Measures of Expatriation Read online

  I wish, too late, I wish to give you that rest.

  The Third Unlikely Sleep

  You took to using sheets of music paper, if at first because they were there, soon for their other and purposeful powers of signification.

  My mother has great trouble practising staccato on the piano with her arthritic fingers. She tries out the meant-to-be-rapid-fire movement note by note. From these detached, successive efforts, a shape of music emerges. It is as if the idea of bread can be established from a loaf with the crumb pecked away by a bird, the crust remaining like a frame.

  How long had it been raining, drizzling, that day; easier to calculate than how long since another human being had touched this one with care. It laid itself straight out, unanæsthetized, on the table, for the silvery-cool instruments to dig and chisel into its patient side. The rain, the drizzle, was less than that winter in New York which accumulated liquid and broke in you like the rolling of a river magnified by nostalgia, a river turning over European ‘r’s. It was less than that; yet under the doctor’s metal touch I slept, lulled by the quality of her surgical attention and by the sound de la pluie outdoors.

  I wish the ease of sleep had salved you; but the artist being both patient and doctor, you excised, bit by bit, the rosy heart of little things that have genesis in insomnia – the feeling of rotation, the idea of houses – creations, but not always of a kind to be named.

  COUNTING SHEEP

  tonguetwisters the gestes d’un arbre are made of sourcils

  sources jitter

  the robust arbuste take as read

  the standard buisson take as read

  business of roses take as read

  the

  grain

  a standard rose chandelier

  a standard lamp roses from the air

  La serre est trop petite pour les caisses

  muffled effect of shears on sheep

  oreilles de lapin

  tordre tondre

  ‘Nobody can take my style, it is not possible,

  at least not for long. do not fret.’

  sleep comes in ropes & fruits, pears

  sleep is initially a stylized form

  en somme, as we recollect it,

  flowers are heliotropic

  dandelion clocks

  we cannot grasp the sun – we can grasp a sea urchin

  the grand earth-spanning arc of sunrise is fictive, only our calculation

  makes a globe

  three dancing princesses even astronauts can’t

  wore out their slippers completely think about

  dancing through the night the sun

  sooner a prostitute, a driveway, a hedgehog

  not-just-doodles because eye of the hurricane

  burqa’d fingerpuppets sea anemone

  anemometer

  a labyrinth of breezes

  la dame moves the damier of sleep

  check mate shah mat

  raindrops prelude

  mountain

  another & another square

  earrings, pillow, oreiller

  le sentier

  a feeling of home rises

  from this path, it’s an approach; sleep has an architecture with a way in,

  does insomnia, too,

  where is the way out?

  the eye set well back in a bird’s head

  exploser exposer plumage & high heels

  featherdusted & tumbleweeded but not to sleep

  levitating sleep is a matter of levitation

  insomnia fixed on a stick

  as if on the beach je joue aux boules

  coulante – terrifie

  one house is a shaded version of another house

  all chemins lead to france

  converge, concentric, intersect

  le phénix renaît de ses cendres

  houses shoot up like lipsticks

  the many peaks are plain & tight

  ‘she stepped on a mind’

  on music paper qu’elle est le rythme d’une nuit blanche

  un sans-papier dans le royaume de l’art

  smiley breastbone, sleepless nipples on which closed-mouth

  criticisms converge

  but how very pretty things are, french girls’ hair, a bouquet of

  balloons; why don’t they float her out

  everywhere i carry a sheep across my shoulders, wide peasant stride

  ‘DO ‘may cocoon one self, another

  not I [banality of a fight, duvet]

  disturb’ come in’

  labyrinth eye centre of its propre labyrinth

  dirty labyrinths with unruled lines

  eye becomes an architecture / entravé in its architecture

  ‘Sainte mouton’? she holds on to the

  ‘Sureté mouton’? holy

  ‘Secrète mouton’? holy dread which is

  INSOMNIA MASHUP

  Je crois, dur comme fer, au format journal, diary

  ‘the garden notebook, côte-garden of all my houses’

  skittles of sleep stick insect

  skittle insect

  mosquito dandelions

  Ça ne fait ni queue ni tête but I still love it

  long-stemmed flowers longer & longer-stemmed flowers

  INCANTATIONS

  if i can join this mountain & the other mountain, there will be france

  cheveluresprécieuses ifiraisemyarms whatrainsdown

  foracanopy/circus ifilowermylids istarttoflower

  whensleeplessiimaginepeopleiknowinemblematicpostures

  hairscatteredontheshoulders charming carriedouttoseaon

  turtles’backs

  [have all your dreams in a row]

  the cold at the core sleepless, Iradiatecold solar, onceagain

  must live radial

  [give everything away]

  ‘I Give Everything Away’

  Measures of Expatriation — V

  Far from Rome

  The blue dusk settles at a rate,

  and fields can be forgotten

  as they are; as-they-were appear

  uppermost, lidded, swept smooth;

  beneath, left still, kiln-fired

  vessels belonging to him,

  pleasing to his strong, torn hands –

  so very much not in Rome,

  this redeployed general.

  The sea mixed in your eyes,

  arrived at cruel decisions

  yet stalling execution.

  I would have sworn to die for you

  sooner than try to live with you.

  The sea swarms in my ears.

  I sift your breath through mine.

  A modern probe might take me

  for less-than-human remains,

  for nail-seed dirt and cumin.

  I wouldn’t mind; being her,

  and yours.

  But not in this life –

  the intolerable one

  which, when the blue dusk scratches,

  lends it my eyes. To discern,

  alone, your life, indicts me.

  Such knowledge a reburial.

  Turn me to copper, one of you

  gods he only temporized with:

  melt me down then score me

  the music for last things.

  Marginal

  An egg is divided

  into shell and meat.

  When I bent to my task

  during the victory visit,

  light banged its gongs and passed,

  with a travelling step, through me.

  I was halves:

  yolk and pallor,

  brittle and sky,

  blankness and savour,

  scoop and scorn,

  loft and huddle,

  core and cry;

  was another musician

  bare and ashamed

  in a yellow slave skirt.

  I played hard.

  Played wrong.

  He stopped in his progress,

  for this was
his talent:

  displaying his goodwill;

  impersonal, merciful

  latin approbation.

  A thrown-cloak equivalent

  where we were not Latin

  and he was imperial.

  Our error, his notes.

  Snake in the Grass

  for Alaric Hall

  My man was menstrual, had fever dreams

  of carbonizing metal. In scattering I began:

  impure, then piled, twisted, fused,

  quenched in oil and sweeter fluids,

  my long form agent and symbol

  of heavy terror: what it is to be split.

  City of Oxford, you forget little enough

  but rather excel in techniques of diversion and cover.

  City, you have renamed Gropecunt and Slaughter streets;

  driven streams to run their own burials;

  with false surgery, you have sealed

  the wide, one-eyed mercy of a lake

  beneath a car park’s sweat, the clang of coins.

  Under Christ Church tower,

  under kings of new history,

  the Jewish town lies in pre-Expulsion sleep;

  under that again, nameless bones.

  Do not dishonour me. I am not sleeping.

  Slide your eye back into its drowsy basket.

  Are you alive, when grass is cut,

  to the slip of blades, reptile-quick

  to stain, to twine? Such things

  share my nature: whatever is woven,

  whatever heats up, iridescing with force.

  Do not shun me. I am not sleeping.

  Glass is the least security. My kind’s for re-use,

  willing to coil cold in the earth

  till each deadly resurrection through your changes of nation,

  till your kind hand comes and the smith repairs us.

  Slide your eye into the wave and wind of me.

  Forget your wife, if you still have one.

  The two of us decide who’s for the taking.

  Bring me to your son, blossoming in his cradle.

  Introduce us. I have a name.

  Man, join us together. There’s wisdom in my core.

  Disposal of a Weapon

  The sword of Sir Hugh de Morville, one of the four knights who killed Thomas Becket at Canterbury, is thought to have been given to Carlisle Cathedral. A replica of a twelfth-century sword is now on view at Carlisle.

  I had to take it somewhere.

  That was the steel.

  I took it home.

  That was in stone.

  They had to leave it somewhere.

  That was the shell.

  The Church stepped in.

  That was in storm.

  Steel, stone, shell, storm.

  Another Cathedral. Rage rising:

  crowds towards us, against our hard work,

  Thomas, head split, forcing hearing’s gate

  with his loud and bloody treasons. Pray

  how could I, lacking fluent parlance,

  else control them? As clouds address

  my hilly sheep in Northumbria?

  In a tyrant’s robed, balconied words?

  With sweets that trade poisons?

  Visitors,

  modern, unburied, probing my rests,

  after my doubtless victim’s blessing –

  also you thoughtless, yet in secret

  capitally troubled – that is not

  my sword, though something targets your head,

  overhangs the roof, disposed to make

  short gold of your moment of starred blue.

  That is not my sword. We are elsewhere.

  Steel, stone, shell, storm.

  I, Hugh de Morville,

  Lord of Knaresborough,

  Honour of Westmorland,

  lineal man stamped down

  man-killer, saint-maker

  by Canterbury history.

  Bless or at least excoriate,

  do not forget, my name

  In 2190, Albion’s Civil Conflicts Finally Divided Along Norman-Saxon Lines

  I know your ancestors without researching them.

  You were thick. We were thin. Fast and inaccurate

  users of your landscape. Our progress started birds.

  We descended, killing in our slenderness. Thick and

  thin. Through thick. The thin.

  So far as I was woman,

  I despised you in my heart; soon was un-womaned.

  Quasi-indistinguishable among willows,

  with superior weaponry, we kept on killing,

  cried

  what must be victory

  with curled tongues.

  Soon, you stopped sounding wrong.

  Young man, I am older than you think;

  why are you sitting next to me? The art of peace:

  scribing and diabetes. You bring gold. Thick. Thin.

  Like a zoo lion’s, your large, unexercised farts;

  I inevitably breathe, breathe nearly the same air.

  Let’s start a conversation. Ask me where I’m from.

  Where is home, really home. Where my parents were born.

  What to do if I sound more like you than you do.

  Every word an exhalation, a driving-out.

  To London

  It was necessary to move, and at this exit

  the beggar, cross-legged at the fork of the tunnel,

  calls out Love! A welcome, of sorts.

  The night light fucks the suburb

  into nightmare familiarity –

  not like a shrammed nerd touting

  guided walks and histories that contract

  imagination for demolition work,

  levelling today’s housing,

  restoring common greens,

  lingering at sites orphaned of their fever

  hospitals – by no means that hyperliterate,

  poor entrepreneur –

  It is the view, the barbed wire roaring into view

  round and round the playground walltop.

  It is the warehouse, warehouse windows blank of occupation.

  It is lives, lives supplied in great number,

  fulfilment of numbers.

  It is the sense of something shared –

  the tailor scissors razoring open

  fishmouth stitches, the sewn-up pocket

  of the new suit,

  and finding something –

  But it is new, all new,

  even the gangs who graffiti chimneys

  scrubbed and lovely, deleted

  like the railways delete

  repeatedly

  the head, the occasionally payrolled head,

  the feet

  of the quartered commuters, of the vertebral week.

  Seven Nights in Transit

  for Karen Martinez

  SATURDAY

  ‘My child.’

  The bearded man in the ticket office is calling hardback old women his children. Like the immemorial conversation-killer that Trinidadian parents transmit to their migrant, errant offspring via the newest technologies:

  ‘But you are my child. I can say anything to you. And I can take anything from you. You can say anything to me.’

  Like we never moved on. Like sitting watching the notices for cancelled trains at midnight in London when I have to be back in the office first thing on a working Sunday, first thing on what is now the same day as tonight, could be the same kind of misery of waiting as when I was really a child, standing inside the Convent classroom watching the sun shine and wanting to be outside.

  It’s the other island, it’s Trinidad that doesn’t move on, isn’t it? Trinidad has put on high-rise buildings like we used to put on our mother’s gold net high heel shoes and flaming Carnival boots when we were toddlers. But I don’t believe the island has changed. Not Trinidad.

  The light is narrowing like an eye doctor’s slit lamp. Better this way, or this way? I can’t see. I can�
��t see more than a palm’s width. I mustn’t sleep in public.

  What are you doing here?

  SUNDAY

  I can only glimpse her though my eyelashes which are sticky with yampee. But those are not my eyelashes. They are coconut trees with ropes knotted to them and planks of wood attached to the ropes, and boys in Sea Scout uniform are measuring the angle of the sun to build their clubhouse with next to no construction equipment, under the direction of the mathematical genius Trini Chinese priest. So we must be in Toco. So this night is taking me to almost equatorial sun, four thousand miles west of England. And when I land, my internal compass-rose flips like my heart and landing in Toco I don’t feel that I have travelled west; I feel that we are north-east, on the tip of the island, the original Atlantic island shaped like a boot and which we kicked behind us, growing up.

  That crazy lady is looking at me and holding what looks like my handbag. I check myself and I’m not carrying anything. What the hell is this? Since when jumbie does thief? She’s not getting away… If I do anything before I die, before I wake, I am going to find out what business it is she has with me. What we have to do with each other.

  MONDAY

  But I really need to stay awake. Being shut inside this scarcely moving car feels like being shut inside a handbag: the odour of warm leather and straining plastic, the talcum choker of sweat, the lipstick-stained Kleenex tumbling like roses on the floor. The light is not changing. We’re stuck in traffic and this is the vagrants’ beat; this is where the vagrants beat on rolled-up car windows, their faces like Christ and their crack cocaine limbs too thin to crucify.

  It had a goat running up and down the cemetery wall. Man, how I envied the creature its freedom. That was one balanced animal. It knew where it was going, and that nobody was going with it.

  The church people left the window louvres open. It still have the Virgin Mary statue, turning her sea-blue back to the street.