People said he was shy. Others said cryptically that his shoelaces were tied together. At six years old he would already move without moving, breathe with contrition, sip air guiltily instead of drinking it down. But the few astute ones saw a void– and voids in human beings had to be filled with something. Love came hard to certain people; hate came easily to everyone.

What did six year olds feel? No longer the breasts of their mother or the warmth of their bassinet, nor the numb of bodily unawareness. They felt asphalt underfoot – the schoolyard’s vast expanse. Tanbark in their shoes, sand between their fingers, the perfume of patrolling teachers, the din of other bodies, alluring areas called ‘out of bounds’, loose change rattling in their pockets, the grey-lead pencil’s many different sides. All felt the immensity of age but not its ties with death – who among them didn’t want to be a hundred years old, huger than mountains and invincible?

Sedate him! Sedate him! A long needle hit the buttock and drained its contents and soon he was staggered and impotent. Then he was strapped limb-by-limb to a bed with leather buckles and wheeled out of emergency. The father followed him. The father was crying and choking like an infant who had forgotten to breathe. Three code blues had sounded in those thirty minutes, when he had threatened the nurses with rape, unspeakable torture, and murder. As security forced him down, two teenagers lost their lives. Trailing his bed now along a corridor with white walls and chrome trolleys, the father felt vertigo and swayed, as though he too had been anaesthetised.

He awoke in a harshly lit room with no shoes or belt. The mattress he lay on was narrow, threadbare and directly opposite a lidless chrome toilet. His mobile phone was gone and he had no memory of the intervening hours between his first beer and opening his eyes to that strangeness. There was a small round window at the top of the door but it was thick and waxy; the face looking in at him was illegible, a blur. People were screaming. The back of his throat felt cracked, his mouth tasted of chemicals. And inside his head was a brain that, it seemed to him, had been placed in a giant mortar and pestle, ground down like a peppercorn, and then put back in pieces the wrong way around.

He attempted to prop up and saw that one of his arms was covered in thick gauze and a black splint ran the length of the underside. A throbbing pain then commenced almost immediately. It throbbed and pulsed so intensely that he thought blood must have been spurting out. But after thirty pulses, the gauze was still white. An image shot to his mind of hunting knives and horrible laughter. A migraine started to emerge from the shroud of grogginess hiding it.

the wind is possessing wet linen
raining dead pine needles down
it is rippling abandoned bird baths
conflating tree branches in the distance
into singular writhing shrouds

the wind is uprooting baby carrots
causing flimsy old tin roofs to flap
it is spinning colourful pinwheels
in the hands of infants on creaking boughs
enthroning all that exists in-flux

the wind is skittling dead history
in its eddies tumble perspectives past
it is puncturing tires on wheelbarrows
filled with eighteen years of dust
prising open pendants with rusted clasps

the wind is an index of languages
a teacher both roaring and mute
it is turbid river water snaking forever
through the ether of exhausted souls
bending sunlight aslant on tired truths

Remarkable how the unknown, pregnant in a new morning can, for the free man, overcome any bodily fatigue. How a charge of adrenaline can wake the dead. Fox calls, fox calls, echoed in the silence. With massive breaths Bryan imbibed the air of the waning day as he walked, breathing so deeply his lungs pinched, as if he had swum in a cold ocean for hours and hours. He arrived at his temporary home with an enraptured state of mind. What progress he would make tomorrow!
Presently he sat down at the small kitchen table, leaving the lights off. Like a soft electrical current, pins and needles coursed through his body. He began to examine books, pamphlets and a bottle of sunscreen in the dark, blindly, like a mountaineer fumbling for something solid to ease his vertigo. Then after stroking his beard a while Bryan checked himself, placed both hands in front, and sat. Suddenly his fatigue appeared. It stole his appetite, made sleep the only mode of course. He was so heavy with lactic acid; even moving to the bed seemed impossible. His mind was so heavy with epiphanies. 

La Solitaria Caseta Verda shimmered in golden dusk when the party arrived back. From the highpoint of the road, buildings could hardly be seen in the glare and that familiar glimpse of Balearic Sea looked drawn onto its horizon with glittered silver ink. Cold and cloudless, except for a few streaks of pale pink, by morning mist would shroud the entire valley; anything low-lying, the ravine for instance, might not have existed until midday. Cicadas hummed in the carob trees, crickets trilled so loudly they seemed to be constantly underfoot. But whenever one tried to spot them, all they found were a few blades of quiet grass.

Soon a fire was stoked in the pit and Ingrid had lit the kitchen burners for her enormous tortilla, made with three dozen local eggs and half a potato sack. Matthias took up his guitar and started strumming Les Djinns.  Sweaty and salt-sprayed, the rest of the volunteers fanned out from the courtyard to put on fresh clothes. Dinner was to be served in forty-five minutes.

The quietening of birdlife seemed to lull the sun to sleep. For a while Bryan stayed by the main building and gazed dreamily at the sky, hardly cognisant of Matthias or Ingrid or the rest of the festive commotion going on around him. There was a little incense in the air. Alone, painstakingly alone, and the mermaid mosaic on his chair irritating him as any small disturbance does a person motivated and sustained by concerns utterly their own. After a mosquito bite, however, Bryan's thoughts turned chaotic and eventually settled on his hair. Losing that hair-tie today must have made him look like a wild man, as most of the younger volunteers did. For the first time in twenty-five years he thought of cutting it all off, before rising with a start and heading for his caravan.

Dust blew through the streets. The shimmer of boiling air was made even sultrier, more oppressive by those draughts of whitish brown. Grains of airborne sand stung the skin. Behind its dazzle of slanting light the great orb seemed so visible, as if without too much adjustment one could make out its surface contours as they did the craters of the moon, which had already risen. Now and then a mangy dog would trot past, rounding a narrow shady bend, only to trot back again, downcast, with its drooped tongue flapping.

Phillip spoke at the head of the crowd for over twenty minutes. In English and Catalan he entreated the people, especially locals, to harangue their government for change. Occasional cheers rose from the picket line, but they were too small, like puffs of smoke, to stir any heartfelt applause from the collective, who simply smiled wryly and looked uncomfortable. Most of the attendees were obviously in the mood for passive support. Theirs was a willingness to listen but not be listened to, which infectiously bred further quiet; even Phillip’s speech assumed a humbler, more solemn tone in kind. Radicalism, as with any passionate state of mind, was unsustainable in a daily sense. Neither love nor hate could get by without regular reprieves. Today, people’s radicalism hadn’t shown up.

A petition slowly made its way from the rearguard to the bottom step of the Ajuntament, where Phillip’s makeshift lectern was. Being so far back, Bryan was one of the first to sign, although he’d signed as if it were a Fed-Ex package – with mute carelessness. None of the afternoon’s proceedings had had any effect on him whatsoever. Instead of listening he had been immersed in his own thoughts, squeezing his hands unknowingly, attempting in a crowd of strangers to cobble together all those portents of unease that had infected him into a position, something he could get at and make sense of. And his pathetic signature had sealed it: what was he doing? Campaigns, door-knocks, proselytising, it was all the same bullshit! Who had stuck this badge on his chest? He didn’t want to be roused by speeches or dance inside circles of linked arms; he had no taste for co-operatives like La Solitaria Caseta Verda. It was the ideas he liked, ideas he could take up and put into practice on his own. His ravine, his refuge: give him that and leave him alone. His ravine! And, in a perfect world, give him Wendy, give him his troubled daughters, without whom he was not whole. Living two lives was possible, being two men wasn’t. That would be his creed. Although, he was still some distance away from the ravine. Only after completing his work, Bryan decided, could he entertain any thoughts of going home.  

Vanuatu

Havana Harbour Heads

still shadows looming silently
before heavens like mango flesh

grave guardians of water
in phosphorescent swoon;
lambent fires by moonlight
betray the living on deathly islands

and everywhere yellow flowers

are spirited across the sea;
from the galley I hear Beethoven’s Fifth
and on bags of furled sails
fall exhaustedly asleep.

…

only playful Flying Fish
accompany me at the helm;
half a mile of calm
blue skirted by outcropped Volcanoes
kissing clouds; half a mile down
black, and Epi yawning worlds beyond
the bow, no larger now than at first light;

three sails, no wind, and a dormant engine
ready to sing failure-songs; the others gone
back under (to let a novice steer unencumbered,
to give he and Velella an intimate moment or two)

place where fish fly!
Not even exhaust fumes ground them

another blue precipice quakes, the hull
cries foamy tears; glinting water holds
a million sunlit mirrors to pale winter skin;

lure jiggling in arrears
hooks a Sailfish bigger than I – impossible
to steer now; behold her crest, her spear
and her sparking air of myth,
cut the lurching line.

…

Celestial tribute! Submarine
flashes; plankton are spawning;
wave an oar to transform blackness –
slick of an underworld alight;

village dogs guffaw near pigs pens
somewhere in the hiding mass
behind us, backlit steeples hover
like queer ideals on palm tree plinths;
yelp, squeal, smell and sight
of spot fires – little Europes growing piecemeal
in sticky forests tinted silver
by the alchemic sea;

brown film of budding reef!
And portside an awesome glow
burns amongst glittering storm clouds;

reflected ire of Ambrym’s volcano
presides over the night;
altar of this great hall of miracles

…

For hours I snorkeled in the bathwater
Pacific – and a rock lobster clipped my toe;
clownfish in the rushes, model bays unknown
by whitefellas windblown – reef shelves
plummeting like cliff tops, and dazedly
Xan kept the inflatable in-tow;

moon risen early, sunset lost in ash clouds;
ruby in a great wave, and spears of light
tentacles of a huge hidden halo;

no intellect for silence
no courage for calm;
what metaphysics needed
to stand under torrents of beauty?

and at five o’clock a bell tolls on Lamen;
time to read the Psalms;
sight the locals lurching homeward on
sails of coconut palm;

afloat on my sun burnt back,
ears seashell-echoed
in the bathwater Pacific I feel
a synthesis of all things;
sunset metamorphosing
each time I open my eyes to that riddle
and insoluble as flesh or bone
there is nothing to do but cry

…

showers are expendable
(my skin is a sunlight snare)

...

the globe is a shoal of green
reef fish
moving ceaselessly as one-
and behind every hen
a tail of ragged chicks swishes
in a courtyard of dead coral
the dogs skulk amongst;

days idle by on Vanuatu time
green gardens erected like shrines
to mother, and jungle rats hungry
for pineapple piss
from the branches of starlit trees
onto kava men reaping their wine;

the village is a place of black
magic,
bestriding its spirit bay-
and embodied in every sea snake
touched only by ghosts and fools
lives the souls of all departed chiefs

…

Patience is an idea unknown to us;
to choose patience unknown to them
whose mother they kiss
on every return to terra firma
whose mothers is ours; we
with scant patience blown in like white dust

…

children fishing in shallows
overhung by creepers
at sunset in a seven island bay,

the restful water pinkish
volcanoes vapour-laden
at anchor in the twilight of the day;

surf roaring from over
the narrow coral shoulder
in total darkness break the eastern waves;

inconceivable colours
none found in a pastel,
and piercing squeals of wild pigs in the fray

…

no man is an island, but, like islands,

man creates his own weather;

blue skies in the bay centre
but over each body a new cloud
new winds, new haze -
posts of a giant sapphire bed
rising from this water-plain;
ashen gods ruling by kastom law;

swathes of men languish ashore, others fish
the reefs when the tide comes -
boat-riders, builders, sorcerers, fire-lighters
each with the skeleton of his own climate;

bird-callers, herdsman, Catholics,
heathens being fanned by the air
of flapping Bibles;

no women have awoken yet
(at least it looks that way from here)
no women except Helane
writing poems in the saloon;
all women are islands
men clamber to live on and worship

…

the waters are liquid crystal
washed afar
of melted grottos
dispassionately appearing
mainly in postcards, but
under and around us now
sunlit and reef-mottled;

four meters all of a thumbnail
to the seabed
flared milky by turtles
closeness and distance to Audrey
a parallel illusion
but never more pointed as when
benign seas are wept hurtful

…

my inner silence structured by
the long absence of her voice
on cold quiet mornings -
my disaffection her hatchling
like the Pele tide the moon’s;

painful memories echo
painful experience,
unbearable memories echo
joy;

I forget the smell of her hair;
what other course than 

to travel half the earth and return
not with a lock but with her?

…

fewer plantation palms
turn the jungle to verdant hills;
pissing off the bow at anchor
I sight the teeming envelope
and shiver – what overgrowth
what quiet

naked and the night wind
laps on rocky beaches, water ruffled;
two days from the fullest moon
the world alight with whiteness
and ire – when all of us
are savage

so on the deck I sit
under my last Vanuatu stars;
pondering the usual questions
with crossed legs and salt-crusted hair
a scream builds; I check myself
and sigh

somewhere a motor boat
steals out to fish or find kava;
man’s first incursion in an hour
reminds me just how tired I am
how tired; how tired of him
how tired

...