Circle Game (2 page)

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the centre
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

We must be the only ones
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods

I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)

gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.

You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,

tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,

not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.

The man came from nowhere
and is going nowhere

one day he suddenly appeared
outside my window
suspended in the air
between the ground and the tree bough

I once thought all encounters
were planned:
newspaper boys passing
in the street, with cryptic
headlines, waitresses and their coded
menus, women standing in streetcars
with secret packages, were sent to
me. And gave some time
to their deciphering

but this one is clearly
accidental; clearly this one is

no green angel, simple black and white
fiend; no ordained
messenger; merely
a random face
revolving outside the window

and if no evident abstract
significance, then
something as contingent
as a candidate for marriage
in this district of exacting neighbours:
not meant for me personally
but generic: to be considered
from all angles (origin; occupation;
aim in life); identification
papers examined; if appropriate,
conversed with; when
he can be made to descend.

Meanwhile, I wonder

which of the green or
black and white
myths he swallowed by mistake
is feeding on him like a tapeworm
has raised him from the ground
and brought him to this window

swivelling from some invisible rope
his particular features
fading day by day

his eyes melted
first; Thursday
his flesh became translucent

shouting at me
(specific) me
desperate messages with his
obliterated mouth

in a silent language

It seems I am always
moving

(and behind me the lady
slumped in darkness
on a wooden bench
in the park, thinking
of nothing: the screams
of the children
going down the slide
behind her, topple her mind
into deep trenches)

moving

(and in front of me the man
standing in a white room
three flights up, a razor
(or is the evening
a razor) poised in his hand
considering
what it is for)

move with me.

Here I am in
a pause in space
hunched on the edge
of a tense suitcase
(in which there is a gathering
of soiled clothing, plastic bottles,
scissors, barbed wire
and a lady
and a man)

In a minute everything will begin
to move: the man
will tumble from the room, the lady
will take the razor in her black-gloved hand

and I will get on the train
and move elsewhere once more.

At the last station
under the electric clock
there was a poster:
Where?
part of some obscure campaign;

at this one there is a loudspeaker
that calls the names and places
(the sounds like static; the silences
thin as razorblades between)

at the next one there will be
a lady and a man,
some other face or evidence
to add to the
collection in my suitcase.

The world is turning
me into evening.

I'm almost ready:
this time it will be far.

I move
and live on the edges
(what edges)
I live
on all the edges there are.

My younger sister at the chessboard
ponders her next move
the arrangement of her empire
(crosslegged on the floor)

while below her in the cellar
the embroidered costumes, taken
from her mother's storage trunks
and lined against the walls
lose their stiff directions in
the instant that she hesitates
above the armies

The shadows of the chessmen
stretch, fall across her: she
is obsessed by history;
each wooden totem rises
like the cairn of an event

(but)

Outside the windows of this room
the land unrolls without landmark
a meshing of green on green, the inner
membrane of the gaping moment
opening around a sun that is
a hole burnt in the sky.

The house recoils
from the brightedged vacancy
of leaves, into itself: the cellar
darkness looming with archaic
silver clocks, brocaded chairs, the fading echoes
of a hunting horn.

The white king moves
by memories and procedures
and corners
no final ending but
a stalemate,
forcing her universe to his
geographies: the choice imposes
vestiges of black and white
ruled squares on the green landscape,

and her failed solution
has planted the straight rows
of an armoured wood patrolled by wooden
kings and queens
hunting the mechanical unicorn
under a coin-round sun.

Her step on the stairs
sounds through the concrete mazes.

In her cellar the mailed
costumes rustle
waiting to be put on.

This year in my ravines
it was warm for a long time
although the leaves fell early
and my old men, remembering themselves
walked waist-high through the
yellow grass
in my ravines, through
alders and purple
fireweed, with burrs
catching on their sleeves,

watching the small boys climbing
in the leafless trees
or throwing pebbles
at tin cans floating
in the valley creek, or following
the hard paths worn by former
walkers or the hooves
of riding-stable horses

and at night
they slept under the bridges
of the city in my (still)
ravines

old men, ravelled as thistles
their clothing gone to seed
their beards cut stubble

while the young boys
climbed and swung
above them wildly
in the leafless eyelid
veins and branches
of a bloodred night
falling, bursting purple
as ancient rage, in

old men's
dreams of slaughter
dreams of
(impossible)
flight.

i

Outside the window the harbour is
a surface only with mountains and
sailboats and
destroyers

depthless on the glass

but inside there's a
patterned carpet on the floor

maroon green purple
brittle fronds and hard
petals

It makes the sea
accessible
as I stretch out with these
convoluted gardens
at eyelevel,

               the sun
filtering down through the windows
of this housetop aquarium

and in the green halflight
I drift down past the
marginal orchards branched
colourful

feathered
               and overfilled
with giving

into the long iceage

      the pressures

of winter

the snowfall endless in the sea

ii

But not
rocked not cradled not forgetful:
there are no
sunken kingdoms no
edens in the waste ocean

among the shattered
memories of battles

only the cold jewelled symmetries
of the voracious eater
the voracious eaten

the dream creatures that glow
sulphurous in darkness or
flash like neurons
are blind, insatiable, all
gaping jaws and famine

and here
to be aware is
to know total

     fear.

iii

Gunshot

outside the window

                      nine o'clock

Somehow I sit up
breaking the membrane of water

Emerged and
beached on the carpet
breathing this air once more
I stare

at the sackful of scales and

my fisted
hand

    my skin
holds

remnants of ancestors

fossil bones and fangs

acknowledgement:

I was born

    dredged up from time
and harboured
the night these wars began.

In this room we are always in:

tired with all the other games
we get out cards and play
at double
solitaire:
the only thing
either of us might win.

There's a queen.
Or rather two of them
joined at the waist, or near
(you can't tell where
exactly, under the thick
brocaded costume)
or is it one
woman with two heads?
Each has hair drawn back
made of lines
and a half-smile that is part
of a set pattern.

Each holds a golden flower
with five petals, ordered
and unwilting.

Outside there is a lake
or this time is it a street

There's a king (or kings)
too, with a beard to show
he is a man
and something abstract
in his hand
that might be either
a sceptre or a sword.

The colour doesn't matter,
black or red:
there's little choice between
heart and spade.
The important things
are the flowers and the swords;
but they stay flat,
are cardboard.

Outside there is a truck
or possibly a motorboat

and in this lighted room
across the table, we
confront each other

wearing no costumes.

You have nothing
that serves the function of a sceptre
and I have
certainly
no flowers.

This man I
know (about a year
ago, when he was young) blew
his arm off in the cellar
making bombs
to explode the robins
on the lawns.

Now he has a hook
instead of hand;

It is an ingenious
gadget, and comes
with various attachments:
knife for meals,
pink plastic hand for everyday
handshakes, black stuffed leather glove
for social functions.

I attempt pity

But, Look, he says, glittering
like a fanatic, My hook
is an improvement:

         and to demonstrate
lowers his arm: the steel questionmark turns and opens,
and from his burning
cigarette

         unscrews
and holds the delicate
ash: a thing
precise
my clumsy tenderskinned pink fingers
couldn't do.

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things;
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows.

On the streets
love
these days
is a matter for
either scavengers
(turning death to life) or
(turning life
to death) for predators

(The billboard lady
with her white enamel
teeth and red
enamel claws, is after

the men
when they pass her
never guess they have brought her
to life, or that her
body's made of cardboard, or in her
veins flows the drained
blood of their desire)

(Look, the grey man
his footsteps soft
as flannel,
glides from his poster

and the voracious women, seeing
him so trim,
edges clear as cut paper
eyes clean
and sharp as lettering,
want to own him
… are you dead? are you dead?
they say, hoping …)

Love, what are we to do
on the streets these days
and how am I
to know that you
and how are you to know
that I, that

we are not parts of those
people, scraps glued together
waiting for a chance
to come to life

(One day
I'll touch the warm
flesh of your throat, and hear
a faint crackle of paper

or you, who think
that you can read my mind
from the inside out, will taste the
black ink on my tongue, and find
the fine print written
just beneath my skin.)