Circle Game Read online

(the sounds like static; the silences

  thin as razorblades between)

  at the next one there will be

  a lady and a man,

  some other face or evidence

  to add to the

  collection in my suitcase.

  The world is turning

  me into evening.

  I’m almost ready:

  this time it will be far.

  I move

  and live on the edges

  (what edges)

  I live

  on all the edges there are.

  An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems

  My younger sister at the chessboard

  ponders her next move

  the arrangement of her empire

  (crosslegged on the floor)

  while below her in the cellar

  the embroidered costumes, taken

  from her mother’s storage trunks

  and lined against the walls

  lose their stiff directions in

  the instant that she hesitates

  above the armies

  The shadows of the chessmen

  stretch, fall across her: she

  is obsessed by history;

  each wooden totem rises

  like the cairn of an event

  (but)

  Outside the windows of this room

  the land unrolls without landmark

  a meshing of green on green, the inner

  membrane of the gaping moment

  opening around a sun that is

  a hole burnt in the sky.

  The house recoils

  from the brightedged vacancy

  of leaves, into itself: the cellar

  darkness looming with archaic

  silver clocks, brocaded chairs, the fading echoes

  of a hunting horn.

  The white king moves

  by memories and procedures

  and corners

  no final ending but

  a stalemate,

  forcing her universe to his

  geographies: the choice imposes

  vestiges of black and white

  ruled squares on the green landscape,

  and her failed solution

  has planted the straight rows

  of an armoured wood patrolled by wooden

  kings and queens

  hunting the mechanical unicorn

  under a coin-round sun.

  Her step on the stairs

  sounds through the concrete mazes.

  In her cellar the mailed

  costumes rustle

  waiting to be put on.

  In My Ravines

  This year in my ravines

  it was warm for a long time

  although the leaves fell early

  and my old men, remembering themselves

  walked waist-high through the

  yellow grass

  in my ravines, through

  alders and purple

  fireweed, with burrs

  catching on their sleeves,

  watching the small boys climbing

  in the leafless trees

  or throwing pebbles

  at tin cans floating

  in the valley creek, or following

  the hard paths worn by former

  walkers or the hooves

  of riding-stable horses

  and at night

  they slept under the bridges

  of the city in my (still)

  ravines

  old men, ravelled as thistles

  their clothing gone to seed

  their beards cut stubble

  while the young boys

  climbed and swung

  above them wildly

  in the leafless eyelid

  veins and branches

  of a bloodred night

  falling, bursting purple

  as ancient rage, in

  old men’s

  dreams of slaughter

  dreams of

  (impossible)

  flight.

  A Descent Through the Carpet

  i

  Outside the window the harbour is

  a surface only with mountains and

  sailboats and

  destroyers

  depthless on the glass

  but inside there’s a

  patterned carpet on the floor

  maroon green purple

  brittle fronds and hard

  petals

  It makes the sea

  accessible

  as I stretch out with these

  convoluted gardens

  at eyelevel,

  the sun

  filtering down through the windows

  of this housetop aquarium

  and in the green halflight

  I drift down past the

  marginal orchards branched

  colourful

  feathered

  and overfilled

  with giving

  into the long iceage

  the pressures

  of winter

  the snowfall endless in the sea

  ii

  But not

  rocked not cradled not forgetful:

  there are no

  sunken kingdoms no

  edens in the waste ocean

  among the shattered

  memories of battles

  only the cold jewelled symmetries

  of the voracious eater

  the voracious eaten

  the dream creatures that glow

  sulphurous in darkness or

  flash like neurons

  are blind, insatiable, all

  gaping jaws and famine

  and here

  to be aware is

  to know total

  fear.

  iii

  Gunshot

  outside the window

  nine o’clock

  Somehow I sit up

  breaking the membrane of water

  Emerged and

  beached on the carpet

  breathing this air once more

  I stare

  at the sackful of scales and

  my fisted

  hand

  my skin

  holds

  remnants of ancestors

  fossil bones and fangs

  acknowledgement:

  I was born

  dredged up from time

  and harboured

  the night these wars began.

  Playing Cards

  In this room we are always in:

  tired with all the other games

  we get out cards and play

  at double

  solitaire:

  the only thing

  either of us might win.

  There’s a queen.

  Or rather two of them

  joined at the waist, or near

  (you can’t tell where

  exactly, under the thick

  brocaded costume)

  or is it one

  woman with two heads?

  Each has hair drawn back

  made of lines

  and a half-smile that is part

  of a set pattern.

  Each holds a golden flower

  with five petals, ordered

  and unwilting.

  Outside there is a lake

  or this time is it a street

  There’s a king (or kings)

  too, with a beard to show

  he is a man

  and something abstract

  in his hand

  that might be either

  a sceptre or a sword.

  The colour doesn’t matter,

  black or red:

  there’s little choice between

  heart and spade.

  The important things

  are the flowers and the swords;

  but they stay flat,

  are cardboard.

  Outside there is a truck

  or possibly a
motorboat

  and in this lighted room

  across the table, we

  confront each other

  wearing no costumes.

  You have nothing

  that serves the function of a sceptre

  and I have

  certainly

  no flowers.

  Man with a Hook

  This man I

  know (about a year

  ago, when he was young) blew

  his arm off in the cellar

  making bombs

  to explode the robins

  on the lawns.

  Now he has a hook

  instead of hand;

  It is an ingenious

  gadget, and comes

  with various attachments:

  knife for meals,

  pink plastic hand for everyday

  handshakes, black stuffed leather glove

  for social functions.

  I attempt pity

  But, Look, he says, glittering

  like a fanatic, My hook

  is an improvement:

  and to demonstrate

  lowers his arm: the steel questionmark turns and opens,

  and from his burning

  cigarette

  unscrews

  and holds the delicate

  ash: a thing

  precise

  my clumsy tenderskinned pink fingers

  couldn’t do.

  The City Planners

  Cruising these residential Sunday

  streets in dry August sunlight:

  what offends us is

  the sanities:

  the houses in pedantic rows, the planted

  sanitary trees, assert

  levelness of surface like a rebuke

  to the dent in our car door.

  No shouting here, or

  shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt

  than the rational whine of a power mower

  cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

  But though the driveways neatly

  sidestep hysteria

  by being even, the roofs all display

  the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,

  certain things;

  the smell of spilled oil a faint

  sickness lingering in the garages,

  a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,

  a plastic hose poised in a vicious

  coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

  give momentary access to

  the landscape behind or under

  the future cracks in the plaster

  when the houses, capsized, will slide

  obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers

  that right now nobody notices.

  That is where the City Planners

  with the insane faces of political conspirators

  are scattered over unsurveyed

  territories, concealed from each other,

  each in his own private blizzard;

  guessing directions, they sketch

  transitory lines rigid as wooden borders

  on a wall in the white vanishing air

  tracing the panic of suburb

  order in a bland madness of snows.

  On the Streets, Love

  On the streets

  love

  these days

  is a matter for

  either scavengers

  (turning death to life) or

  (turning life

  to death) for predators

  (The billboard lady

  with her white enamel

  teeth and red

  enamel claws, is after

  the men

  when they pass her

  never guess they have brought her

  to life, or that her

  body’s made of cardboard, or in her

  veins flows the drained

  blood of their desire)

  (Look, the grey man

  his footsteps soft

  as flannel,

  glides from his poster

  and the voracious women, seeing

  him so trim,

  edges clear as cut paper

  eyes clean

  and sharp as lettering,

  want to own him

  … are you dead? are you dead?

  they say, hoping …)

  Love, what are we to do

  on the streets these days

  and how am I

  to know that you

  and how are you to know

  that I, that

  we are not parts of those

  people, scraps glued together

  waiting for a chance

  to come to life

  (One day

  I’ll touch the warm

  flesh of your throat, and hear

  a faint crackle of paper

  or you, who think

  that you can read my mind

  from the inside out, will taste the

  black ink on my tongue, and find

  the fine print written

  just beneath my skin.)

  Eventual Proteus

  I held you

  through all your shifts

  of structure: while your bones turned

  from caved rock back to marrow,

  the dangerous

  fur faded to hair

  the bird’s cry died in your throat

  the treebark paled from your skin

  the leaves from your eyes

  till you limped back again

  to daily man:

  a lounger on streetcorners

  in iron-shiny gabardine

  a leaner on stale tables;

  at night a twitching sleeper

  dreaming of crumbs and rinds and a sagging woman,

  caged by a sour bed.

  The early

  languages are obsolete.

  These days we keep

  our weary distances:

  sparring in the vacant spaces

  of peeling rooms

  and rented minutes, climbing

  all the expected stairs, our voices

  abraded with fatigue,

  our bodies wary.

  Shrunk by my disbelief

  you cannot raise

  the green gigantic skies, resume

  the legends of your disguises:

  this shape is final.

  Now, when you come near

  attempting towards me across

  these sheer cavernous

  inches of air

  your flesh has no more stories

  or surprises;

  my face flinches

  under the sarcastic

  tongues of your estranging

  fingers,

  the caustic remark of your kiss.

  A Meal

  We sit at a clean table

  eating thoughts from clean plates

  and see, there is my heart

  germfree, and transparent as glass

  and there is my brain, pure

  as cold water in the china

  bowl of my skull

  and you are talking

  with words that fall spare

  on the ear like the metallic clink

  of knife and fork.

  Safety by all means;

  so we eat and drink

  remotely, so we pick

  the abstract bone

  but something is hiding

  somewhere

  in the scrubbed bare

  cupboard of my body

  flattening itself

  against a shelf

  and feeding

  on other people’s leavings

  a furtive insect, sly and primitive

  the necessary cockroach

  in the flesh

  that nests in dust.

  It will sidle out

  when the lights have all gone off

  in this bright room

  (and you can’t

  crush it in the da
rk then

  my friend or search it out

  with your mind’s hands that smell

  of insecticide and careful soap)

  In spite of our famines

  it keeps itself alive

  : how it gorges on a few

  unintentional

  spilled crumbs of love

  The Circle Game

  i

  The children on the lawn

  joined hand to hand

  go round and round

  each arm going into

  the next arm, around

  full circle

  until it comes

  back into each of the single

  bodies again

  They are singing, but

  not to each other:

  their feet move

  almost in time to the singing

  We can see

  the concentration on

  their faces, their eyes

  fixed on the empty

  moving spaces just in

  front of them.

  We might mistake this

  tranced moving for joy

  but there is no joy in it

  We can see (arm in arm)

  as we watch them go

  round and round

  intent, almost

  studious (the grass

  underfoot ignored, the trees

  circling the lawn

  ignored, the lake ignored)

  that the whole point

  for them

  of going round and round

  is (faster

  slower)

  going round and round

  ii

  Being with you

  here, in this room

  is like groping through a mirror

  whose glass has melted

  to the consistency

  of gelatin

  You refuse to be

  (and I)

  an exact reflection, yet

  will not walk from the glass,

  be separate.

  Anyway, it is right

  that they have put

  so many mirrors here

  (chipped, hung crooked)

  in this room with its high transom

  and empty wardrobe; even

  the back of the door

  has one.

  There are people in the next room

  arguing, opening and closing drawers

  (the walls are thin)