Circle Game (4 page)

There are omens of
rockets among the tricycles
I know it

time runs out
in the ticking hips of the
man whose twitching skull
jerks on loose
vertebrae in my kitchen
flower
beds predict it

the city burns with an
afterglow of explosions as the
streetlights all come on

The thing that calls itself
I
right now
doesn't care

I don't care

I leave that to my
necessary sibyl
(that's what she's for)
with her safely bottled
anguish and her glass
despair

i

Escaping from allegories
in the misty east, where inherited events
barnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshake
might be a finger pointing; you can't look
in store windows without seeing
reflections/remnants of privateer
bones or methodist grandfathers with jaws
carved as wood pulpits warning
of the old evil; where not-quite-
forgotten histories
make the boards of lineal frame
farmhouses rotten

the fishermen
sit all day on old wharves facing
neither sea-
wards nor inland, mending
and untangling their old nets
of thought

and language is the law

we ran west

wanting
a place of absolute
unformed beginning

(the train
an ark
upheld on the brain's darkness)

but the inner lakes reminded
us too much of ancient oceans
first flood: blood-
enemy and substance
(was our train like
an ark or like a seasnake?

and the prairies were so nearly
empty as prehistory
that each of the
few solid objects took some great
implication, hidden but
more sudden than a signpost

(like an inscribed shard, broken bowl
dug at a desert level
where they thought
no man had been,
or a burned bone)

(every dwarf tree portentous
with twisted wisdom, though
we knew no
apples grew there

and that shape, gazing
at nothing
by a hooftrampled streamside:
it could
have been a centaur)

and even the mountains
at the approach, were
conical, iconic
again:
(tents
in the desert? triangular
ships? towers? breasts?
words)
again
these barriers

ii

Once in the pass, the steep
faulted gorges were at last
real: we
tossed our eastern
suitcases from the caboose
and all our baggage:
overboard
left in our wake
along the tracks
and (we saw) our train became
only a train, in real
danger of falling; strained
speechless through those new mountains
we stepped
unbound
into

what a free emerging
on the raw
streets and hills
without meaning
always creeping up behind us
(that cold touch on the shoulder)

our faces scraped as blank
as we could wish them

(but needing new
houses, new
dishes, new
husks)

iii

There are more secondhand
stores here than we expected:
though we brought nothing with us
(we thought)
we have begun to unpack.

A residual brass bedstead
scratched with the initials
of generic brides and grooms;
chipped squat teapots: old totemic
mothers; a boxful
of used hats.

In the forest, even
apart from the trodden
paths, we can tell (from the sawn
firstumps) that many
have passed the same way
some time before
this (hieroglyphics
carved in the bark)

Things here grow from the ground
too insistently
green to seem
spontaneous. (My skeletons, I think,
will be still
in the windows when I look,
as well as the books
and the index-
fingered gloves.)

There is also a sea
that refuses to stay in the harbour:
becomes opaque
air or throws
brown seaweeds like small drowned hands
up on these shores

(the fishermen
are casting their nets here
as well)

and blunted mountains
rolling

     (the first whales maybe?)
in the
inescapable mists.

There are similarities
I notice: that the hills
which the eyes make flat as a wall, welded
together, open as I move
to let me through; become
endless as prairies; that the trees
grow spindly, have their roots
often in swamps; that this is a poor country;
that a cliff is not known
as rough except by hand, and is
therefore inaccessible. Mostly
that travel is not the easy going
from point to point, a dotted
line on a map, location
plotted on a square surface
but that I move surrounded by a tangle
of branches, a net of air and alternate
light and dark, at all times;
that there are no destinations
apart from this.

There are differences
of course: the lack of reliable charts;
more important, the distraction of small details:
your shoe among the brambles under the chair
where it shouldn't be; lucent
white mushrooms and a paring knife
on the kitchen table; a sentence
crossing my path, sodden as a fallen log
I'm sure I passed yesterday

                 (have I been

walking in circles again?)

but mostly the danger:
many have been here, but only
some have returned safely.

A compass is useless; also
trying to take directions
from the movements of the sun,
which are erratic;
and words here are as pointless
as calling in a vacant
wilderness.

              Whatever I do I must
keep my head. I know
it is easier for me to lose my way
forever here, than in other landscapes

i) Totems

We went to the park
where they kept the wooden people:
static, multiple
uprooted and trans-
planted.

Their faces were restored,
freshly-painted.
In front of them
the other wooden people
posed for each others' cameras
and nearby a new booth
sold replicas and souvenirs.

One of the people was real.
It lay on its back, smashed
by a toppling fall or just
the enduring of minor winters.
Only one of the heads had
survived intact, and it was
also beginning to decay
but there was a
life in the progressing
of old wood back to
the earth, obliteration

that the clear-hewn
standing figures lacked.

As for us, perennial watchers,
tourists of another kind
there is nothing for us to worship;

no pictures of ourselves, no bluesky
summer fetishes, no postcards
we can either buy, or
smiling
be.

There are few totems that remain
living for us.
Though in passing,
through glass we notice

dead trees in the seared meadows
dead roots bleaching in the swamps.

ii) Pebbles

Talking was difficult. Instead
we gathered coloured pebbles
from the places on the beach
where they occurred.

They were sea-smoothed, sea-completed.
They enclosed what they intended
to mean in shapes
as random and necessary
as the shapes of words

and when finally
we spoke
the sounds of our voices fell
into the air single and
solid and rounded and really
there
and then dulled, and then like sounds
gone, a fistful of gathered
pebbles there was no point
in taking home, dropped on a beachful
of other coloured pebbles

and when we turned to go
a flock of small
birds flew scattered by the
fright of our sudden moving
and disappeared: hard

sea pebbles
thrown solid for an instant
against the sky

flight of words

iii) Carved Animals

The small carved
animal is passed from
hand to hand
around the circle
until the stone grows warm

touching, the hands do not know
the form of animal
which was made or
the true form of stone
uncovered

and the hands, the fingers the
hidden small bones
of the hands bend to hold the shape,
shape themselves, grow
cold with the stone's cold, grow
also animal, exchange
until the skin wonders
if stone is human

In the darkness later
and even when the animal
has gone, they keep
the image of that
inner shape

hands holding warm
hands holding
the half-formed air

Again so I subside
nudged by the softening
driftwood of your body
tangle on you like a water-
weed caught
on a submerged treelimb

with sleep like a swamp
growing, closing around me
sending its tendrils through the brown
sediments of darkness
where we transmuted are
part of this warm rotting
of vegetable flesh
this quiet spawning of roots

released
from the lucidities of day
when you are something I can
trace a line around, with eyes
cut shapes
from air, the element
where we
must calculate according to
solidities

but here I blur
into you our breathing sinking
to green millenniums
and sluggish in our blood
all ancestors
are warm fish moving

The earth
shifts, bringing
the moment before focus, when
these tides recede; and we
see each other through the
hardening scales of waking

stranded, astounded
in a drying world

we flounder, the air
ungainly in our new lungs
with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning

Orange in the middle of a table:

It isn't enough
to walk around it
at a distance, saying
it's an orange:
nothing to do
with us, nothing
else: leave it alone

I want to pick it up
in my hand
I want to peel the
skin off; I want
more to be said to me
than just Orange:
want to be told
everything it has to say

And you, sitting across
the table, at a distance, with
your smile contained, and like the orange
in the sun: silent:

Your silence
isn't enough for me
now, no matter with what
contentment you fold
your hands together; I want
anything you can say
in the sunlight:

stories of your various
childhoods, aimless journeyings,
your loves; your articulate
skeleton; your posturings; your lies.

These orange silences
(sunlight and hidden smile)
make me want to
wrench you into saying;
now I'd crack your skull
like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin
to make you talk, or get
a look inside

But quietly:
if I take the orange
with care enough and hold it
gently

I may find
an egg
a sun
an orange moon
perhaps a skull; centre
of all energy
resting in my hand

can change it to
whatever I desire
it to be

and you, man, orange afternoon
lover, wherever
you sit across from me
(tables, trains, buses)

if I watch
quietly enough
and long enough

at last, you will say
(maybe without speaking)

(there are mountains
inside your skull
garden and chaos, ocean
and hurricane; certain
corners of rooms, portraits
of great-grandmothers, curtains
of a particular shade;
your deserts; your private
dinosaurs; the first
woman)

all I need to know:
tell me
everything
just as it was
from the beginning.

There are two of them:

One larger, with steep granite
cliffs facing us, dropping sheer
to the deep lake;

the other smaller, closer
to land, with a reef running
out from it and dead trees
grey, waist-high in the water.

We know they are alone
and always will be.

The lake takes care of that
and if it went,
they would be hills
and still demand
separateness
from the eye.

Yet, standing on the cliff
(the two
of us)
on our bigger island,
looking,

we find it pleasing
(it soothes our instinct for
symmetry, proportion,
for company perhaps)

that there are two of them.

i

It is not available to us
it
is not available, I said
closing my hours against you.

I live in a universe
mostly paper.
I make tents
from cancelled stamps.

Letters
are permitted but
don't touch me, I'd
crumple

I said

everything depends on you

staying away.

ii

I didn't want you to be
visible.

How could you invade
me when
I ordered you not
to

Leave my evasions
alone
stay in the borders
I've drawn, I wrote, but

you twisted your own wide spaces

and made them include me.

iii

You came easily into my house
and without being asked
washed the dirty dishes,

because you don't find
my forms of chaos,
inverted midnights
and crusted plates,
congenial:

restoring some kind of
daily normal order.

Not normal for me:

I live in a house where
beautiful clean dishes
aren't important

enough.

iv

Love is an awkward word

Not what I mean and
too much like magazine stories
in stilted dentists'
waiting rooms.
How can anyone use it?

I'd rather say
I like your
lean spine
or your eyebrows
or your shoes

but just by standing there and
being awkward

you force me to speak

love.

v

You collapse my house of cards
merely by breathing

making other places
with your hands on wood, your
feet on sand

creating with such
generosity, mountains, distances
empty beach and rocks and sunlight
as you walk
so calmly into the sea

and returning, you
taste of salt,

and put together my own
body, another

place

for me to live
in.

vi

I don't wear gratitude
well. Or hats.

What would I do with
veils and silly feathers
or a cloth rose
growing from the top of my head?