Selected Poems (3 page)

Putting pressed frangipani in her dress.

She’s not as desperate for a go as that.

She has her gaudy parrot and her spayed, grey cat

For company.
Babar
’s a champion impressionist

Of whisky noises when his owner’s pissed.

She pretends he’s learnt it when he’s heard her wash

And offers visitors a choice of squash.

Darkness. The swoosh of soda and the glug

Of Scotch come from
Babar
as that drunken thug

She hired as a watchman and
must
fire, treads

Down her phlox and pees on her arctotis beds.

She knows what he’s up to. Brute! The garage door

Swings on its hinges for the watchman’s whore.

And now they’re rocking. One cracked heel

Scrapes after purchase on her
Peugeot
wheel.

Rustle and gasp, black creatures claw

At one another in her packing straw.

You never know in these hot climates;
coups

Can throw the whole white quarter on the booze.

Whisky and danger. Ah who knows? Who knows?

Some drunken Public Works might still propose.

But she wouldn’t have him. No, not her. Boy!

She’ll give you the sack for those grunts of joy.

V

Northwards two hundred miles, an emptiness

As big as Europe;
Sah’ra
; Nothingness.

South six hundred, miles of churning sea

Make of the strongest swimmer a nonentity,

Bleaching the blackest flesh as white as spray.

The sea makes no demands but gets its way.

The campus wants its pep- and sleeping pills.

It’s not diseases, but the void that kills,

The space, the gaps, the darkness, that same void

He hears vibrating in clogged adenoid

And vocal cords. Through his cool stethoscope

He hears despair pulsate and withered hope

Flutter the failing heart a little, death

Of real feeling in a laboured breath.

He knows with his firm finger on a pulse

It is this Nothingness and nothing else

Throbs in the blood. Nothing is no little part

Of time’s huge effort in the human heart.

There’s love. There’s courage. And that’s all.

And the
itus et reditus
of Pascal.

He’s not asked out to drinks or dinner much.

He knows how the slightest sweatrash on the crutch

Scares some and with good reason, whose child’s whose,

Whose marriage depends on sjamboks, and who screws

In
Posts & Telegraphs
, and reads instead

His damp-stained
Pensées
on their double bed.

The Nothingness! Lisa – she couldn’t stand

The boredom and packed off for Switzerland.

She sends him a postcard of a snowblown slope:

Boris, ich bin frei … und friere
. He can’t cope

Here alone. There’s nothing for a sick MO

Sick of savannah, sick of inselberg,

Sick of black Africa, who cannot go

Ever again to white St Petersburg.

I

A lake like lead. A bar. The crowding, nude

Slack-breasted, tattooed girls made lewd,

Lascivious gestures, their bald groins

Studded with wet francs, for my loose coins.

I’m surrounded by canoes.
Cadeau! Cadeau!

I fling out all my change, but they won’t go.

One paddles underneath and pokes a straw

At my bare ankles through the gaping floor.

I’m on my fifth warm beer. I need my cash.

I crunch her knuckles hard, and yell out:
Vache!

Then as she pulls my sandals:
Tu, vache noire!

They rock the rotten stilts that prop the bar.

My boatman saves me, and for ten francs more

Canoes me blushing to the nearest shore.

I lie back like a corpse Valhalla bound

And sleep. Only a wet, withdrawal sound

Sucks at my ear. I dream. I dream the sun

Blackens my bare balls to bitumen.

II

Again I feel my school belt with the snake-

Hook, silver buckle tauten and then break

From the banisters I swung off. Suicide –

The noose’s love-bites and a bruised backside.

I laughed a long time and was glad I fell.

The white wake swabbing at the woundless swell,

The swashing, greasy pool, the spindrift fine

As
Shelltox
seasoning my lips with brine

Makes sadness shoreless and shakes sullen grief

Apart like gobs of spittle. Off Tenerife

French soldiers from Gabon dressed up as sheikhs

Waltzed amidships and blackamoors cut cakes

Iced thick with tricolours. The
Marseillaise

Boomed from the tannoy and the easy lays

Beamed at the officers. I flung your zig-zag

Tuareg ring and the red, goat-leather bag

I’d bought for our swimming things into the sea

Placating nothing. A little lighter, free

To saunter in fancy dress the festooned decks,

In the midst of plenty, hungry for good sex,

I found a lonely woman. I got you off my chest,

But had to have my hand held and I lay

All night with my confessor, fully dressed,

Afraid of my terror, longing for the day.

III

Bordeaux – Paris – London – Leeds; I get

Cold and tachycardia in my couchette.

With weeks of travel thudding in my brain,

Bilges, ship’s engine, and the English train,

Too much black coffee and cold lager beer

I find sleep impossible. My throbbing ear

Bangs on the pillow with an angry thud –

It’s you, it’s you, with a sound like blood,

After the bloodshed, if your tribe survives,

Pounding a big man’s yams among young wives.

IV

Leeds City Station, and a black man sweeps

Cartons and papers into tidy heaps.

‘… the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a pansy into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.’

(Shelley,
A Defence of Poetry
)

Distant Ophir

 (after Hieronymi Fracastorii,
Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus
, Veronae,
MDXXX
)

‘Westerners, who laid the Sun’s fowl low,

the flocks of Apollo, now stand and hear

the dreadful sufferings you must undergo.

This land, where you are now, is that Ophir

your flashy maps show off like jewellery

but not yet yours to own, nor domineer

its quiet peoples until now quite free;

cities and new sacraments you won’t impose

until you’ve suffered much by land and sea.

Self-lumbered pilgrims of San Lazaro’s,

brothels and gold bars bring you no joy,

porphyry and rape bring no repose!

You’ll war with strangers, bloodily, destroy

or be destroyed, your discoveries will cost

destructions greater than the siege of Troy,

worse wanderings after with more thousands lost,

comrades you fitted out search parties for

hutches of bleached ribs on our bare coast.

You’ll go on looking, losing more and more

to the sea, the climate, weapons, ours
and
yours,

your crimes abroad brought home as civil war.

And also
Syphilis
: sores, foul sores

will drive you back through storm and calenture

crawling like lepers to our peaceful shores.

The malaise of the West will lure

the scapegoats of its ills, you and your crew,

back to our jungles looking for a cure. –

You’ll only find the Old World in the New,

and you’ll rue your
discubrimiento
, rue

it, rue Africa, rue Cuba, rue Peru!’

And away behind the crags the dark bird flew.

And everything it prophesied came true.

Note
. Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483–1553), the author of
Syphilis
, was born, as perhaps befits a true poet, without a mouth. The fact is celebrated in the well-known epigram of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558). Fracastorius died, after an apoplexy, speechless.

‘An experienced doctor has said that he has never seen tropical neurasthenia develop in a man with a sound philosophy of life.’

(
Notes on the Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates
, London,
The Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene, 3rd ed., 1960)

I.
The Origin of the Beery Way

The Coast, the Coast, a hundred years ago!

Poisonous mangroves and funereal palms,

Victorian hearse-plumes nodding victims in

To bouts of wifeless boredom and
El Vomito
,

Shacking with natives, lovely Sodom’s sin,

Boozers with riff-raff in their
British
arms.

Reports put down ‘futility & worthlessness’ –

I’m just a big
colon
: kick, kick, caress,

Administer, then murmur
beau, beau, beau

Like some daft baby at your Mandingo.

From
dashi, dashi
to
cadeau, cadeau
,

Armed with my
Dettol
, my
Od-o-ro-no
,

My
African Personality
, I go

For a bit of the old Français finesse,

Not work at your ballocks like a kid’s yo-yo,

Then buck you off them like a rodeo.

With prudish pansies I am passionless.

My sex-life’s manic like a bad rondeau.

I need to forage among Francophones.

A real beaubarian and buckaneer, that’s me, Yo Ho,

Bottles of
Black & White
do me for rum.

I soft-shoe shuffle on the white man’s bones,

Windborne or brittle as a popadum.

Omar, not Khayam, the Gambia’s mad Marabout

Changed the Commissioners’ bullets into water;

Into water being Moslem. I, being atheist,

Am full of more potent potions when I’m pissed.

A century later, full of
Guinnesses
and
Stars
,

I’m God’s own Heaven, and as I slash I shout:

The white man’s water turns back into fire!

Braving castration at their scimitars,

And single-handed put Islam to rout,

And vanquish the missions with my bent desire,

Spouting a semen capable of slaughter.

Flat on my back, beneath the Galaxy, I fear

This burning in my groin is gonorrhoea.

II.
The Elephant & the Kangaroo

The first rains slap the leaves like slow applause.

My nerves are soothed by it.

The insects’ constant grind has been put down.

It means a night indoors;

nothing doing in the town;

power failure; all the dives unlit.

The imported apples begin to look like shit.

The
Star
beer’s warmish, the cut fruit brown.

Chops will be rotting in the Lebanese Cold Stores.

The rainmaker wraps away his amulet

and hugs his gods to see the great downpours.

So the world comes back into its own

and all the houses through a stage-scene gauze

of wavering, driven rain and drunkenness.
It

goes on spinning and will not run down.

In cool bush-shirt and shorts I sit

feeling the world spinning, the spinning floors

between the brandy and verandah. Laterite.

Bush, like effigies of bush, is washed of it.

A clean green everywhere and it still pours.

This is Noah’s weather. All will drown –

But I’ll escape by crawling on all fours.

III.
The Foreign Body

Each blue horizontal thrust

into the red, rain-spattered dust

brings my tachycardia back.

My heart’s a thing caught in a sack.

Lashes of tall grass whip

at my genitals, the thick ears flip

hard insects from sprung stalks

and the fraying lightning forks.

Boom! The flame trees blaze

out the ancientest of days.

All the dead in running shoes!

A bootless marchpast of dead Jews!

Boom! Bad blood cells boom

in unison for
Lebensraum
.

Burst corpuscles and blood cells spray

the dark with fire and die away.

The brief glares strewed

flamboyants in my face like blood.

Boom! Boom! And at each wrist

a worm as blue as amethyst

burrows its blunt head in my palm

to keep its bloodless body warm.

And in my bed I hear the whine

of soliciting anopheline,

and diptera diseases zoom

round and round my foetid room,

and randiness, my life’s disease,

in bottle green Cantharides,

and the bloody tampan, that posh louse

plushy like an Opera House,

red as an Empire or lipstick,

insect vampire, soft-backed tick –

all females, the female womb

is stuffed with blind trypanosome.

Which of your probosces made

my heart fire off this cannonade,

or is its billion gun salute

for lover or for prostitute?

Boom! Boom! And now here comes

the endless roll of danger drums,

and the death-defying leap

jerks me panicking from sleep.

Boom! Boom! Bonhomie!

America’s backslapping me.

Starchy Baptist cherubim

give me tests at the SIM,

and swallowed US tracers trace

my body’s Cuban missile base.

Boom! Boom! World War 3’s

waging in my arteries.

Desperately I call these app-

rehensions Africa but the map

churns like wet acres in these rains