Lucky Me (3 page)

it was skewed, and turned into a sheet.

At my age even a rat, running

snout low, has me sucking air.

To glimpse wild, (the there … and gone)

is a surprise, an unanticipated gift

unsnapped … a story half-believed,

uncomfortable, envied.

Like a disappearing snake

there is an impulse, always late,

to corner and destroy

the marvel, to own and out-manoeuver,

to carve a triumph out of

petty stone.

But rats are safe with me!

I have the time to stay on guard,

to catch another instant

of uncertainty when fermions collide,

(or is it bosons?

or mesons?

or even smaller ‘strings'?)

I'll have to wait and see.

I remember living,

swimming.

I would rise and surface, then

re-submerge to strain warm

²
liquor through the frill

that forms my gills;

oblivious.

Awareness was instinctual – before

the smell of father-smoke woke

love. I was older too, with

dormant eyes, darting from

the abstract of predatory mouths;

while fear was strictly limited,

(to dish-kiss for example),

and immortality contained

in global endometrium.

Volcanoes would have blacked

the sea (despite the sun being younger

then) with basalt, while comets

would have mesmerized the moon

and drawn me into shallows.

Fish? Foetus? Both perhaps, and

swimming,

twirling,

unbothered,

like innominate nebulae.

²
Liquor, pronounced ‘lie-cor', is the fluid surrounding a foetus in utero

It was late enough

while exercising Alice

to let her off the lead,

and safe enough to have

her sniff wolf urine

as she pleased.

I also sniffed, and I

should have sniffed for

crimson, for the emblem

rose, but my nostrils,

(sensing rebellion and seeking

out blemish), settled for

fresh-clipped grass.

It could have been

the season of late summer

(when roses scorch) that stopped

convention, but I believe it was school

cricket, (towels at the pool),

because nasal vibrissae like

wolves, cherish a smell,

(especially an itchy smell),

that remembers girl skin.

i'll race you my mother

said to the house

and her polka-dot dress

went flying and her feet

took off i had never

seen her run or take her

shoes off in the sand

nor had i seen the

white behind her knees

it was the last time

that i was fat as i

remember and the squeak

of galloped dust still

stings with gasp as

happy as snow on her

birthday she catches and

hugs and kisses the salt

from my eye

Your walnuts are falling crack

onto our tin

roof like bullets, shivering brains that also bounce

soft on the turf for Alice to snack

with her wolf jaw.

She nibbles to find the right plane,

the sagittal suture

that gives like a vice-caught tooth;

not shattering, not bursting, not

leaving the root; but brute

force nevertheless.

And your roses are banking, John,

on a frostless Easter

and a hidden moon, especially the pink rose outside

your outside room. With autumn all but gone

it will have to stand

idle and shoulder the wait for a happier bloom.

For Alice though the season

offers coat-oil and approved prey, cranial

fuel in cerebral folds, shelled memory for

her seven worn years

till your walnuts are falling.

The river, vivid in remembering,

separates a boulder

from a blue, perched fisher - a

kingfisher - sharpening its beak.

Flood wood, water smell

fresh with oxygen, canvass

shoes, and our own fire

for the flames. That, and a

stunned worm stopped wriggling,

to catch small bream.

Further up the bank beyond the

willow is a cow bell, and a cow boy

whipping, slipping in cow shit

and cracked mud. We listen and

search for a beetle that is tapping, tapping.

But the river, resembling philosophy,

reassembles myth and memory,

wets synaptic furrows that imagine

they are dry, and flushes

old veins with pomegranate dye.

³
The Umzingwane River in Zimbabwe

Searching for a thought

to frame the terror-virgin

giggle, the chill-thrill, the

Poe poem, Edith's
Snake
,

or Granny's cracking wart,

I double back, reverse

my metamorphosis and

enter storm drains, Sunday

city buildings, port

bars, until, finally, I squirt

into a sperm, and

wriggle through her ostium

more quickly than I ought.

  Because of shade, (and our

ineptitude), fuchsia have assumed ascendancy in

the garden. Their leaves have a preference for tree-soft

light and they thrive like fungus

in damp-shelter.

      We have a host of coy

varieties (close to twenty four or more)

which dangle like bright shells

at a festival. Everyone's favourite is

voodoo
, and it is impressive,

(being double red and magenta with arms

that need support); but my

personal preference (among fuchsia)

is for varieties with subtle leaves.

      If there'd been less shade

however, and less rain in our garden, we

might have been more successful with rose

bushes or agapanthus.

      But, to take the argument one step

further, (and I might be disclosing

more than is wise), let me

confess that we would, if we could exhume

our African sun, consider replacing the

garden's fuchsine splendor with poinsettia.

Their petals you see (although

they aren't actually petals), flap like

giant lips.

      Please don't tell the fuchsia though, what we miss,

that we hanker after lost piercings

of scarlet blue, as they too can turn away their glance,

and, as you know, they too would rather dance

than kiss.

  We are seeds

dispersed, borne

on wind current and wave,

ejected with pessimistic ease

from long pods.

      We left parent

trees dropping iris on

the old school,

as we floated and flew

to new loam.

      We are grafted

now, into composites,

hybrids half-happy,

uncomfortable in the wet

island wind ; and

    We raise seeds

ourselves now, in settled rhythm,

sending up sap in the spring,

  hiding root-hunger

and hurt in the soil.

We are flowers

as well, unfurling and spilling

iris-blue, softening asphalt

and fields, the way

jacarandas do.

Watch a cow

eat. She bends perpetually

over mud-green

grass, but spurns, like

cooked carrot, unpalatable dock.

Watch for long

enough, and she will

move/chew/move - without

ever looking up – without

ever taking stock.

Watch for longer

still, and you will notice

her herd turn toy, turn

alloy, turn boy milk; turn

hands off the clock.

The earth is splitting like a fig

fat in autumn after gust-storm,

and fissures like fig

down to raw-pink flesh.

⁴
Wax-eyes are too heavy

    to fly

and humans too splintered

    to flee

  filling black.

Even the atom unhinges

and prepares to attack:

        Crack ~~~~~~ Crack

⁴
Small fruit-eating birds in Australasia

The dark rose is eaten out

and
⁵
'The invisible worm' turns

on autumn cabbage leaves,

pulling and pushing like Quasimodo,

masticating, methodically devouring,

leaving a picked sole

frame, and a little spittle from

his pitiless, never-kissed mouth.

⁵
‘The invisible worm' is a quote from William Blake's poem
‘The Sick Rose'.

Listen to the yellow

Owl, yellow after

Waking, eager to be

Eating, mating,

Waiting for the dark

To see.

Listen to the cello,

Owl, mellow in the

Evening, meowing like

A widowed cat,

Reaching for a chord

To free.

With no residual predator but hate

the eagles fish with impunity,

beyond surfeit, beaming down cloud-high

to target every quarry by the sea

that scurries.

Their juveniles, just loosened,

wearing white sagacity as cover, are

indiscriminate in aim. Their

eyes like oil spots betray no pleasure

in the killing – no quiver.

They capture prey on film, lead-running,

and cleanse; leaving carrion.

Our frog, in the way that he was sitting,

looked comical, not like a frog

at all, and disconnected from his leg

and ledge.

Was he troubled, or in love? Was

a tadpole missing? While we were guessing

a snake snaked her way to

the edge.

Frog was distracted, preoccupied, an

unintentional fool, and his protruding

eyes looked out, but also in, as if

to dredge

the Archaean. But snake meanwhile,

more at ease on land than lake, slipped

by, flicked her lips, then headed for

the hedge

beyond. We could not fathom why she

missed her dinner, why frog was unperturbed,

as we would kill for food, but also for

a pledge.

A conjuring god is eating her

raw, incrementally, savouring

buttock-like portions in

invisible bites, using

enveloping ash as a screen.

The audience leans west, tracking

revolution, eager to see through

the sleight, anxious for the

emergence through involution,

of an undigested moon.

She stopped to murmur as he slept, “what is it

that is left? Opaque nails on bleached feet? An

uncaged sac? The promise of a doctor's visit!”

She cocked an ear and listened to his phlegm

pop. (It sounded anachronistic, like a man

blowing through the stem

of his Dr. Plumb). And then, unexpectedly, the suck

cut. She reached for air and began,

meticulously, to check his pipe was clear, that muck

was not the cause. She even turned him onto

his side and away from the fan

and tapped him, but sensed that he did not want to

breathe; so she left the room to hang a vest spilt

yellow by his soup. At six, when bugles used to blow, she ran

a scented bath; but guilt

again caused her to stop, again to pose

the question; “what is it that is left? How can

I enjoy a bath with a tag tied round his toes?”

Half a life is not enough, not

to stop the vagus chill

the heart the way it does, not

when spit sets. I still,

despite my age, dart

fast beyond the damning

comment, and contemplate retreat,

escape, even nescience;

But that half, that part

that parries, is much aware that patients'

sense is touch, not word, not gaucherie,

and it, the grey, will feel them hear

the news, and clasp

with liver strength, their fright, their fear.

Her red legs were far too thin

to run on sand, thinner even

than a child could draw, and all that

I could truthfully see were