Circle Game (3 page)

I held you
through all your shifts
of structure: while your bones turned
from caved rock back to marrow,
the dangerous
fur faded to hair
the bird's cry died in your throat
the treebark paled from your skin
the leaves from your eyes

till you limped back again
to daily man:
a lounger on streetcorners
in iron-shiny gabardine
a leaner on stale tables;
at night a twitching sleeper
dreaming of crumbs and rinds and a sagging woman,
caged by a sour bed.

The early
languages are obsolete.

These days we keep
our weary distances:
sparring in the vacant spaces
of peeling rooms
and rented minutes, climbing
all the expected stairs, our voices
abraded with fatigue,
our bodies wary.

Shrunk by my disbelief
you cannot raise
the green gigantic skies, resume
the legends of your disguises:

this shape is final.

Now, when you come near
attempting towards me across
these sheer cavernous
inches of air

your flesh has no more stories
or surprises;

my face flinches
under the sarcastic
tongues of your estranging
fingers,
the caustic remark of your kiss.

We sit at a clean table
eating thoughts from clean plates

and see, there is my heart
germfree, and transparent as glass

and there is my brain, pure
as cold water in the china
bowl of my skull

and you are talking
with words that fall spare
on the ear like the metallic clink
of knife and fork.

Safety by all means;
so we eat and drink
remotely, so we pick
the abstract bone

but something is hiding
somewhere
in the scrubbed bare
cupboard of my body
flattening itself
against a shelf
and feeding
on other people's leavings

a furtive insect, sly and primitive
the necessary cockroach
in the flesh
that nests in dust.

It will sidle out
when the lights have all gone off
in this bright room

(and you can't
crush it in the dark then
my friend or search it out
with your mind's hands that smell
of insecticide and careful soap)

In spite of our famines
it keeps itself alive

: how it gorges on a few
unintentional
spilled crumbs of love

i

The children on the lawn
joined hand to hand
go round and round

each arm going into
the next arm, around
full circle
until it comes
back into each of the single
bodies again

They are singing, but
not to each other:
their feet move
almost in time to the singing

We can see
the concentration on
their faces, their eyes
fixed on the empty
moving spaces just in
front of them.

We might mistake this
tranced moving for joy
but there is no joy in it

We can see (arm in arm)
as we watch them go
round and round
intent, almost
studious (the grass
underfoot ignored, the trees
circling the lawn
ignored, the lake ignored)
that the whole point

for them
of going round and round
is (faster

  slower)
going round and round

ii

Being with you
here, in this room

is like groping through a mirror
whose glass has melted
to the consistency
of gelatin

You refuse to be
(and I)
an exact reflection, yet
will not walk from the glass,
be separate.

Anyway, it is right
that they have put
so many mirrors here
(chipped, hung crooked)
in this room with its high transom
and empty wardrobe; even
the back of the door
has one.

There are people in the next room
arguing, opening and closing drawers
(the walls are thin)

You look past me, listening
to them, perhaps, or
watching
your own reflection somewhere
behind my head,
over my shoulder

You shift, and the bed
sags under us, losing its focus

There is someone in the next room

There is always

(your face
remote, listening)

someone in the next room.

iii

However,
in all their games
there seems
to be some reason

however
abstract they
at first appear

When we read them legends
in the evening
of monstrous battles, and secret
betrayals in the forest
and brutal deaths,

they scarcely listened;
one yawned and fidgeted; another
chewed the wooden handle
of a hammer;
the youngest one examined
a slight cut on his toe,

and we wondered how
they could remain
completely without fear
or even interest
as the final sword slid through
the dying hero.

The next night
walking along the beach

we found the trenches
they had been making:
fortified with pointed sticks
driven into the sides
of their sand moats

and a lake-enclosed island
with no bridges:

a last attempt
(however
eroded by the water
in an hour)
to make
maybe, a refuge human
and secure from the reach

of whatever walks along
(sword hearted)
these night beaches.

iv

Returning to the room:
I notice how
all your word-
plays, calculated ploys
of the body, the witticisms
of touch, are now
attempts to keep me
at a certain distance
and (at length) avoid
admitting I am here

I watch you
watching my face
indifferently
yet with the same taut curiosity
with which you might regard
a suddenly discovered part
of your own body:
a wart perhaps,

and I remember that
you said
in childhood you were
a tracer of maps
(not making but) moving
a pen or a forefinger
over the courses of the rivers,
the different colours
that mark the rise of mountains;
a memorizer
of names (to hold
these places
in their proper places)

So now you trace me
like a country's boundary
or a strange new wrinkle in
your own wellknown skin

and I am fixed, stuck
down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mind's continent

(here and yet not here, like
the wardrobe and the mirrors
the voices through the wall
your body ignored on the bed),

transfixed
by your eyes'
cold blue thumbtacks

v

The children like the block
of grey stone that was once a fort
but now is a museum:

especially
they like the guns
and the armour brought from
other times and countries

and when they go home
their drawings will be full
for some days, of swords
archaic sunburst maces
broken spears
and vivid red explosions.

While they explore
the cannons
(they aren't our children)

we walk outside along
the earthworks, noting
how they are crumbling
under the unceasing
attacks of feet and flower roots;

The weapons
that were once outside
sharpening themselves on war
are now indoors
there, in the fortress,
fragile
in glass cases;

Why is it
(I'm thinking
of the careful moulding
round the stonework archways)
that is this time, such
elaborate defences keep
things that are no longer
(much)
worth defending?

vi

And you play the safe
game the orphan game

the ragged winter game
that says, I am alone

(hungry: I know you want me
to play it also)

the game of the waif who stands
at every picture window,

shivering, pinched nose pressed
against the glass, the snow
collecting on his neck,
watching the happy families

(a game of envy)

Yet he despises them: they are so
Victorian Christmas-card:
the cheap paper shows
under the pigments of
their cheerful fire-
places and satin-
ribboned
suburban laughter
and they have their own forms
of parlour
games: father and mother
playing father and mother

He's glad
to be left
out by himself
in the cold

(hugging himself).

When I tell you this,
you say (with a smile fake
as a tinsel icicle):

You do it too.

Which in some ways
is a lie, but also I suppose
is right, as usual:

although I tend to pose
in other seasons
outside other windows.

vii

Summer again;
in the mirrors of this room
the children wheel, singing
the same song;

This casual bed
scruffy as dry turf,
the counterpane
rumpled with small burrows, is
their grassy lawn

and these scuffed walls
contain their circling trees,
that low clogged sink
their lake

(a wasp comes,
drawn by the piece of sandwich
left on the nearby beach

(how carefully you do
such details);

one of the children flinches
but won't let go)

You make them
turn and turn, according to
the closed rules of your games,
but there is no joy in it

and as we lie
arm in arm, neither
joined nor separate

(your observations change me
to a spineless woman in
a cage of bones, obsolete fort
pulled inside out),

our lips moving
almost in time to their singing,

listening to the opening
and closing of the drawers
in the next room

(of course there is always
danger but where
would you locate it)

(the children spin
a round cage of glass
from the warm air
with their thread-thin
insect voices)

and as we lie
here, caught
in the monotony of wandering
from room to room, shifting
the place of our defences,

I want to break
these bones, your prisoning rhythms

(winter,
summer)

all the glass cases,

erase all maps,
crack the protecting
eggshell of your turning
singing children:

I want the circle
broken.

You want this instant:
nearly spring, both of us walking,
wind blowing

walking
sunlight knitting the leaves before our eyes
the wind empty as Sunday

rain drying
in the wormy sidewalk puddles
the vestiges of night on our
lightscratched eyelids, our breezy fingers

you want to have it and so
you arrange us:

in front of a church, for perspective,
you make me stop walking
and compose me on the lawn;

you insist
that the clouds stop moving
the wind stop swaying the church
on its boggy foundations
the sun hold still in the sky

for your organized instant.

Camera man
how can I love your glass eye?

Wherever you partly are
now, look again
at your souvenir,
your glossy square of paper
before it dissolves completely:

it is the last of autumn
the leaves have unravelled

the pile of muddy rubble
in the foreground, is the church

the clothes I wore
are scattered over the lawn
my coat flaps in a bare tree

there has been a hurricane

that small black speck
travelling towards the horizon
at almost the speed of light

is me

They lie side by side
under a thick quilt of silence.
The air silts up with snow.

The drifting land
merges with the inside room
gradually through the window

and the white sheet
swells and furrows
in the wind: no things
in this deep sleep are solid

only perhaps this floating
bed which holds them up, a life-
raft where they weather seas
that undulate with danger.

Under the bed the dust
eddies and collects;
dead leaves, broken
twigs, water-sodden
bones of small
animals gather
like sediment on the seafloor
under the snow.

Outside, the land
is filled with drowning men

and stretched remote close

beside her

he foundered and went down
some time before she knew.

The sun had been burning for a long time
before we saw it, and we saw it
only then because
it seared itself through the roof.

We, who thought we were living
in the centre of a vast night
and therefore spent our time
hoarding our own heat

were astonished by the light.

I made this house once
because I wanted the
coldest season, where you could be
if only by comparison, a
substitute for sun

but the earth
turns for its own reasons
ignoring mine, and these human
miscalculations

and so we are drifting
into a tepid ocean
on a shrinking piece of winter

(for two so frozen
this long in
glacial innocence
to swim would be
implausible)

with ice the only thing
between us and disaster.

Below my window
in the darkening
backyard the children
play at war
among the flowerbeds

on my shelves the bottles
accumulate

my sibyl (every woman
should have one) has chosen
to live there

thin green wine bottles
emptied of small dinners
ovaltine jars, orange-brown
emptied of easy sleep

my sibyl crouches
in one of them
wrinkled as a pickled
baby, twoheaded prodigy
at a freakfair
hairless, her sightless
eyes like eggwhites

I stand looking
over the fading city

she calls to me with the many
voices of the children
not I want to die
but You must die
later or sooner alas
you were born weren't you
the minutes thunder like guns
coupling won't help you
or plurality
I see it
I prophesy

but she doesn't reach me.
Old spider
sibyl, I'll
uncork you
let in a little air
or I'll ignore you.

Right now
my skin is a sack of
clever tricks, five
senses ribboned like birthday
presents unravel
in a torn web around me

and a man dances
in my kitchen, moving
like a metronome
with hopes of staying
for breakfast in the half-empty
bottle in his pocket