11/04 #1

Shindofuji in Urban Gardens

we are told to eat food grown near home.

the rationale is more than environmental –

endemism couples body with soil, and so we become

our path to belonging – land is

the site of the birth, the continuing, the death –

not a moment elapses

when our story is not written in the ink of

minerals and elements at hand – we are, literally, where we live.

and this honey salve tars the body and enters the mind

through the blood. but what we are not told is

the beds are raised, moveable,

itinerant, the stories garbled among the newspaper shreds

hail from everywhere but here –

place of no stories – some other earth

bagged, trucked in, substituting our own, which is ruined,

the coffee grounds began in Africa.

consider, those blue tarpaulin sheets

protect us from the perils of home.

the wooden pallets must originate in

distant forests, now unreadable encryptions in the grain

because this is a treeless city

ornamented with sculptures of swinging fists.

so, what does it mean to partake of nature

that is us, but not us? we are trying

everything, but according to the ancient precepts

what we grow is our own estrangement,

what we dip our nibs in is ink that vanishes

so that the simplest stories require expensive, cold apparatus

just to be read, though birth and death

go unchanged. but do we trust the ancients?

in truth, they are not so old after all, not so old.

better to stand upon toxic ground than to fly.

10/04

my eye sockets are on the middle abdominals,

people in my village compare me to an old juiceless orange –

shrunken, solid as a billiard ball

with a face drawn on its brown snake-

skin belly – and I would happily be burned

(though I think I am a reasonable man),

drowned in potato liquor

to saturate her lips, go in vapours toward her neck

like the spirit of the heart

whose spiked chamber walls are

finding one another, slowly. but night upon night

her cat sits on the bed, licks at the same plot of emptiness

until first light, feeding time.

she is not returning for her things, or her animals.

I know that the hot air balloons

the cat watches through the window as it cracks the sardine skulls,

I know they are hiding her. I know

the emptiness must be where my eyes had been.

08/04

one towel is for the body,

one towel is for the face, a rosebush in rain,

curved leafs all reservoirs

for rain, droplets

rare beetles clear as sea salp,

hungering like abyssal beings

starved of light,

forced to give birth to light

and his fingertips, like his heart,

squared – as a join is squared –

pushing massive brick walls on their tracks

over to where such walls are needed.

alley cats pause a moment

aware of being watched by packs of stray

dogs whose infected mouths

gush teeth like slot machines.

the odour of the dogs makes man-

dogs smell sweet as rosebushes,

quartz ascribed special powers by

absorbing the play-sound of dolphins in its piezoelectric fibres 

as skin pores admit light.

it is Saturday.

at the psychic fair are booths

empty for some powerful fortune tellers’

absences due to unforseen maladies.

mistrust is not the primary mode

and so it is my own name I doubt

as I smash the labelled letterboxes over with a stake

uprooted at a nearby biomass farm,

my drive-by car driving through the quiet suburban streets like a stake,

thinking of so many, many miseries amalgamated

into humour, humour into joy

and the names collapse like the final

out-of-breath cadences of hymns sung at a great aunt’s funeral,

cross upon the altar blessed

by dolphins play-fighting with the current.

07/04

a hand seen

suddenly atop the blue gazing

globe, spruce

a century old, fingernails

black, the porch

bathed in evening sunlight

and myself out of bed, moving to the window

down the body-length of the bed –

white flannel sheets holding

the long hairs of recent lovers like static,

many-coloured memory –

halfway to the window, the storm

pane newly unlatched for spring, speeding cars

near me. sunlight

pouring down the balustrade.

a hand I have never seen before,

a voice speaking through the door to a another woman

whose body I cannot see but whose voice I recognise as

an upstairs tenant’s. as

I hear their plans for the weekend

and their plans for summer

the baseball in the mitt on my windowsill

rolls down onto the floor.

a mausoleum: the thud

conjures death-thoughts

in me, death-fear at the first glimpse of her face, flushed,

radiant. she stretches her hamstrings anyway,

keeping balance with the gazing globe,

black running tights

black fog through the flyscreen, ankles white as bone.

she sends out over the busy road

behind her a motion instinct,

the bare linden trees become rockets.

there is a thud in my room

when the baseball falls.

an echo comes out of it,

rapping, hammering

louder than a drum.

the rapping wills her head to turn

to witness the disgrace,

the hammering never weakens.

06/04

lovers walk in opposite directions

around the renaissance room of a gallery

famous for the exotic birds

caged in its central atrium. when the lovers meet again

with a kiss, they have turned the space on its axis

like mismatched cyclists a velodrome.

many colognes and perfumes

ghost through the ambience

on willowy slipstream trapezes. children cling to

stools at baby easels before adoration scenes.

that point of reuniting is a landscape

of twin sisters sitting on a marble floor,

huge Komodo dragons between them – artist unknown, blurb purely material.

were the room twice as large, she would have overlapped her

but whether their pace differential comes down to

boredom or fascination remains to be seen.

in that kiss, quick as an atria contraction

neither lover unclasps her hands

in propriety’s roost at the small of her back,

neither says anything with her mouth or her face

and soon the spin cycle resumes

in the room where

pieces break off into components.

05/04

It is Fool Moon night, and to get to the restaurant I must walk through the market       

square where children marshalling for the big street parade

play beneath the steep tin roof by lanternlight, dressed for the sleet and the wind 

baying against the clutter of the stalls cloaked in burlap until Saturday, 

balloons taped to sticks in their hands.

I catch eyes with one of the fathers.

he has a daughter whose long butterscotch hair spools out from a pom-pom beanie, curtaining her neck as if her parka had a coyote fur ruff

and a papier-mâché moonfish

glowing brighter than the eagles,

armadillos, dinosaurs, unicorns and octopi held by other parents,

glowing brighter still at the eyes.

what could be more beautiful than to see the old grow young again

amidst fantastical beacons draped in fog?

The restaurant is a house – the dining room once a parlour. Nobody is in the dining room except the maître d’. At my entrance she turns down the volume of the Thai soap opera, gets up to procure me a water jug and a specials menu. While she is gone, I notice that her place at the empty banquet table is covered with white jasmine rice, some of the grains still whole, some mashed into the clear plastic tablecloth, and that the large bowl filled, oddly, with nothing but water and sliced banana seems untouched.

I have nearly finished eating when the maître d’ asks me about the festival – she has seen it every year for many years from the front window of the restaurant, but

still does not know what it means. I tell her, the name is Fool Moon, but beyond this I am not sure. In Thai she calls down a corridor to somebody, presumably in the kitchen. A white man appears in the archway. The maître d’ continues to speak in Thai to the white man, pointing out the window toward the crowd and the scores of lanterns, aglow, lolling in the air like buoys on a choppy sea. He answers, okay, removes his apron, and walks out the door. He will find out, you will see, says the maître d’. And I watch the white man cross the road and disappear - despite the beacons - in the fog.

04/04

no other place of refuge,

the last lithic masses of snow

melted now to run off

and be river. his last mask

fallen off a ledge

from great height, shattering.

the face that wore the mask

elsewhere.

darkness cut from skin folds.

out of the duct, dry air

hunts down the space behind

a tapestry nailed to the wall

and the turtles dance in heat-

billows, the elephants dance.

they the animals watch him

misunderstand his own bed.

a beautiful woman bids him

reaffix the shattered mask.

the snow runs down the street

toward the river, and he knows

the river irrigates his body,

floods his veins. he has drunk the river

as milk from the breast of a wolf.

no other place of refuge.

a refreezing within, a fusing.