The Cinnamon Peeler (10 page)

This is the hour for sudden journeying.

               Cervantes accepts

a 17th Century invitation

from the Chinese Emperor.

Schools of Chinese-Spanish Linguistics!

Rivers of the world meet!

And here

ducks dressed in Asia

pivot on foreign waters.

At 4 a.m. he wakes in the sheet

that earlier held tropics in its whiteness.

The invited river flows through the house

into the kitchen up

stairs, he awakens and moves within it.

In the dim light

he sees the turkish carpet under water,

low stools, glint

of piano pedals, even a sleeping dog

whose dreams may be of rain.

It is a river he has walked elsewhere

now visiting moving with him at the hip

to kitchen where a friend sleeps in a chair

head on the table his grip

still round a glass, legs underwater.

He wants to relax

and give in to the night

fall horizontal and swim

to the back kitchen where his daughter sleeps.

He wishes to swim

to each of his family and gaze

at their underwater dreaming

this magic chain of bubbles.

Wife, son, household guests, all

comfortable in clean river water.

He is aware that for hours

there has been no conversation,

tongues have slid to stupidity on alcohol

sleeping mouths are photographs of yells.

He stands waiting, the sentinel,

shambling back and forth, his anger

and desire against the dark

which, if he closes his eyes,

will lose them all.

                         The oven light

shines up through water at him

a bathysphere a ghost ship

and in the half drowned room

the crickets like small pins

begin to tack down

the black canvas of this night,

begin to talk their hesitant

gnarled epigrams to each other

across the room.

               Creak and echo.

Creak and echo. With absolute clarity

he knows where he is.

She hesitated. ‘Are you being romantic now?
’

‘
I’m trying to tell you how I feel without exposing myself. You know what I mean?
’

ELMORE LEONARD

You stand still for three days

for a piece of wisdom

and everything falls to the right place

or wrong place

                         You speak

               don’t know whether

seraph or bitch

flutters at your heart

and look through windows

for cue cards

blazing in the sky.

                         The solution.

This last year I was sure

I was going to die

The geography of this room I know so well

tonight I could rise in the dark

sit at the table and write without light.

I am here in the country of warm rains.

A small cabin – a glass, wood,

tin bucket on the Pacific Rim.

               Geckoes climb

the window to peer in,

and all day the tirade pale blue waves

touch the black shore of volcanic rock

and fall to pieces here

How to arrive at this

drowning

on the edge of sea

               (How to drive

the Hana Road, he said—

one hand on the beer

one hand on your thigh

and one eye for the road)

Waves leap to this cliff all day

and in the evening lose

their pale blue

he rises from the bed

as wind from three directions

falls, takes his place

on the peninsula of sheets

which also loses colour

stands in the loose green kimono

by a large window and gazes

through gecko

past the deadfall

into sea,

               the unknown magic he loves

throws himself into

                         the blue heart

Tell me

all you know

about bamboo

growing wild, green

growing up into soft arches

in the temple ground

the traditions

driven through hands

through the heart

during torture

and most of all

                         this

small bamboo pipe

not quite horizontal

that drips

every ten seconds

to a shallow bowl

I love this

being here

not a word

just the faint

fall of liquid

the boom of an iron buddhist bell

in the heart rapid

as ceremonial bamboo

A man buying wine

Rainier beer at the store

would he be satisfied with this?

Cold showers, electric skillet,

Red River
on tv

Oh he could be

(Do you want

                         to be happy and write?)

He happens to love the stark

luxury of this place

– no armchairs, a fridge of beer and mangoes

               Precipitation.

All our narratives of sleep

a mild rumble to those inland

               Illicit pockets of

               the kimono

Heart like a sleeve

The cabin

               its tin roof

a wind run radio

catches the noise of the world.

He focuses on the gecko

almost transparent body

how he feels now

everything passing through him like light.

In certain mirrors

he cannot see himself at all.

He is joyous and breaking down.

The tug over the cliff.

What protects him

is the warmth in the sleeve

that is all, really

We go to the stark places of the earth

and find moral questions everywhere

Will John Wayne and Montgomery Clift

take their cattle to Missouri or Kansas?

Tonight I lean over the Pacific

and its blue wild silk

ringed by creatures

who

               
tchick tchick tchick

my sudden movement

who say nothing else.

There are those who are in

and there are those who look in

Tiny leather toes

hug the glass

On the porch

thin ceramic

chimes

               ride wind

off the Pacific

bells of the sea

                         I do not know

the name of large orange flowers

which thrive on salt air

lean half drunk

against the steps

Untidy banana trees

thick moss on the cliff

and then the plunge

to black volcanic shore

It is impossible to enter the sea here

except in a violent way

                         How we have moved

from thin ceramic

to such destruction

All night

               the touch

of wave on volcano.

There was the woman

who clutched my hair

like a shaken child.

The radio whistles

round a lost wave length.

All night slack-key music

and the bird whistling
duino

duino, words and music

entangled in pebble

ocean static.

The wild sea and her civilization

the League of the Divine Wind

and traditions of death.

                         Remember

those women in movies

who wept into the hair

of their dead men?

Going up stairs

I hang my shirt

on the stiff

ear of an antelope

Above the bed

               memory

restless green bamboo

               the distant army

assembles wooden spears

her feet braced

on the ceiling

sea in the eye

Reading the article

an 1825 report
Physiologie du Gout

on the artificial growing of truffles

speaks

               of ‘vain efforts

and deceitful promises,’

commandments of culinary art

Good

morning to your body

hello nipple

and appendix scar like a letter

of too much passion

from a mad Mexican doctor

All this noise at your neck!

heart clapping

like green bamboo

               this earring

    which

has flipped over

    and falls

               into the pool of your ear

The waves against black stone

that was a thousand year old

burning red river

could not reach us

               Cabin

‘hana’

               this
flower
of wood

in which we rose

out of the blue sheets

you thin as horizon

reaching for lamp or book

my shirt

               hungry

for everything about the other

here we steal places to stay

as we steal time

               never too proud to beg,

even if we never

see the other’s grin and star again

there is nothing resigned

in this briefness

we swallow complete

I will know everything here

                         this cup

                                        balanced on my chest

                         my eye witnessing the petal

                         drop away from its order,

                         your arm

for ever

precarious in all our fury

Every place has its own wisdom. Come.

Time we talked about the sea,

the long waves

                         ‘trapped around islands’

There are maps now whose portraits

have nothing to do with surface

Remember the angels, floating compasses

– Portolan atlases so complex

we looked down and never knew

which was earth which was sea?

The way birds the colour of prairie

confused by the sky

flew into the earth

(Remember those women

who claimed dead miners

the colour of the coal they drowned in)

The bathymetric maps startle.

Visions of the ocean floor

troughs, naked blue deserts,

Ganges Cone, the Mascarene Basin

so one is able now

in ideal situations

to plot a stroll

to new continents

‘doing the Berryman walk’

And beneath the sea

there are

these giant scratches

of pain

the markings of

some perfect animal

who has descended

burying itself

under the glossy

ballroom

or they have to do with ascending,

what we were, the earth creatures

longing for horizon.

I know one thing

our sure non-sliding

civilized feet

our small leather shoes

did not make them

(Ah you should be happy and write)

I want the passion

which puts your feet on the ceiling

this fist

to smash forward

take this silk

               somehow
Ah

out of the rooms of poetry

(Listen, solitude, X wrote,

is not an absolute,

it is just a resting place)

listen in the end

the pivot from angel to witch

depends on small things

this animal, the question

are you happy?

No I am not happy

lucky though

               Rainy Night Talk

               Here’s to

the overlooked

nipples of Spain

               brown Madrid aureoles

kneecaps of Ohio girls

kneeling in the palms of men

waiting to be thrown high

into the clouds

of a football stadium

               Here’s to

the long legged

woman from Kansas

whispering good morning at 5,

               dazed

in balcony moonlight

All that drizzle the night before

walking walking through the rain

slam her car door

and wrote my hunger out, the balcony

like an entrance

to a city of suicides.

Here’s to the long legs

driving home

in more and more rain

weaving like a one-sided

lonely conversation

over the mountains