Circle Game Read online

  You look past me, listening

  to them, perhaps, or

  watching

  your own reflection somewhere

  behind my head,

  over my shoulder

  You shift, and the bed

  sags under us, losing its focus

  There is someone in the next room

  There is always

  (your face

  remote, listening)

  someone in the next room.

  iii

  However,

  in all their games

  there seems

  to be some reason

  however

  abstract they

  at first appear

  When we read them legends

  in the evening

  of monstrous battles, and secret

  betrayals in the forest

  and brutal deaths,

  they scarcely listened;

  one yawned and fidgeted; another

  chewed the wooden handle

  of a hammer;

  the youngest one examined

  a slight cut on his toe,

  and we wondered how

  they could remain

  completely without fear

  or even interest

  as the final sword slid through

  the dying hero.

  The next night

  walking along the beach

  we found the trenches

  they had been making:

  fortified with pointed sticks

  driven into the sides

  of their sand moats

  and a lake-enclosed island

  with no bridges:

  a last attempt

  (however

  eroded by the water

  in an hour)

  to make

  maybe, a refuge human

  and secure from the reach

  of whatever walks along

  (sword hearted)

  these night beaches.

  iv

  Returning to the room:

  I notice how

  all your word-

  plays, calculated ploys

  of the body, the witticisms

  of touch, are now

  attempts to keep me

  at a certain distance

  and (at length) avoid

  admitting I am here

  I watch you

  watching my face

  indifferently

  yet with the same taut curiosity

  with which you might regard

  a suddenly discovered part

  of your own body:

  a wart perhaps,

  and I remember that

  you said

  in childhood you were

  a tracer of maps

  (not making but) moving

  a pen or a forefinger

  over the courses of the rivers,

  the different colours

  that mark the rise of mountains;

  a memorizer

  of names (to hold

  these places

  in their proper places)

  So now you trace me

  like a country’s boundary

  or a strange new wrinkle in

  your own wellknown skin

  and I am fixed, stuck

  down on the outspread map

  of this room, of your mind’s continent

  (here and yet not here, like

  the wardrobe and the mirrors

  the voices through the wall

  your body ignored on the bed),

  transfixed

  by your eyes’

  cold blue thumbtacks

  v

  The children like the block

  of grey stone that was once a fort

  but now is a museum:

  especially

  they like the guns

  and the armour brought from

  other times and countries

  and when they go home

  their drawings will be full

  for some days, of swords

  archaic sunburst maces

  broken spears

  and vivid red explosions.

  While they explore

  the cannons

  (they aren’t our children)

  we walk outside along

  the earthworks, noting

  how they are crumbling

  under the unceasing

  attacks of feet and flower roots;

  The weapons

  that were once outside

  sharpening themselves on war

  are now indoors

  there, in the fortress,

  fragile

  in glass cases;

  Why is it

  (I’m thinking

  of the careful moulding

  round the stonework archways)

  that is this time, such

  elaborate defences keep

  things that are no longer

  (much)

  worth defending?

  vi

  And you play the safe

  game the orphan game

  the ragged winter game

  that says, I am alone

  (hungry: I know you want me

  to play it also)

  the game of the waif who stands

  at every picture window,

  shivering, pinched nose pressed

  against the glass, the snow

  collecting on his neck,

  watching the happy families

  (a game of envy)

  Yet he despises them: they are so

  Victorian Christmas-card:

  the cheap paper shows

  under the pigments of

  their cheerful fire-

  places and satin-

  ribboned

  suburban laughter

  and they have their own forms

  of parlour

  games: father and mother

  playing father and mother

  He’s glad

  to be left

  out by himself

  in the cold

  (hugging himself).

  When I tell you this,

  you say (with a smile fake

  as a tinsel icicle):

  You do it too.

  Which in some ways

  is a lie, but also I suppose

  is right, as usual:

  although I tend to pose

  in other seasons

  outside other windows.

  vii

  Summer again;

  in the mirrors of this room

  the children wheel, singing

  the same song;

  This casual bed

  scruffy as dry turf,

  the counterpane

  rumpled with small burrows, is

  their grassy lawn

  and these scuffed walls

  contain their circling trees,

  that low clogged sink

  their lake

  (a wasp comes,

  drawn by the piece of sandwich

  left on the nearby beach

  (how carefully you do

  such details);

  one of the children flinches

  but won’t let go)

  You make them

  turn and turn, according to

  the closed rules of your games,

  but there is no joy in it

  and as we lie

  arm in arm, neither

  joined nor separate

  (your observations change me

  to a spineless woman in

  a cage of bones, obsolete fort

  pulled inside out),

  our lips moving

  almost in time to their singing,

  listening to the opening

  and closing of the drawers

  in the next room

  (of course there is always

  danger but where

  would you locate it)

  (the children spin

  a round cage of glass

  fr
om the warm air

  with their thread-thin

  insect voices)

  and as we lie

  here, caught

  in the monotony of wandering

  from room to room, shifting

  the place of our defences,

  I want to break

  these bones, your prisoning rhythms

  (winter,

  summer)

  all the glass cases,

  erase all maps,

  crack the protecting

  eggshell of your turning

  singing children:

  I want the circle

  broken.

  Camera

  You want this instant:

  nearly spring, both of us walking,

  wind blowing

  walking

  sunlight knitting the leaves before our eyes

  the wind empty as Sunday

  rain drying

  in the wormy sidewalk puddles

  the vestiges of night on our

  lightscratched eyelids, our breezy fingers

  you want to have it and so

  you arrange us:

  in front of a church, for perspective,

  you make me stop walking

  and compose me on the lawn;

  you insist

  that the clouds stop moving

  the wind stop swaying the church

  on its boggy foundations

  the sun hold still in the sky

  for your organized instant.

  Camera man

  how can I love your glass eye?

  Wherever you partly are

  now, look again

  at your souvenir,

  your glossy square of paper

  before it dissolves completely:

  it is the last of autumn

  the leaves have unravelled

  the pile of muddy rubble

  in the foreground, is the church

  the clothes I wore

  are scattered over the lawn

  my coat flaps in a bare tree

  there has been a hurricane

  that small black speck

  travelling towards the horizon

  at almost the speed of light

  is me

  Winter Sleepers

  They lie side by side

  under a thick quilt of silence.

  The air silts up with snow.

  The drifting land

  merges with the inside room

  gradually through the window

  and the white sheet

  swells and furrows

  in the wind: no things

  in this deep sleep are solid

  only perhaps this floating

  bed which holds them up, a life-

  raft where they weather seas

  that undulate with danger.

  Under the bed the dust

  eddies and collects;

  dead leaves, broken

  twigs, water-sodden

  bones of small

  animals gather

  like sediment on the seafloor

  under the snow.

  Outside, the land

  is filled with drowning men

  and stretched remote close

  beside her

  he foundered and went down

  some time before she knew.

  Spring in the Igloo

  The sun had been burning for a long time

  before we saw it, and we saw it

  only then because

  it seared itself through the roof.

  We, who thought we were living

  in the centre of a vast night

  and therefore spent our time

  hoarding our own heat

  were astonished by the light.

  I made this house once

  because I wanted the

  coldest season, where you could be

  if only by comparison, a

  substitute for sun

  but the earth

  turns for its own reasons

  ignoring mine, and these human

  miscalculations

  and so we are drifting

  into a tepid ocean

  on a shrinking piece of winter

  (for two so frozen

  this long in

  glacial innocence

  to swim would be

  implausible)

  with ice the only thing

  between us and disaster.

  A Sibyl

  Below my window

  in the darkening

  backyard the children

  play at war

  among the flowerbeds

  on my shelves the bottles

  accumulate

  my sibyl (every woman

  should have one) has chosen

  to live there

  thin green wine bottles

  emptied of small dinners

  ovaltine jars, orange-brown

  emptied of easy sleep

  my sibyl crouches

  in one of them

  wrinkled as a pickled

  baby, twoheaded prodigy

  at a freakfair

  hairless, her sightless

  eyes like eggwhites

  I stand looking

  over the fading city

  she calls to me with the many

  voices of the children

  not I want to die

  but You must die

  later or sooner alas

  you were born weren’t you

  the minutes thunder like guns

  coupling won’t help you

  or plurality

  I see it

  I prophesy

  but she doesn’t reach me.

  Old spider

  sibyl, I’ll

  uncork you

  let in a little air

  or I’ll ignore you.

  Right now

  my skin is a sack of

  clever tricks, five

  senses ribboned like birthday

  presents unravel

  in a torn web around me

  and a man dances

  in my kitchen, moving

  like a metronome

  with hopes of staying

  for breakfast in the half-empty

  bottle in his pocket

  There are omens of

  rockets among the tricycles

  I know it

  time runs out

  in the ticking hips of the

  man whose twitching skull

  jerks on loose

  vertebrae in my kitchen

  flower

  beds predict it

  the city burns with an

  afterglow of explosions as the

  streetlights all come on

  The thing that calls itself

  I

  right now

  doesn’t care

  I don’t care

  I leave that to my

  necessary sibyl

  (that’s what she’s for)

  with her safely bottled

  anguish and her glass

  despair

  Migration: C.P.R.

  i

  Escaping from allegories

  in the misty east, where inherited events

  barnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshake

  might be a finger pointing; you can’t look

  in store windows without seeing

  reflections/remnants of privateer

  bones or methodist grandfathers with jaws

  carved as wood pulpits warning

  of the old evil; where not-quite-

  forgotten histories

  make the boards of lineal frame

  farmhouses rotten

  the fishermen

  sit all day on old wharves facing

  neither sea-

  wards nor inland, mending

  and untangling their old nets

  of thought

  and language is the law

  we ran west

  wanting

>   a place of absolute

  unformed beginning

  (the train

  an ark

  upheld on the brain’s darkness)

  but the inner lakes reminded

  us too much of ancient oceans

  first flood: blood-

  enemy and substance

  (was our train like

  an ark or like a seasnake?

  and the prairies were so nearly

  empty as prehistory

  that each of the

  few solid objects took some great

  implication, hidden but

  more sudden than a signpost

  (like an inscribed shard, broken bowl

  dug at a desert level

  where they thought

  no man had been,

  or a burned bone)

  (every dwarf tree portentous

  with twisted wisdom, though

  we knew no

  apples grew there

  and that shape, gazing

  at nothing

  by a hooftrampled streamside:

  it could

  have been a centaur)

  and even the mountains

  at the approach, were

  conical, iconic

  again:

  (tents

  in the desert? triangular

  ships? towers? breasts?

  words)

  again

  these barriers

  ii

  Once in the pass, the steep

  faulted gorges were at last

  real: we

  tossed our eastern

  suitcases from the caboose

  and all our baggage:

  overboard

  left in our wake

  along the tracks

  and (we saw) our train became

  only a train, in real

  danger of falling; strained

  speechless through those new mountains

  we stepped

  unbound

  into

  what a free emerging

  on the raw

  streets and hills

  without meaning

  always creeping up behind us

  (that cold touch on the shoulder)

  our faces scraped as blank

  as we could wish them

  (but needing new

  houses, new

  dishes, new

  husks)

  iii

  There are more secondhand

  stores here than we expected:

  though we brought nothing with us