the apricot tree

the growth of my little apricot tree,

so pregnant with promise

has this very moment reminded me

of a proverb my mother told

whenever she washed my hair.

women with child, she would say

as warm water dripped – thinning

the washcloth’s engorged fibers –

onto my shut eyelids and shoulders

have bellies like sunflower buds.

sometimes if the moon is blue

the baby won’t come out
a baby like you but a sunflower,
and mummy will plant it in a meadow

where sunlight drips down from space

and dewdrops sparkle like eyes.

and those nights, hot bath-tired

I would dream of the mothers

holding brass watering cans,

beautiful mothers smiling.

but my meadow mothers started to grieve

more and more woefully

until on the last night I dreamt of them

they were uprooting their children,

flaying petals to the bud, poisoning with salt

the soil also smeared on their hands and lips.

your story hurt me, made me sick inside.

your sunflower-children have twisted me inside
I said to my own mother, and

went away. Now, years later,

the apricots are fruiting

but I’m not hungry for them, never hungry.

with a beautiful girl, discussing literature at rainbow serpent

As storm clouds grow and roil I tell her

I’ve no favourite authors; a poet who reads

no poems, non-literary, non-decorous,

an image seer and hoarder
of light boiled to glassy vision

but no thief –

running my mouth

I say ‘original’, straighten the tassels

on the Chai Tent’s ragged rug
and comment on the statuesque
cheeks the pre-dawn affords her.

“But if it’s as you say then what are

your ideas but untruths,

errors, dead letters in silvery water?
I bet there’s nothing in them
Proust hasn’t explored- and that

spiritualism was exhausted
by Hesse how many years before!”

                                                                        “Reading is, you know, like the writer’s
                                                                          test;

                                                                          know the minds

                                                                          who thought of it all, then

                                                                          try to think of more.”

Tassels gone awry again and

damp seeping through my pants,

I can hear Erik Satie’s nightmusic

When I see her literally fly into outer space.

By now it was three thirty. At best there were ninety minutes of daylight left before darkness fell, after which any glare refracted off the ice would do no more than impart a dim cruel clarity to his helplessness. James had no money, no Canadian SIM. Losing her was not an option. He shook the snow from his shoulders and walked. Dirty slush bore its way through the unstuck toes of his boots and anaesthetized his feet and his boot-heels made roguish slides from under him. With nobody on the street – nobody stupid enough – the world’s edges felt closer, closing. Silence more like a willful suppression of sound. And then, when the sparse whistle of the wind seemed to embody all nature gagged and in pain mingled with that plough’s horn, it described to James the turmoil fast seeping into his thoughts and interpretations. He was panicked. Consequently the landscape around him turned from white to bleak, ethereal to menacing. Wonder gave way to fear and, out of breath but colder than ever, he let his mind transform the snowstorm into a harbinger of ill and of bad.

Then, reaching the top of the stairs James saw that the deserted plain on which the chateau stood was littered with corpses. Fully hundreds of figures stood, featureless and half-collapsed, their faces blown from their heads and scattered on the snow before them. A fortunate few had retained their eyes, others their mouths or pipes, and one of the completely faceless majority still wore a black bowler hat. Not one nose, however, had stayed on. Because the snowmen were arranged in precise columns, if James looked through their rows at an angle the carrots, stuck tip-down, appeared to be markers for a kind of emergency runway, a last resort for planes run aground in the tempest. Presently he noticed that in front of and behind each column were magnificent ice sculptures depicting Elk and Moose and Indian braves. And on its perch the chateau, with icicles hanging from every awning, flags of Quebec and Canada flying from its two highest spires, channeled the grandest European palaces. Tracking old footsteps in zigzags and circles, James moved as if he were dreaming. Surely this was what she had wanted to show him! But there was still no sign of her anywhere. There was nobody.

Suddenly a horn was slammed- and held. It blew towards his ears on the wind, wavered, vanished, returned. Wind lashed off the mighty Saint-Laurent, cold enough to anaesthetize bare skin in minutes. Instinctively James braced himself for the crash of an accident, but when the crash didn’t come he looked back over his shoulder and saw a giant snowplough, the first he had seen in his life save for an episode of The Simpsons, straddling the curb near the corner of Haldimand and Mont Carmal. Huge tires scudding haplessly along the icy footpath. Snow everywhere. People screaming.

 The truck was making no attempt to right its course. Perhaps fifty meters away there stood the old man who had been shoveling snow from a shop entrance some time earlier, when James had passed. They had waved to each other, even said bonjour. Now the shovel was limp at the old man’s side and it seemed impossible that he would not be hit. Cupping his hands over his mouth in terror, James spluttered as he gulped in too much frigid air, caustic on his lungs. He couldn’t look away. He watched as, by some miracle, the snowplough’s enormous yellow bulk came to a halt at the last possible moment. He watched the old man grab snow from the ground with gloveless hands and pelt it at the passenger side window. Gesticulate madly. And finally he watched as the old man took off his Canada Goose jacket, laughed, climbed aboard. Meanwhile she had kept on walking and was now some distance up the hill, almost undetectable in the whiteness.

So they were friends. This dead of winter which made people indoors claustrophobic and dry-lipped and people outdoors, under their huge coats and balaclavas, anguished with cold; as he quickened his steps to catch her James thought how comforting it was to see a little spirit on display, no matter how reckless. After all, weren’t the Quebecois renowned for their sense of humour? Through shock and exertion his blood seemed sprung to life, he could move his toes again. Hear the thud of a rising heartbeat and the silence of car tires on fresh powder. Falling more heavily now the snow veiled buildings, made snot gush from his nose and freeze solid on his moustache, salty icicles goading the tongue, lick them off lick them off, when to do so would only make more.

It felt as if they had been climbing forever. To James’ left was proof of that ascendance; the old port, the bus terminal next door, the maple markets (he had bought some apple butter for his mother there), the Old City walls, all slowly coming into view. Sparse, sweeping outskirts dotted with low-income apartments and shopping malls. But above all there was the Saint-Laurent. Half-frozen, run into by scores of tributaries, the nation’s most powerful river in all its staggering immenseness. Next to it the Murray was a murky leak, the great sheets of ice floating downstream as wide as the Yarra itself. Not far from where he stood it would begin to form an estuary amongst the largest in the world. Stopping to let a woman pass on the narrow sidewalk, James bore the brunt of the wind and gazed riverward and she said merci and he, having to think a second, said c’est rien back. She was talking on the phone. Moins vingt-sept was all he understood. Then the huge gables of Chateau Frontenac appeared. Behind them the sun’s orb, sheathed in white cloud, looked paler than normal, as if the sky were a tremendous egg laid by a starving hen. As the rest of the building took shape in front of him James was forced to take shelter in the gift shop of the old funicular, his fingers feeling incurably frostbitten under his gloves. So much for the $100 price tag. An urge to piss roused him and, as the river left his mind, she entered it. He pressed back out into the open, strained his eyes in both directions. There was no sign of her anywhere. Something to show you: that enigmatic sentence was the entire justification for this walk, this suicide mission. And now she was gone.

The green trellises are split into jigsaw pieces. They are split into pieces by fern trees, crooked, which bear the furry yellow balls I have piled on my lap so as to eat the nuts inside. Behind the trellis is a sort of junkyard patrolled by desert dogs with thin bodies and long tongues. There is an iron crucifix on a padlocked wire gate leading to another junkyard. In this hostel garden, four cats doze wherever the sunlight splits the green canopy into pieces and my notebook dances with ferny silhouettes. When the sun leaves, so do the cats. The heat of the open air and menace of those dogs keep them from lying on old car bonnets or tin roofing next door.

Yellowed by pollen, a table tennis table supports the weight of a picnic set spread out in readiness for lunch. But thirty minutes pass and then an hour passes and still nobody comes to eat. And when finally it becomes a fixation spoiling my rest I struggle out of my hammock to see if the plates are dirty. I walk by a tree with bright pink flowers, full of singing birds. One offers a guttural mating call that sounds more like a frog – his tiny chest heaving from the strain. Onions are frying somewhere. In the corner of my eye a mannequin appears. An armless legless female with tongue-like aloe leaves where her head should be, cinched at the waist with barbed wire. A garland of thorns uprooted from an absent head and slid down over those shoulder stumps has settled at the crest of her perfect plastic hips. She is decorative. She is massacred for art.

Her image makes me pause a moment to consider a sentence that has been turning over in my mind, since I haven’t written for perhaps a week.

It seems to me that he is chewing a crown of thorns; the holier his words get, the bloodier his gums.

Nothing else has come to me in connection to that fragment. It is a garden among junkyards. All it will ever be is one of the growing block of sentences referring only to themselves, belonging to no greater whole, which I have added to so prolifically in recent times. So large has the block grown that it is now almost tangible, a dark and forbidding barrier to fluid thoughts, a second set of eyelids. People sometimes call it ‘writers’ block’.

Dam a river though, and the pressure, the energy held in reserve by the wall is akin to a concentration of untold distances, a summation of forces from the entire river before that barrier. Were the wall to burst, the currents immediately afterward must run freer and more powerfully than could ever have been possible without the initial dearth of the blockage. Plates, crockery, knives – everything is spotlessly clean. Soon, however, a group of drunk guests consign it all to the dust and pollen and nut shells of the ground so that they can have a game before their own lunch. And I break the tip off an aloe leaf to rub its riches over my cracked hands. Then I sink back into my hammock. 

It is a happy coincidence that this city's political namesake should have shared his with the French word for sugar. Arid as the climate is, rippled as the air is with heat, in the shade of the palms and acacias of Sucre's Plaza De Mayo it is difficult not to feel that a curtain has been lifted on a sovereign's secret Paradise. The buildings, constructed using the profits of silver mines once the largest on earth, are grander than any I have seen since Lima, their garish white facades cleaned biannually by government edict. World class chocolate stores have fountains in the windows and the fountains in parks are actually filled with water.


Bolivia was signed into existence here. One of the signatories was Bolivar himself. By definition - but not in a practical sense - Sucre remains the nation's capital. And, though President Morales and his parliament sit in the larger, more prosaic La Paz, this place has an undeniable air of stateliness, superiority. Not twenty minutes ago, when our bus was still chugging through slums, interspersed here or there by a half-built mansion or military compound or creek with thousands of plastic bags snagged on its stony bottom, I would never have believed what could be awaiting us in the center. One of the recurring paradoxes of this continent, however, is that wealth begins with an almighty bang, an explosion of grandeur equal to or greater than those in the Western world - what edifice in Melbourne could boast of even half the splendour of the Palace De Gobierno? -  but peters out in concentric circles to relative and then abject poverty with phenomenal speed. For example, central Lima could be mistaken for any European capital; cross the bridge into Rimac, fifteen minutes on foot, and the garbage-filled streets are wrecked and roamed by little children in the night. Colonial hubris built all those plazas hiding the destitution surrounding them, like great trees promising an orchard but instead standing in the middle of loveless pastures dried out or gone to seed. Is it symbolism before the people, then, or for them? What physical sacrifices is one prepared to make for a sense of achievement, pride? Because even those residents of Sucre who are not fortunate enough to live inside that magnificent blast radius can still claim to be part of The White City of The Americas. 


The central market is three stories of tropical fruits and technicolour spices, fresh bread and wheels of spongy cheese. Cuy, Lamb, Llama carcasses often still have tufts of pelt attached, or tails. There are pig heads bleeding from the eyes in boxes of offal. Upstairs, an eating hall capable of accommodating two hundred people heaves under the strain of twice as many. They eat a savoury breakfast of Chicharron pastries, drinking porridge and Papa Rellena, the latter of which we sample. For me it is the beginning of a love affair. After buying all the food we need for three days and a bottle of rum, we are $15 poorer.

Later in the day I give a shoeshine boy five Canadian dollars and his marching orders. "Mucho Nuevo," he says, crunching the plastic bill down and snapping it out again. He was crying and grabbing my ankles and his polish containers were empty. Meantime a new mayor is sworn in behind us, replete with brass band playing military songs, youngish crowd roaring. His name is Ivan and his photograph cannot be escaped; as for his opponents, I see nothing at all pertaining to them. One of the onlookers is the manager of our hostel, a Swiss man of 6'4 who seems to be a sort of unofficial town mascot. Everybody knows him and acclaims his presence with loud shouts and embraces. And that deafening mania, of which we can only be drowned-out spectators, arrests my focus to the point of hypnosis.

Thoughts of home, like a sudden ring of the telephone after a period of total silence, storm into my mind. University, job, my family; all are incursions into this holiday peace we all pine for but can never really attain. Day by day those thoughts become more solid, and when at last they are bodies again, when I can smell the paper of library books and hear my mother's voice, I will be forced to bid her goodbye. I am thinking for the first time about the goodbye.

Soon we are accosted by a pack of shoeshine boys, led by the one to whom I gave the Canadian bill. Waiting peacefully for the sunset is impossible. Those dirt-spattered faces, eyes covered in pink swimming goggles, English 'please' repeated over and over in voices quavering on the edge of sobs, more hands around my ankles; we retreat to the hostel, buying some dark chocolate and a few churros on the way.

...

La Mina

Her fleeing spirit catches
on rocks on the empty shore;
on seaweed strung
around ankles coarse
with stubble, fishing lures
rusted and washed up are
reborn - a tent pitched, tides surfed,
ties torn.

And sunning on a rock outcrop
with birds dead and alive
she feels like the last woman,
last mermaid beyond sexual reproach,
without shame or pride or pair
of self-reproving eyes or smell, or taste,
or noise.

She fashions a fence of stones,
sits inside,
untouchably watching
mussel nets rake the surface,
dark black buoys and orange buoys
and duck-diving birds scatter in the vapours;
limp nets pulled in, dripping, piled
at the stern of little wooden boats.
She imagines the noise of them piling.

Desperate to piss,
she clenches her buttocks, ties
and reties her hair to distraction,
walks laps of the twilit beach;
plunges chest-deep
into water grey with silt
but cannot go, cannot abnegate
the perfect finishings of her family,
cannot stop thinking of her dad.

Build a stone wall then,
a box, an outhouse, a hollow
cairn homage to the human anatomy,
build pretty diversions with shattered brown glass-

red-eyed Inca birds place her,
without them she is nowhere;
she wishes they would fly back to Ballestas.