Critical responses to This Won't Last Forever: "Morton's poems, whether erotic discoveries, satiric variations on a theme or cries of outrage, are accessible and interesting.... His experimental, playful approach to poetry is frank and refreshing." - Journal of Canadian Poetry. "A rich talent, working in contemporary modes ... scrupulous in language and attitude." - Canadian Literature.
Other books by Colin Morton:
This morning it was apple trees: clearing away crossed branches, making space for light to enter, fruit to grow. Now words: trimming the language for a new season's needs.
At 16 I was the shyest skier on the hill, carving snakes down the plunge my classmates leapt. Once they dared me up the expert slope, and when I slid home an hour after dark I packed the skis away. Later sold them. It has taken me half a life to stand at this height again. Now having so much less to lose (less time and still everything to find) I dip my toes and take the hill head on in a reckless dive. I'll take the snow as it flies and the blood, I'll take this rush of air this mountain sky and make it my lover.
moon rose through leaves composing a rune the name of the moon most soulful stone root of the nameless night's composure rosary moving leaf to leaf rose moon rose is to moon as wind moan to leaves leave them moon compose their movement through the nameless close of night moon rose alone but composed in the stone the whole night rose
the shadow of your sleeping body
spins a web of dreams
in the moonlight
your sleeping body spins
a web of dreams
in the shadow of the moonlight
in the web of dreams
moonlight spins the shadow
of your sleeping body
the moonlight of dreams
spins a web in the shadow
of your sleeping body
in the shadow of dreams
your sleeping body spins a web
of moonlight
You are my apple pie.
I am your chocolate eclair.
I drag these two lines out of sleep
into morning coffee.
Pearls in the nets
crumbs and syrup on the glass plate.
You are my apple pie.
Sunrise reddens.
Scavengers on the crusted snow take wing.
Grumbling, the city's engine turns over.
I search the mirror but it is ice.
I am your chocolate eclair.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Fuses blow out all around me.
Elevators stall for one giddy second
while auxiliary circuits kick in.
The moon
reaches out of its well of stars
and turns me
on its axis of love.
7:48
The toaster is smoking,
the bag lunches made,
the boy is waiting at the window
for the schoolbus.
I go to the bedroom to tie my tie
and see you lying there
fresh from the shower,
more naked in the winter sunrise
than even on a candlelit Friday night
beautiful as you were the first time
we cut classes together
and went to a friend's room
ten years ago and more
(more beautiful).
7:49
"There's the bus.
By Mom, bye Dad!"
We look at each other and smile
knowing
this will not last forever.
The hair on your back
The hair on your back, she said,
makes me think I am in the lair
of some wild animal,
dangerous, strong-scented, quick.
Such on me but do not bite,
when you touch, draw in your claws.
Take me like a beast, but gently,
it is only the illusion I love.
Bead of dew
bead of dew
on a leaf
in the forest
bead of sweat
on the hairs of your belly
slow parting
of moist
lips
After all these years
After all these years you
pant as if the next few seconds
may bring you through to the light.
February sweats beneath our quilt.
Far away jazz keeps the night awake with its dreams.
Moonlight quenches and
the taste of your thighs awakens thirst.
You who find
you who find yourself
again and again on the bed
with me
find me
She knew how the sunlight ran its warm fingers between her smooth brown thighs, how her shadow swayed with her skirt when she walked in front of him. She felt him following and with a sidelong glance shook hair away from her face, aware how it fell, faint suggestion of joy, to the arch of her back. She knew his want and let it surround her. She let him choose the music, pull the blind unless he wanted it up so the sun could run pale fingers from lips to nipples to soft belly hairs. They both said love was brief and parted still believing it. But the years came unasked for, and still she walks that street watching her shadow flirt with the sun, wishing he would follow her again.
May be a weedy, tangled path But let's not turn back for that Better speak these words now Thank let them, unspoken Dam the flow of words The real pleasure We take in each other. So I'll go first It is sheer joy to be admired As you admire me What heaven it must be For you.
I have walked this bridge a time or two
but never known its giddy height before
nor felt the cool blue invitation of the edge
~ this rush of gust and wave, rap
of heart and lungs against the ribs.
I have passed by rail-standers before,
intent on my destination,
and pitied them their dreams of flight and forgetting
a halfstep beyond the verge.
Now I know you, I have seen
both heights and depths, have stopped
to look past my intent.
I do not know
if you are the river, the bridge, the space between
or my partner in another world.
I know you are not death, are not
afraid of life,
that any moment you may take a halfstep
into my element.
The far shore does not concern me,
it is not mine;
to return the way I came
I cannot do.
I have risked a poem, now
I'll risk a rhyme;
I am standing at the rail
waiting for you.
How to turn
how to turn away
how to turn the coffeetable talk away
from war from the imminent
unravelling of history
to this warm room
its wallpaper peeling
piano out of tune
tea cooling with our talk
cake on the plate logs on the fire cigarette ash
all crumbling
another fragile evening of friendship.
Death?
It's nothing.
But the dying ...
the eyes the hair the flesh the nerves
the genes
red tendons unravelling.
Well, there's the weather, a friend says.
How cold it has turned, shall we
open the other bottle?
Next morning I rinse cups and glasses
empty the ashtrays
and walk out in my warm winter coat
to watch snow fall
onto the stream
turn cloudy and freeze
listen
to the gurgle and crack
of waves under ice.
The weather yes
let's talk about the weather
how all of this
can melt.
You say another year of marriage is another cup of coffee in the morning ~ some kind of addiction safer to continue than to quit. Each one requiring a little more sugar, stops the pain in the head anyway. Your bitter smile through steam is the grimace of boredom on the fourteenth floor ~ really the thirteenth ~ boredom the safest expression you know, each day a strategy of postponement. Rising and descending in the elevator eyes forward clouded with sleeplessness, you keep escaping your dreams and finding them in wait around corners. You could just turn your back, you say, walk out on the badly played scene, but life is no technicolor movie with credits and no debits at the end. Evenings at home are only more memos you say, in a language of indirection you are afraid you have come to understand, and speak, swallowing your words with that dull insensitive frown you make with each gulp of sweetened coffee.
together apart
topart agether
aget toparther
apart together
The space between
the space between us
gapes into distance ~ you
airborne, above the rain
Spring flood pushes mud up the riverbank
and over, where last week I watched you
jogging, your bare limbs
white in the cold
now brown water flows,
no longer the familiar calm friend,
the river leaps canyons of itself, threatens
the footbridge, tears out
new promontories in the sandy shore,
tears them away,
trees totter on the edge like
divers having second thoughts,
tender leaves trailing
green hair in the water.
I am thinking of you, can't help it,
it's that poem I started last week,
the one that went, Your river
runs through me to an unfamiliar sea,
it won't be written now, can't be,
was going nowhere anyway,
its fragile lines trail
green grasses in your flood,
which in time will recede,
return to its familiar bed,
leaving me
with altered edges, old
roots exposed,
new growth stunted or delayed,
and forever leaning like these trees
toward you.
You were frightened, being young, at the thought of growing old; how the season of weddings would turn cold and be crowded out by funerals; how your pride would say with your breasts, then shrivel, turn grey and dry; how, widowed, you would wait for death or your thoughtless children to phone. It was then I promised to call you up on your eightieth birthday, and tell you how wonderful you had always been, and make love to you as I should have when we were young. You laughed, as I meant you to, and told me off, forgetting for awhile your anticipated troubles, to dwell, the way young people do, on the smells and incontinencies of age. Young girl, do you imagine even now it is only your body I want? That ten pounds or twenty more or less would alter my desire? Or those lines that (darling) already are sketching their fences around your eyes would ever deter my trespass there?
I want to make the night short for you. I want to take the knife of the long hours out of your hand and lift you from the wet pavement where you sit waiting for the dawn. Then I will praise you with the tip of my tongue, with my fingertips I will raise the glow of lunacy in your thighs. And when daybreak gleams through the window I will leave you only long enough to pull the blind and then turn back to the light.
Over summerripe garden -- two weeks and the ripening creepers have flooded every space with green. Tomato vines cling to rose canes and keep climbing, hide their luscious fruit between the thorns. Points scratch the window and my gloveless hands, I heap red wilted flowers on the grass then flood the blind roots with water splashing from a green translucent hose, prune back tomato leaves, stake up and uncover forgotten pansies smothered in overgrowth. Pansies whose purples and blues and violets have _not_ forgotten, whose yellows and pinks and burgundies are bright as they were on your collar that evening we walked.
"You can see how far I've gone
not to speak of you." - Roo Borson
There's the difference between us:
how I, a man, have learned
to study my desire, and
when possible, to take,
to be proud of my reason
and discard it when it interferes,
never to sublimate;
while you, wanting as much
have given your days
to watchfulness, have waited,
have woven a braid of care
to hang your desire on, a pearl
you wear round your neck
and take off at night.
Before freeze-up the dams in the river are opened, dark mud and rocks exposed beneath the summer bank, rapids are treacherous again, and in the bay broad shoals of mud appear, spotted with gulls, black stumps jut out of the water, snagged with fish hooks and lost anchor lines. So when our season has turned I find jagged outcrops, barrens where I once saw only deepening shades of blue, hooks I did not foresee when I waded in beyond my depth. Now I think it was Narcissus who invented love, and falling in, found himself alien, among mermaids who knew neither how to laugh nor cry, who even when the river dried up did not anticipate their death.
Such a long and heady time I lived in then, in if, in abstract worlds without you, throwing words into echo's canyon, my head in the electric blue, a whole decade I road a high charged wire, all ecstasy and nausea, darting from sub- to super- to an image of maybe, glimpsed in starlight. Like some charged particle I was nothing or nowhere, something or somewhere never both, never here when most alive nor quite myself when I gave up into your darkness the glimmering half-life before sleep. That's why I still can't believe it when, famished, spent, I return to this cluttered, unsure, almost senseless now, that is all the sense that lasts, to test my feet on solid ground and find you are still here, still patient as time with a jet-lagged traveller, proving on the senses what's real can't be caught in the striving nor seen in the whirling radiance of hot words, but grows in darkness and mess, in odd loose days that, being in them, seem not to fit but, touching now, grow into seasons, ripen in secret to an unsuspected grace that one day awakens us here, together.
You cross half a continent behind the wheel
where your father used to sit,
you kids now in the back seat restless as kids,
you ride ferries "for a breather"
(for the seagulls, the arrival at Tobermory)
drive down the ramp and half a day more then
park in the barnyard just as we pull in
at the end of our drive, kids
jumping on each other like puppies, continuing
a game we interrupted last year.
We too leap the time in a minute,
though we have come all this way to marry off
our brother again, ten years later,
our casual hugs and our puns say this is
one of the ordinary times we shared most of.
Bride and groom arrived last night and now
are out on the back porch shucking corn
for their weeding feast.
We settle onto the steps as if
we too grew up here,
ten years of days flow in a calm wave
to this day, tomorrow.
"Marriage? in this age, what for?"
"Because it's hard
and we need
the help of
our friends."
So the family like a yoghurt culture, grows,
we sit down to dinner with new sisters and brothers,
our children say I love you to a new grandma,
our arms open wider than we knew they could.
A day is a string of minutes that has n end, though,
the new generation and the elders finally turn in,
and only our years ago keep us awake beyond weariness.
Candlelight plays back all
the old albums on memory's stereo and,
voices hushed, we sing the new lyrics
aware of the sleeping bodies over our heads.
"The suicide behind the wheel in the White House," you say.
"The border clashes of love."
We smile at ourselves in the mirror of each other
and see for a moment at child's height,
through a window, the casual deaths
we live each day,
like tomorrow,
when we toast the future then
drive our own ways again,
out past the cornfields, onto the cloverleaves,
eyes on the double solid line.
We shoot the canyon on three cylinders athirst for sea wind coast down the last hill and chug- aputchug to the steaming valley -- arena of mountains concrete and cornrows where no whisper of tide stirs the air ripe with soil's damp rot The freeway widens to fill the valley with broken lines and lunacy city exits flash by like futures too late to choose In the trance of the highway leaking grey oil the sky around us discovering colour we gallop three-legged after the sun windows wide open for a scent of the sea
Last trip I was on the fly,
stopped off for three hours between ferries
to spend it on the water with you
testing the breeze off the seaward point
where
- a spray! -
and a whale's back rolled toward the deep.
I said, You look happy, and though my words
were lost in the straining of the sail
I didn't insist.
(Neither of us
needed reminding of the boy,
confused and bent on destruction,
who hitchhiked out of the prairie winter
two years ago.)
We put in
to share a drink before the ferry arrived
but the whole time your eyes
scudded over the whitecaps beyond the beach,
and I smiled to know you had found your element.
Next day I flew home to this landlocked city
and news of your death
alone
off the point where we saw the whale dive.
They had you sent back in a box,
but I wouldn't go to the chapel
to see what they did to your eyes
or hear what the old men would say
who lowered you into the ground.
That night I capped the bottle
before it was empty
to walk out through the moonless night,
and saw ducks tracing vees
on the still, cold river.
Swimming south.
The dreams of modern lovers are set in shopping malls
where they walk as if at the seashore listening to the sweet
muzak of the tide rolling in
and the young woman tries on shoes at competitive prices
in a half dozen stores
but the heels are all too high or blockish the toes too
square or round
and as the dream goes on she becomes rounder too
not only her breasts but also her hips and especially her eyes
they stroll hand in hand down the gourmet aisles in the supermart
but come away with only one bruised yellow apple or mango or
pomegranate
wrapped in cellophane reduced to clear
which she will eat later in the seclusion of her bed
and both are vaguely dissatisfied as they wander out to the
parking lot
having forgotten which car they came in not only where they left it
and the good neighbor collection box is just too appealing
the thought of all the less fortunates makes their eyes mist over
like the sea at dawn
and the young woman can't resist crawling inside
but the hatch doesn't open wide enough to let her man follow
and standing outside totally engulfed in fog now
he can hear nothing but the sound of the half-spoiled apple
crunching softly between her teeth.
Quartier Libre
I put my cap in the cage
and went out with the bird on my head
So
you don't salute anymore
asked the captain
No
we don't salute anymore
replied the bird
I see
don't mind me I thought you still saluted
said the captain
No apologies needed we all make mistakes
said the bird.
I woke up this morning in the 1960s.
Believe me, it came as a surprise.
The sun was no brighter, the trees no more green,
but I noticed the change in myself right away.
I stared at the spines of unread books on my shelf
and ached to devour them in a single feast.
I believed there was truth and longed for it.
Names on the map crooned a siren call.
I knew something odd had happened when the news came on
and I heard the voices of Pearson and Dief,
Johnson and Bob Kennedy, and felt my heart
quicken at the thought of politics.
It was the morning after the night
I first read Kafka's "Metamorphosis,"
but instead of waking up an insect
I woke up in the 1960s.
In the kitchen Andy is counting out
morning-glory seeds to eat with a glass of milk.
I have just written my first novel
and begun to edit my first magazine.
I'm writing poetry with rock'n'roll rhythms
and imagining whatever flows is immortal.
I'm reading Atwood and Yevtushenko both for the first time,
and neither frightens me and I can't tell the difference.
I'm growing a beard and yelling
NO MORE WAR
and planning to live in a co-op
that always pulls through by pulling together
and earns enough by rock'n'roll
to support poetry and plays, and by love
conquers weakness and jealousy and greed ....
I woke up this morning in the 1960s.
It's no picnic, I assure you.
The '70s are still ahead of me and
I may not survive them a second time.
When the last dishes are removed from spotted white linen we cradle our Courvoisier and sigh once again for the distant revolution. Suddenly from outside - an uncivil commotion! Our anarchist friends are invading the restaurant to liberate the chateaubriand. Drink up, there's no hurry. They'll have to stop to tip the doorman. We'll barricade ourselves in the wine cellar.
Use slow heat. Simmer till flaky while basting with desire. Sprinkle with the petals of flowers in season. When ready, serve immediately, it will not keep. If the savour is sweet, praise the dish, not the cook. If bitter, praise anyway, swallow without a grimace. Beware of the bones, which are slender, brittle and barbed like a fisherman's hook.
This isn't about The Autumn Of the Patriarch by Garcia Marquez. I haven't read it, only A few sentences before my wife Left it on the hood of the car When we drove off one day To catch the Victoria ferry. I just thought it would make a good title For a poem about that menace Sexism, in all its forms, armed With enough hate and enough love To make a fascist out of anyone. I am writing this on the back Of an International Sun Day poster. On it is a sun design Made by twelve people Holding hands in a ring. The twelve people are men. I hesitated before reading one sentence Of the Autumn of the Patriarch Because I'd heard they run on for chapters Like the patriarchy dying, and I knew I couldn't stop sliding in That long sickening descent With all the other patriarchs starting To have to live like mortals. But look, the sun is out, And the flowers that Fertilize themselves know It's spring.
Every time I think of moving I shiver
check my watch look out the window
(no I lost my watch
last time i moved
21 times now in 9 years
"in blizzard mud and desert heat
by trailer truck and bike" etc.
In 76 I ghost-wrote the paperback
_Moving without divorce_
and today in the mailbox:
my divorce notice
re-directed from my last address
my wife is just being sarcastic
she knows my address
she lives here
(no I lost my wife
last time I moved
To be or not to be: that is the quickstep;
whether 'tis nobler in the minimum to suffer
the slip-ups and arsenic of outrageous foundlings
or to take armistice against a seam of trout
and by opposing end them. To die; to sleep;
no more; and by a sleuth to say we end
the heartstrings and the thousand natural shops
that flim-flam is helix to. 'Tis a contemporary
devoutly to be wished. To die; to sleep;
To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay there's the rubric,
for in that sleuth of debility what dressmakers may come
when we have shuffled off this mortal colander
must give us pawnshop. There's the restaurant
that makes calculus of so long ligament.
For who would bear the whir and scrabble of tinder,
the optometrist's xerox, the proud mandible's conversation,
the pansies of despised lower classes, the laxative's delight,
the inspiration of officiousness, and the squabbles
that patient mescaline of the upheaval takes,
when he himself might his quintessence make
with a bare boilermaker? Who would farmsteads bear,
to grunt and sweat under a weary liftoff,
but that the dressing of something after debility,
the undiscovered couple from whose bowels
no trawlers return, puzzles the wind,
and makes us rather bear those illusions we have
than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus consequence makes co-workers of us all,
and thus the native hullabaloo of respectability
is sicklied o'er with the pale castings of thread,
and enticements of great pity and monasticism
with this regimen their curvatures turn awry,
and lose the nap of acuity.
~ Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Oarsman, in thy orphanage
be all my sing-songs remembered.
one lump of rock
two houses
three ruined foundations
four gravediggers
one garden
some flowers
one beaver
one dozen oysters one beetle one loaf of bread
one hour of sunshine
one volcano
four horsemen
one door with doormat
one man waving his purple heart
another beaver
one sculptor with a welding torch
one maple leaf
two lovers on a large bed
one canvasser one chair three Christmas turkeys
one cabinet minister one carbuncle
one wasp
one kidney stone
one racing form
one hippie two nuns three grasshoppers two of the neighbour's
apples
one whalebone corset
one Queen Anne chair
one shilling (George the second) two shillings (George the third)
three shillings (George the fourth)
one illegible penny
one ball of string two safety pins one elderly gentleman
one winged victory one accountant one man of the world
two surgeons three vegetarians
one cannibal
one colonial expedition both ends of a horse an ounce of prevention
one tse tse fly
one surf 'n' turf
one Japanese garden
one Macintosh apple
one monocle one mountie one orphan one iron lung
one day of glory
one week of happiness
one month of Diana
one terrible year
two minutes of silence
one second's inattention and ...
five or six beavers
one little boy who goes to school crying
one little boy who leaves school laughing
one ant
two arrowheads
seventeen bison one judge on vacation sitting on the accused
one landscape with a lot of green in it
one cow
one bull
two loves of the century three grand pianos one veal cutlet
one Waterloo sun
one seltzer bottle
one cheap rose
one tom thumb one phony excuse one statue of liberty one rope
ladder
two sisters of mercy three dimensions twelve apostles a thousand
and one nights thirty-two
positions five cardinal points six corners of the world
seven deadly sins a few hectares of snow two fingers of
one hand ten drops with each meal thirty days in
detention fifteen in solitary five minutes intermission
and ...
some more dam beavers
when you talk about the land you talk about me and my family you talk the land when you talk about me and about my family the land you talk about me about my family when you talk and when the land about me and my family about you talk you talk what part you destroy of the land you also destroy of me you also what part you destroy of the land destroy of me of me the land what part destroy of you you destroy also what part you destroy of me the land also of you destroy
His winter is early, no magic in it. He gets up but he does not go out in the morning, he has seen his last empty trap. The road leads to town, he doesn't walk it. The road calls him no good, still he won't walk it. He only laughs now when he's drinking. Say he falls in the river on his way home, that's funny. But who is laughing with him now? Only the wind.
Gun metal can get mighty cold
on the South Saskatchewan in May.
The eye may be sharp as ice but
the mouth gets kind of dry
and the boys can sure get a thirst on
when they've been down in Batoche
taking potshots at the voices.
They're looking for trouble
when they strut into Duck Lake tavern
and they're ready for anything
except what they see -- Li Po and Tu Fu
getting drunker than skunks
and chattering like a flow of crows,
covering the tabletops with poems.
Tu Fu's penwork is shot to hell
since his finger got stuck
in his tenth Canadian. Now
sipping number eleven he slaps down
lunatic words that make clumsiness soar.
Li Po laughs and empties his beer
while Tu Fu, giggling, pees his pants.
Li Po, playing host with an elegant flourish,
calls for another round and pours
forth the song of a scholarly bird.
It's the fifteenth of May
and all over Saskatchewan
the clover and the foxtails are blowing.
But in the Duck Lake tavern
the bullshit's flying like angel dust,
and the boys from down around Batoche
have all turned into poets.
"You know that rock, eh?
With Gabriel's name on it?
I musta shot off boxes a shells
at that sucker in my time,
and you know,
not one a them made a scratch?"
He: theft under e50
theft over e50
attempted theft
b & e and theft under e50
b & e and theft over e50
attempted b & e
theft of auto
use of auto without permission (joyriding)
She: common assault
attempted common assault
assaulting police officer
assault causing bodily harm
resisting arrest
He: robbery
attempted robbery
robbery with violence
attempted robbery with violence
possession of stolen property
She: attempted murder
non-capital murder
forgery and uttering
manslaughter
wounding with intent
He: indecent exposure
intercourse with female under 18 years
intercourse with female under 16 years
intercourse with female under 14 years
attempted rape
rape
indecent act
incest
indecent assault on female
indecent assault on male
beastiality
contributing to juvenile delinquency
She: possession of stolen property
destruction of property (wilful damage, vandalism)
public mischief
causing a disturbance
American father finds brutally murdered family Black women rescue syndicate murderer gangster's daughter dies in FBI revolution police agent tries to control home life riotous detectives search for stolen plans smalltown kidnappers discover mysterious passions beautiful singer holds up country bank career gangsters team up with smalltown sheriff ex-con pilot kills wealthy man's daughter Italian thieves kill enemy woman ruthless ex-Green Berets attack Italian waitress enemy police officers murder singer's family killer secretary uses strange target boss's daughter loves Nazi home mute gunman sets out to find outlaw detective secret agents fight American-controlled lovers soldier boy turns into old man crooked officer becomes romantic vigilante Black men suspect violent plot ship's crew takes over Indian country young captain tries to find wealthy widow
This poem has no shame.
It has a punk bagpiper on the Saturday morning sidewalk
who has set out a basket to collect quarters or dollar bills,
it has one silver dollar (American) and one sand dollar (Atlantic),
the Pacific and Arctic oceans fit neatly into its corners
leaving room for the Great Lakes, a gravestone, a stamp album, a
teddy bears' picnic and more,
this poem is large enough to encompass the orbit of Jupiter without
straining,
it has black holes into which readers have been known to disappear
and never return,
this poem has a melodious doorbell and five spacious rooms,
it has picture windows, broadloom and air-conditioning,
but it has no shame, it has no soul.
This poem has sole fried in butter with lemon and a sprig of
parsley,
it has phallic symbols, womb symbols, symbols of death and
resurrection which never correspond because they don't affix
proper postage,
this poem has bold headlines behind which burn real bodies which
don't symbolize anything,
it has cities reduced to rubble and cities restored in plaster, it
has cabinet ministers preserved in alcohol,
but it has no shame.
It has no shame because the stars are rusty,
because the phallic symbols look like wombs and vice versa,
because the dead think this is living and the living, postage paid,
have never returned,
because its readers have short attention spans and are already
getting annoyed at this,
because some have already given it up, and for the rest of us every
second counts,
although not one in a hundred knows CPR and heart disease is the
number two killer,
through no fault of its own yet irreversibly, this poem has no
heart.
This poem is not alone,
although in nights so silent even the streets are mute and every
light has gone out in the facing apartment tower it tells
itself there is no other poem like it in the world,
and it aches with an inarticulate loneliness because it knows that
is not so,
that every poem is like it but it can phone up none of them, not
even long distance.
It has no heart because if another poem did phone it up in the
night it would curse and hang up,
because it is empty, yet doesn't hold water, nor serve as a sieve
by separating coarse from fine,
because it is finest when it is coarsest and vice versa,
because it sings the blues without being blue and celebrates
without joy, and when it is blue does not sing at all,
because it is wise without wisdom and foolish without folly,
because it salts its words without savour,
because it never speaks on the elevator,
because it has walked in space but never in cowshit,
because it has acted out its sex fantasies but not its death wish,
because it prefers fantasy and so will be taken unawares by death,
because it drives fast through the city late at night in search of
other poems and ramming them,
because it is a poem with dented fenders rusting out,
a fatty poem carrying in it traces of pesticides food additives
battery acids,
a poem with nine cups of coffee two ashtrays and a heap of sweaty
clothing,
a poem with bagpipes, kilt of purple leather and a one-stringed
electric hockey stick,
but no soul.
A soleless shoe of a poem written on folds and folds of print-out
paper wadded to keep the rain out,
a poem with only a horseshoe for good luck
a poem that says it is prepared for the worst but imagines decay is
mere bad luck and forgetting but an interval in memory (not
vice versa),
a poem that regardless has walked in space,
that still has room for another bagpipe, for a chair wrapped in
magnetic tape, for all the planet plus the entire metric
system;
into its black hole fall the half-moon of a fingernail, the moon
itself which is full tonight, and all the moons of Jupiter;
a poem with room for more still,
because it is a horseshoe
with its ends pointed up
to catch the falling angels.
North/South
I.
Congo
Cruise
Zaire Rwanda Burundi
Agent Orange
Chad
Titan
Niger
Nigeria
Backfire Biafra
Hellfire Hornet
Somalia
Trident
Tanzania
Eagle
Egypt
Tomcat Togo
Guinea
Ethiopia
Backfire
Eritrea Exocet
Botswana
Napalm Mozambique
Cruise
Zimbabwe
MX
Zambia
Badger
Gambia
B-52
Uganda
Tomahawk
Cruise
Sudan Napalm Mali
Minuteman
Malawi
Mig
Guinea Bissau
Howitzer
Swaziland
Trident
Tunisia
Poseidon
Namibia
Hellfire
Zimbabwe
Cruise
II.
Wandering, I reached an oasis --
date trees, their fruit rip and moist,
shade from the sun,
a spring running clear and cold.
I ate, I drank,
then lay down to sleep,
a breeze in the branches, the cool
song of birds in my ears.
But sleep would not come,
monsters and mockers
crossed my eyes in cloud-shapes.
They told me
I slept already,
all this
was a dream.
Sun glared in my eyes
and woke me,
throat parched,
belly aching with hunger,
and round me I saw only
sand, and flies
swarming over me as if
I were dead.
III.
The rains did not fall
They sent planes to the president
The cattle grew thin
They sent guns to the rebels
The crops did not ripen
They sent bombs for the airplanes
The men had no work
They sent bullets for the rifles
The babies cried for food
They sent nuclear reactors
My husband went to war
They sent tractors for the harvest
My parents died in sorrow
They sent lies to the newspapers
My daughter's eyes darken
They send cars to the capital
My son's teeth fall out
They send books to the libraries
My womb is dry and empty
They send x-rays to the hospitals
My baby spits up death
They send oysters to the president
All the land is dying
They send good will and peace-on-earth
The president is murdered
They send newsmen and camera crews
IV.
The colours I see
are no colours
but shadows
of a light behind light
and this darkness around me
is earth
in which creatures of air
have buried dead joys.
If I could see!
If I could see you
again
as in my dream ...
If I could touch
the frost on the window
and look (in? out?
then would I see you
and would you
look back at me?