The Cinnamon Peeler (4 page)

Eventually the room was a time machine for him.

He closed the rotting door, sat down

thought pieces of history. The first girl

who in a park near his school

put a warm hand into his trousers

unbuttoning and finally catching the spill

across her wrist, he in the maze of her skirt.

She later played the piano

when he had tea with the parents.

He remembered that surprised—

he had forgotten for so long.

Under raincoats in the park on hot days.

The summers were layers of civilization in his memory

they were old photographs he didn’t look at anymore

for girls in them were chubby not as perfect as in his mind

and his ungovernable hair was shaved to the edge of skin.

His friends leaned on bicycles

were 16 and tried to look 21

the cigarettes too big for their faces.

He could read those characters easily

undisguised as wedding pictures.

He could hardly remember their names

though they had talked all day, exchanged styles

and like dogs on a lawn hung around the houses of girls.

Sex a game of targets, of throwing firecrackers

at a couple in a field locked in hand-made orgasms,

singing dramatically in someone’s ear along with the record

‘
How do you think I feel / you know our love’s not real

The one you’re made about / Is just a gad-about

How do you think I feel
’.

He saw all that complex tension the way his children would.

There is one picture that fuses the five summers.

Eight of them are leaning against a wall

arms around each other

looking into the camera and the sun

trying to smile at the unseen adult photographer

trying against the glare to look 21 and confident.

The summer and friendship will last forever.

Except one who was eating an apple. That was him

oblivious to the significance of the moment.

Now he hungers to have that arm around the next shoulder.

The wretched apple is fresh and white.

Since he began burning hills

the Shell strip has taken effect.

A wasp is crawling on the floor

tumbling over, its motor fanatic.

He has smoked 5 cigarettes.

He has written slowly and carefully

with great love and great coldness.

When he finishes he will go back

hunting for the lies that are obvious.

View of the coast of Brazil.

A man stood up to shout

at the image of a sailing ship

which was a vast white bird from over the sea

now ripping its claws into the ocean.

Faded hills of March

painted during the cold morning.

On board ship Charles Darwin sketched clouds.

One of these days the Prime Mover will

paint the Prime Mover out of his sky.

I want a
 … centuries being displaced

 … 
faith

                         23rd of June, 1832.

                         He caught sixty-eight species

                         of a particularly minute beetle.

The blue thick leaves who greeted him

animals unconscious of celebration

moved slowly into law.

Adam with a watch.

Look past and future, (
I want a
…),

ease our way out of the structures

this smell of the cogs

and diamonds we live in.

I am waiting for a new ship, so new

we will think the lush machine

an animal of God.

Weary from travelling over the air and the water

it will sink to its feet at our door.

Having to put forward candidates for God

I nominate Henri Rousseau and Dr Bucke,

tired of the lizard paradise

whose image banks renew off the flesh of others

– those stories that hate, which are remnants and insults.

Refresh where plants breed to the edge of dream.

I have woken to find myself covered in white sheets

walls and doors, food.

There was no food in the world I left

where I ate the rich air. The bodies of small birds

who died while flying fell into my mouth.

Fruit dripped through our thirst to the earth.

All night the traffic of apes floats across the sky

a worm walks through the gaze of a lion

some birds live all their evenings on one branch.

They are held by the celebration of God’s wife.

In Rousseau’s
The Dream
she is the naked lady

who has been animal and tree

her breast a suckled orange.

The fibres and fluids of their moral nature

have seeped within her frame.

The hand is outstretched

her fingers move out in

mutual transfusion to the place.

Our low speaking last night

was barely audible among the grunt

of mongrel meditation.

She looks to the left

for that is the direction we leave in

when we fall from her room of flowers.

This is for people who disappear

for those who descend into the code

and make their room a fridge for Superman

– who exhaust costume and bones that could perform flight,

who shave their moral so raw

they can tear themselves through the eye of a needle

this is for those people

that hover and hover

and die in the ether peripheries

There is my fear

of no words of

falling without words

over and over of

mouthing the silence

Why do I love most

among my heroes those

who sail to that perfect edge

where there is no social fuel

Release of sandbags

to understand their altitude—

               that silence of the third cross

               3rd man hung so high and lonely

               we don’t hear him say

               say his pain, say his unbrotherhood

               What has he to do with the smell of ladies,

               can they eat off his skeleton of pain?

The Gurkhas in Malaya

cut the tongues of mules

so they were silent beasts of burden

in enemy territories

after such cruelty what could they speak of anyway

And Dashiell Hammett in success

suffered conversation and moved

to the perfect white between the words

This white that can grow

is fridge, bed,

is an egg – most beautiful

when unbroken, where

what we cannot see is growing

in all the colours we cannot see

there are those burned out stars

who implode into silence

after parading in the sky

after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway

‘
Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks – ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes – which he arranged in front of him
…’

I
TALO
C
ALVINO

In the long open Vancouver Island room

sitting by the indoor avocados

where indoor spring light

falls on the half covered bulbs

and down the long room light falling

onto the dwarf orange tree

vines from south america

the agatha christie books by the window

Nameless morning

solution of grain and colour

There is this light,

colourless, which falls on the warm

stretching brain of the bulb

that is dreaming avocado

The bathroom light burns over the mirror

In the blackness of the house

beds groan from the day’s exhaustion

hold the tired shoulders bruised

and cut legs the unexpected

3 a.m. erections. Someone’s dream

involves a saw someone’s

dream involves a woman.

We have all dreamed of finding the lost dog.

The last light on upstairs

throws a circular pattern

through the decorated iron vent

to become a living room’s moon.

The sofa calls the dog, the cat

in perfect blackness walks over the stove.

In the room of permanent light

cockroaches march on enamel.

The spider with jewel coloured thighs the brown moth

with corporal stripes

                         ascend pipes

and look into mirrors.

All night the truth happens.

All afternoon (while the empty drive-in

screen in the distance promises)

we are moving the two-seater

100 yards across his garden

We turn it over on its top

and over, and as it slowly

falls on its side

the children cheer

60 years old and a change in career—

from these pale yellow flowers emerging

out of damp wood in the roof

to become a room thorough with flight, noise,

and pregnant with the morning’s eggs,

a perch for chickens.

Two of us. The sweat.

Our hands under the bottom

then the top as it goes

over, through twin holes the

flowers, running to move the roller, shove,

and everybody screaming to keep the dog away.

Fred the pragmatist – dragging the ancient comic

out of retirement and into a television series

among the charging democracy of rhode island reds

Head over heels across the back lawn

old wood collapsing in our hands

All afternoon the silent space is turned

Scrub lawn.

               A chained

dog tense and smelling.

50 cents for a mattress. 50 cents

for doors that allowed privacy.

                         A rain

swollen copy of Jack London

a magazine drawing of a rabbit

bordered with finishing nails.

6 chickens, bird cage (empty),

sauerkraut cutting board

down to the rock

               trees

not bothering to look

into the old woman’s eyes

as we go in, get a number

have the power to bid

on everything that is exposed.

After an hour in this sun

I expected her to unscrew

her left arm and donate it

to the auctioneer’s excitement.

In certain rituals we desire

only what we cannot have.

While for her, Mrs Germain,

this is the needle’s eye

where maniacs of earth select.

Look, I wanted to say,

$10 for the dog

with faded denim eyes

There are the poems of Campion I never saw till now

and Wyatt who loved with the best

and suddenly I want 16th-century women

round me devious politic aware

of step ladders to the king

Tonight I am alone with dogs and lightning

aroused by Wyatt’s talk of women who step

naked into his bedchamber

Moonlight and barnlight constant

lightning every second minute

I have on my thin blue parka

and walk behind the asses of the dogs

who slide under the gate

and sense cattle

deep in the fields

I look out into the dark pasture

past where even the moonlight stops

my eyes are against the ink of Campion

Two figures in deep water.

Their frames truncated at the stomach

glide along the surface. Depot Creek.

One hundred years ago lumber being driven down this river

tore and shovelled and widened the banks into Bellrock

down past bridges to the mill.

The two figures are walking

as if half sunk in a grey road

their feet tentative, stumbling on stone bottom.

Landscapes underwater. What do the feet miss?

Turtle, watersnake, clam. What do the feet ignore

and the brain not look at, as two figures slide

past George Grant’s green immaculate fields

past the splashed blood of cardinal flower on the bank.

Rivers are a place for philosophy but all thought

is about the mechanics of this river is about

stones that twist your ankles

the hidden rocks you walk your knee into—

feet in slow motion and brain and balanced arms

imagining the blind path of foot, underwater sun

suddenly catching the almond coloured legs

the torn old Adidas tennis shoes we wear

to walk the river into Bellrock.

What is the conversation about for three hours

on this winding twisted evasive river to town?

What was the conversation about all summer.

Stan and I laughing joking going summer crazy

as we lived against each other.

To keep warm we submerge. Sometimes

just our heads decapitated

glide on the dark glass.

There is no metaphor here.

We are aware of the heat of the water, coldness of the rain,

smell of mud in certain sections that farts

when you step on it, mud never walked on

so you can’t breathe, my god you can’t breathe this air

and you swim fast your feet off the silt of history

that was there when the logs went

leaping down for the Rathburn Timber Company

when those who stole logs had to leap

right out of the country if caught.