The Cinnamon Peeler (2 page)

We clean buckets of their sand

to fetch water in the morning,

reach for winter cobwebs,

sweep up moths who have forgotten to waken.

When the children sleep, angled

behind their bottles, you can hear mice prowl.

I turn a page

careful not to break the rhythms

of your sleeping head on my hip,

watch the moving under your eyelid

that turns like fire,

and we have love and the god outside

until ice starts to limp

in brown hidden waterfalls,

or my daughter burns the lake

by reflecting her red shoes in it.

The car carried him

racing the obvious moon

beating in the trees like a white bird.

Difficult to make words sing

around your appendix.

The obvious upsets me,

everyone has scars which crawl

into the mystery of swimming trunks.

I was the first appendix in my family.

My brother who was given the stigma

of a rare blood type

proved to have ulcers instead,

The rain fell like applause as I approached the hospital.

It takes seven seconds she said,

strapped my feet,

entered my arm.

I stretched all senses

on
five

the room closed on me like an eyelid.

At night the harmonica plays,

a whistler joins in respect.

I am a sweating marble saint

full of demerol and sleeping pills.

A man in the armour of shining plaster

walks to my door, then past.

Imagine the rain

falling like white bees on the sidewalk

imagine Snyder

high on poetry and mountains

Three floors down

my appendix

swims in a jar.

O world, I shall be buried all over Ontario

for Bill Muysson

In his clean vegetation

the parrot, judicious,

poses on a branch.

The narrator of the scene,

aware of the perfect fruits,

the white and blue flowers,

the snake with an ear for music;

he presides.

The apes

hold their oranges like skulls,

like chalices.

They are below the parrot

above the oranges—

a jungle serfdom which

with this order

reposes.

They are the ideals of dreams.

Among the exactness,

the symmetrical petals,

the efficiently flying angels,

there is complete liberation.

The parrot is interchangeable;

tomorrow in its place

a waltzing man and tiger,

brash legs of a bird.

Greatness achieved

they loll among textbook flowers

and in this pose hang

scattered like pearls

in just as intense a society.

On Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot’s walls,

with Lillie P. Bliss in New York.

And there too

in spangled wrists and elbows

and grand façades of cocktails

are vulgarly beautiful parrots, appalled lions,

the beautiful and the forceful locked in suns,

and the slight, careful stepping birds.

Two birds loved

in a flurry of red feathers

like a burst cottonball,

continuing while I drove over them.

I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

A girl whom I’ve not spoken to

or shared coffee with for several years

writes of an old scar.

On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,

the size of a leech.

I gave it to her

brandishing a new Italian penknife.

Look, I said turning,

and blood spat onto her shirt.

My wife has scars like spread raindrops

on knees and ankles,

she talks of broken greenhouse panes

and yet, apart from imagining red feet,

(a nymph out of Chagall)

I bring little to that scene.

We remember the time around scars,

they freeze irrelevant emotions

and divide us from present friends.

I remember this girl’s face,

the widening rise of surprise.

And would she

moving with lover or husband

conceal or flaunt it,

or keep it at her wrist

a mysterious watch.

And this scar I then remember

is medallion of no emotion.

I would meet you now

and I would wish this scar

to have been given with

all the love

that never occurred between us.

Men stopped in the heel of sun,

hum of engines evaporated;

the machine displayed itself bellied with mud

and balanced – immense.

No one ran to where

his tensed muscles curled unusually,

where jaws collected blood,

the hole in his chest the size of fists,

hands clutched to eyes like a blindness.

Arched there he made

ridiculous requests for air.

And twelve construction workers

what should they do but surround

or examine the path of falling.

And the press in bright shirts,

a doctor, the foreman scuffing a mound,

men. removing helmets,

the machine above him

shielding out the sun

while he drowned

in the dark orgasm of his mouth.

With the bleak heron Paris

imagine Philoctetes

the powerful fat-thighed man,

the bandaged smelling foot

with rivers of bloodshot veins

scattering like trails into his thighs:

a man who roared on an island for ten years,

whose body grew banal

while he stayed humane

behind the black teeth and withering hair.

Imagine in his hands – black

from the dried blood of animals,

a bow of torn silver

that noised arrows loose like a wild heart;

in front of him – Paris

darting and turning, the perfumed stag,

and beyond him the sun

netted in the hills, throwing back his shape,

until the running spider of shadow

gaped on the bandaged foot of the standing man

who let shafts of eagles into the ribs

that were moving to mountains.

Sun moves broken in the trees

drops like a paw

turns sea to red leopard

I trap sharks and drown them

stuffing gills with sand

cut them with coral till

the blurred grey runs

red designs.

And kill to fool myself alive

to leave all pity on the staggering body

in order not to shoot an arrow up

and let it hurl

down through my petalling skull

or neck vein, and lie

heaving round the wood in my lung.

That the end of thinking.

Shoot either eye of bird instead

and run and catch it in your hand.

One day a bird went mad

flew blind along the beach

smashed into a dropping wave

out again and plummeted.

Later knocked along the shore.

To slow an animal

you break its foot with a stone

so two run wounded

reel in the bush, flap

bodies at each other

till free of forest

it gallops broken in the sand,

then use a bow

and pin the tongue back down its throat.

With wind the rain wheels like a circus hoof,

aims at my eyes, rakes up the smell of animals

of stone moss, cleans me.

Branches fall like nightmares in the dark

till sun breaks up

and spreads wound fire at my feet

then they smell me,

the beautiful animals

Catch, my Uncle Jack said

and oh I caught this huge apple

red as Mrs Kelly’s bum.

It’s red as Mrs Kelly’s bum, I said

and Daddy roared

and swung me on his stomach with a heave.

Then I hid the apple in my room

till it shrunk like a face

growing eyes and teeth ribs.

Then Daddy took me to the zoo

he knew the man there

they put a snake around my neck

and it crawled down the front of my dress.

I felt its flicking tongue

dripping onto me like a shower.

Daddy laughed and said Smart Snake

and Mrs Kelly with us scowled.

In the pond where they kept the goldfish

Philip and I broke the ice with spades

and tried to spear the fishes;

we killed one and Philip ate it,

then he kissed me

with raw saltless fish in his mouth.

My sister Mary’s got bad teeth

and said I was lucky, then she said

I had big teeth, but Philip said I was pretty.

He had big hands that smelled.

I would speak of Tom, soft laughing,

who danced in the mornings round the sundial

teaching me the steps from France, turning

with the rhythm of the sun on the warped branches,

who’d hold my breast and watch it move like a snail

leaving his quick urgent love in my palm.

And I kept his love in my palm till it blistered.

When they axed his shoulders and neck

the blood moved like a branch into the crowd.

And he staggered with his hanging shoulder

cursing their thrilled cry, wheeling,

waltzing in the French style to his knees

holding his head with the ground,

blood settling on his clothes like a blush;

this way

when they aimed the thud into his back.

And I find cool entertainment now

with white young Essex, and my nimble rhymes.

She said, ‘What about Handy? Think I should send it to him?
’

‘
He’s supposed to call in a little while. I’ll ask him.
’

‘
He retired, didn’t he?
’

‘
Yes.
’

She waited and then said, ‘Say something, Parker. God to get you to gossip, it’s like pulling teeth.
’

‘
Handy retired.’ Parker said
.

‘
I know he retired! Tell me about it. Tell me why he retired, tell me where he is, how’s he doing. Talk to me, Parker, goddamit.
’

R
ICHARD STARK
,
The Sour Lemon Score

It becomes apparent that I miss great occasions.

My birth was heralded by nothing

but the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s marriage.

No monuments bled, no instruments

agreed on a specific weather.

It was a seasonal insignificance.

I console myself with my mother’s eighth month.

While she sweated out her pregnancy in Ceylon

a servant ambling over the lawn

with a tray of iced drinks,

a few friends visiting her

to placate her shape, and I

drinking the life lines,

Wallace Stevens sat down in Connecticut

a glass of orange juice at his table

so hot he wore only shorts

and on the back of a letter

began to write ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’.

That night while my mother slept

her significant belly cooled

by the bedroom fan

Stevens put words together

that grew to sentences

and shaved them clean and

shaped them, the page suddenly

becoming thought where nothing had been,

his head making his hand

move where he wanted

and he saw his hand was saying

the mind is never finished, no, never

and I in my mother’s stomach was growing

as were the flowers outside the Connecticut windows.

‘
Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic.
’

My wife’s problems with husbands, houses,

her children that I meet

at stations in Kingston, in Toronto, in London Ontario

– they come down the grey steps

bright as actors after their drugged four hour ride

of spilled orange juice and comics.

Reunions for Easter egg hunts.

Kite flying. Christmases.

All this, I was about to say,

invades my virgin past.

When she was beginning

this anthology of kids

I moved – blind but for senses

jutting
faux pas
, terrible humour,

shifted with a sea of persons,

breaking when necessary

into smaller self sufficient bits of mercury.

My mind a carefully empty diary

till I hit the barrier reef

that was my wife—

                         there

the right bright fish

among the coral.

With her came the locusts of history—

innuendoes she had missed

varied attempts at seduction

dogs who had been bred

and killed by taxis or brain disease,

Here was I trying to live

with a neutrality so great

I’d have nothing to think about.

Nowadays I get the feeling

I’m in a complex situation,

one of several billboard posters

blending in the rain.

I am writing this with a pen my wife has used

to write a letter to her first husband.

On it is the smell of her hair.

She must have placed it down between sentences

and thought, and driven her fingers round her skull

gathered the slightest smell of her head

and brought it back to the pen.