick on Timothy. I leftclicked on Timothy. I’m opening Timothy. I remember the summer that was Timothy, but I do not recall what’s inside Timothy. How many keystrokes have been wasted on Timothy…

  Timothy contains seven folders: Wrath, Greed, Pride, Sloth, Lust, Envy and Gluttony. These names do not look right. It was a night to remember when I went into Timothy and renamed everything within Timothy. I do not recall that night. I do not wish to delve too deeply into the sevenfold contents of Timothy.

  Timothy was a project manager and he made projections. Perhaps the sins correspond to the phases of our project; our futureproofed summer. Wrath is Thinking, Greed is Planning, Pride is Doing, Sloth is Monitoring, Lust is the Exit Phase leading to or perhaps including the Feedback of Envy, while there’s no place in the scheme for Gluttony, which clearly means this guess is wrong. I might as well call the notes of a musical scale or name the colours of the rainbow as continue with this childish game. I’m hovering over and selecting the entirety of Timothy, about to finish him off.

  Timothy had set the background of my laptop to roses, which used too much memory, making everything freeze, and he introduced a Trojan horse by unprotected browsing. There are babies in foreign lands named after Timothy by mothers he never met; many project workers relied remotely on Timothy.

  Now it’s all blue again and it’s coming back to me. It’s coming back to me since I’m deleting the shortcut that is Timothy.

  What was most difficult was proving that it was suicide, though the irregular little room with vodka windows and cranberry shantung curtains in the hotel near to the railway station seemed made only for that or the other thing; but I had no interest in finishing off the real Timothy, who taught me that income and happiness are not linked, so whether I am worse off or better off since the death of the real Timothy makes no difference, especially since we are in crisis and also at war, and for such a long time I hung on to the shortcut that was Timothy. The real Timothy was philosophical; when it turned out that neither Susan nor Linda could spell, he said: at least we know where they were educated and that they’ll have no choice but to listen to us when they make their choices; then he struck a deal under the table with the futureproofer from the rival company, a deal which seemed as if it could turn out to my advantage, though instead as you see I’m living in this different place now, with people like you.

  And if the real Timothy were here he’d pluck out the heart of our mystery, reminding me that a positive correlation does not necessarily indicate a cause.

  Though it’s a pretty rotten coincidence that all my other icons vanished almost as soon as I’d deleted the shortcut that is Timothy; and the blue screen is bluer than you’d have thought.

  María Lloró / Blue Sky Tears

  for Maria Jastrzebska

  Ministry of Tourism

  edict:

  henceforward, islanders, utilize

  naturally strippable skies –

  way to have

  succeeded

  since our bluedock

  coats are shredded;

  pitchy patchy citizenry

  sailors,

  rum ’uns, several-headed,

  ordered to repair

  indoors, permitted only

  strictly

  necessary sky-strips, unsatisfying radical geometría – ay, María,

  azul

  celestial’s glued beneath

  pinked nails, jiffed

  away multiplicatory trapezium

  smiles,

  leaving this oval

  blank of face –

  qué hacer, flat-out

  cielo

  emplasters our changing-room;

  if window glazing

  wipes out outsideness –

  Me

  extraña tu ausencia,

  absent carnivaller, auditor;

  specks of dust

  general

  all over island,

  (dóndequiera, mi general)

  who’s to rationalize

  (merced)

  our clean-up job?

  Estamos listos. Bring

  the Google car.

  Presentable.

  We’re readied by

  being gone again.

  Inhuman Triumphs

  for Nicholas Laughlin

  (I) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A BOX HEDGE

  it was a small snail

  on a rainy day

  it was a small snail

  a petal vertex

  it was a small snail

  nestled ascendant

  the heart of a rose

  an apricot rose

  and for a small snail

  on a rainy day

  the sea was beating

  about my heart; O

  love, beating about

  my green heart of hearts

  (II) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A DOUBLE VODKA

  Accuse me, before I start,

  of seeking forms to shatter –

  at the icy least, to overspill –

  you, meantime, pouring out me

  on the rocks. MAN DRINKS MERMAID

  MISTAKING HER FOR LIQUOR!

  Seizing my mirror, make up

  wars for islands that aren’t cold;

  you grin; I chill; water wins my heart,

  an alien drop in my interior

  and into whom I’m melting,

  a cubic volume of undrunk spirit; O

  love, wrapt in glass wrapt in a set of bony fingers…

  Air, how does it transpire that we are from each other?

  (III) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A HEAT HAZE

  & it was not a hot country; but occasionally

  hot, though not by decree nor description; even a day

  like this, where it rained fiercely on sheets of sun, jubilant

  about heat, but denying hotness; not a hot country.

  & it drove the insects in droves, it drove drivers off roads,

  drove drivers into whatever grows on the sides of roads

  & roads became what happened to be passing by, because

  I melted them; & beggars died too sh
y to beg for drinks

  because it’s stupid to feel the heat, admit to feeling

  the heat & to not liking it & not to liking it

  but to feeling everything twice as thick, feeling at all;

  the stream sucked it up, milled on wordless; the trees rebelled, O

  love, voted with their roots, forgetting how to vote, vowing

  their all to – as a leaf double, shape, shade, light – a stitch-up –

  (IV) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A PIECE OF PAINTED FABRIC

  That night laid hands on my back,

  ironing out a castle,

  finding no body, is true;

  that night’s pursuit turned up

  a green sleeve flat as a wall,

  that’s true as well; sky & I

  locked eyes; who called curtains first

  no journalism could tell. Shall this

  poem turn to the wrong side?

  A fine seam of gold stripes me;

  righteous buyers mutter, mined;

  mine, I said to night. And O

  love, night kept going round in circles,

  trailing a moonless shower, lyrid threads.

  (V) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO SPACE

  *********************************************

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

  L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

  *********************************************

  *********************************************

  sphere gas gravity heat radiation collapse

  luminosity colour temperature location

  **********************************************

  ***************************************** * O

  love, *

  Measures of Expatriation — III

  Neomarica Sky Jet

  for Helena Taylor

  GIVE ME YOUR REASONS

  that I may have tokens

  by which to remember you

  no please no more keeping in touch

  you have already taken so much

  of myself from myself, reinvested

  in paragraphs to your prosaic advancement –

  keynote speaker hired to dust off archival blues –

  give me your reasons

  THESE WORDS, THOSE MOST CRYING THINGS

  a poem

  possible, consisting

  not of those things

  he meant to write about –

  a poem: merely

  word reminders

  after some tumult

  that embarrassed him

  into writerpoise –

  small change,

  high voltage,

  burning his own

  adjustable light.

  and these words, those most crying things –

  sunk for now

  in his private code,

  like his ‘moonrise’ stands in

  for black black tree

  since felled,

  street lamp

  once upon a time

  unrepaired,

  across the road

  alsatianed and unplayed-with

  shotgun neighbours

  in three pinkish storeys

  (all this

  his ‘moonrise’),

  and night

  adamant leveller

  pushing blues

  on a land

  already halfhearted

  about difference

  (this too coded

  in his ‘moonrise’)

  from big-word-

  originary, and rising, sea

  OUR OFFICES

  This poem isn’t his. So let us leave him,

  nary a flicker in his groin: only

  when those no-longer-his-kind hoist defeat

  in their homeward eyes; televised killer

  whales fountainpen ice floes;

  violin-case nails,

  lower-salary-scaled, female, tip off

  from the everest of reception orchids

  insects camped in uncompliant dormancy:

  only then a flicker in his groin. So

  let us leave him. This poem was not his.

  It is the window’s. The precipitant window’s.

  The window, who believes in this poem

  it is the only thing personified;

  grieving after wholeness, split in glass sheets,

  steel-sheathed, lethal to the weather. New York

  rains New York: different, technological,

  skyscrapery grey rain; heart-of-a-pearl

  chorusing out of the gutters... One drop!

  The window’s gripped by hopeless passion. That

  one drop! that isn’t personified! So,

  this poem is the window’s. (You’re a star.)

  SHE SAYS

  Does it suit me? holding up

  red cloth tacked in some fashion –

  hoping that colour flicks on

  redemption like a farm-shop

  bauble, gleeful fruit of joy

  seeded throughout colder days –

  and she speaks

  full of glorious veins,

  anxious over scarlet rayon.

  Who

  could have an objection; have

  her as an object? She is

  no thing; she is everything.

  Who says:

  Poem, like a clasping knife

  shut in safe relationship,

  guard what you’re made to cut out?

  NEOMARICA SKY JET

  Why, one of us, sitting

  in a raw-hemmed purple garment’s

  softer flag, where the sand’s flare

  maximal against jade water

  demarcates the old dance-massacre,

  wished the other also sitting

  at a marred dance-step’s distance,

  not as you and I sit

  now and there

  at unadaptive distance,

  making as if perfectly aligned

  And she has lifted or lowered her arms

  she-who-rips-open-intention

  for this is in time without warfare

  time in between

  her scattering-of-sinews dance

  Sand queers itself as light retreats

  sea blue at last and last

  neomarica sky jet

  one and/or both of us sitting

  the wish the distance

  less and also perfectly aligned

  Cities in Step

  for the Weyward Sisters

  talk about sleeping

  you dream in black and white

  i dream in fauve and phosphor

  cities where people are held for interrogation

  cities where taxidrivers and policemen

  systematize their criminality

  cities where the friends i can depend on

  meet for the first time outside and by chance

  mispronouncing hello

  cities where the script is not quite Roman

  crying out is currency

  and so are sweets

  i dream cities overwhelmingly

  not people

  you dream of flowers, dreaming you are

  a girl

  clothes shopping

  you say what colour suits me

  you see what colour suits me

  is i-see-no-one-enter colour

  is try-the-shop-three-miles-away colour

  is would-your-friend-like-to-sign-up-for-the-newsletter-and-the-prize-draw colour

  is you-probably-aren’t-looking-for-anything-expensive colour

  is oh-sorry-i-thought-you-were-together colour

  you

  aren’t you with him

  his hair disinterred from a scalp hung in basements

  his ski
n pocked and bubbling spread under soil

  his shoulders reaching down to smoosh his elbows

  his hands growing in your direction

  how else do we know you are here?

  didn’t you come with him

  into our sunglasses shop

  our expensive sunglasses shop

  isn’t he the one wanting

  polarized designer lenses

  why are you behaving

  as if you are not with him?

  he came in behind you; aren’t you

  together?

  step from there

  absolutely no change

  and a good face on it

  absolutely no change

  let’s go for a picnic

  absolutely no change

  we have the same basked

  absolutely no change

  how was your day? Did

  you do, have, get, like, buy,

  eat, drink, make up, make out

  like you don’t

  dream cities

  overwhelmingly?

  we have spread a cloth on the ground

  share another cloth over our knees

  pass a flask without commenting

  fireflies, their matchbox likeness,

  pulled out like a thought of thinking

  or of polar exploration,

  Scott of the Antarctic, the taste

  of chocolate dismissing him, death

  seeming more New World, more Aztec

  something my company will not

  translate

  talk about sleeping

  being happy

  i dream giraffes mostly

  having put one together

  from sand under seawater

  dappled by sunlight

  at paddling depth

  or having seen it rise up

  amiable

  companionable

  with a friendliness seldom measured by scientists

  a long-lashed

  essentially solitudinous yet

  occasionally-leaning giraffe

  truly i wanted

  to build bridges

  reinforced with bamboo

  and a castle

  using the classic

  spade and bucket

  where living shells

  cut or sink

  tiny silent circles

  hissing with air

  and what happened

  the colour of

  black happened, rainbow