Measures of Expatriation Page 7
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.