Selected Poems (21 page)

and mistakes in the mists of his Alzheimer’s

the nurse who wipes his bottom for his mother.

Some hoard memories as some hoard gold

against that rapidly approaching day

that’s all they have to live on, being old,

but find their savings spirited away.

What’s the point of having lived at all

in the much-snapped duplex in Etobicoke

if it gets swept away beyond recall,

in spite of all the snapshots, at one stroke?

If we
are
what we remember, what are they

who don’t have memories as we have ours,

who, when evening falls, have no recall of day,

or who those people were who’d brought them flowers.

The troubled conscience, though, ’s glad to forget.

Oblivion for some ’s an inner balm.

They’ve found some peace of mind, not total yet,

as only death itself brings that much calm.

And those white flashes on the
TV
screen,

as a child, whose dad plunged into genocide,

remembers Dresden and describes the scene,

are they from the firestorm then, or storm outside?

Crouching in clown’s costume (it was
Fasching
)

aged, 40 years ago, as I was, 9

Eva remembers cellar ceiling crashing

and her mother screaming shrilly:
Swine! Swine! Swine!

The Tiergarten chief with level voice remembered

a hippo disembowelled on its back,

a mother chimp, her charges all dismembered,

and trees bedaubed with zebra flesh and yak.

Flamingos, flocking from burst cages, fly

in a frenzy with their feathers all alight

from fire on the ground to bomb-crammed sky,

their flames fanned that much fiercer by their flight;

the gibbon with no hands he’d had to shoot

as it came towards him with appealing stumps,

the gutless gorilla still clutching fruit

mashed with its bowels into bloody lumps …

I was glad as on and on the keeper went

to the last flayed elephant’s fire-frantic screech

that the old folk hadn’t followed what was meant

by official footage or survivors’ speech.

But then they missed the Semper’s restoration,

Dresden’s lauded effort to restore

one of the treasures of the now halved nation

exactly as it was before the War.

Billions of marks and years of labour

to reproduce the Semper and they play

what they’d played before the bombs fell, Weber,

Der Freischütz
, for their reopening today.

Each bleb of blistered paintwork, every flake

of blast-flayed pigment in that dereliction

they analysed in lab flasks to remake

the colours needed for the redepiction

of Poetic Justice on her cloud surmounting

mortal suffering from opera and play,

repainted tales that seem to bear recounting

more often than the facts that mark today:

the dead Cordelia in the lap of Lear,

Lohengrin who pilots his white swan

at cascading lustres of bright chandelier

above the plush this pantheon shattered on,

with Titania’s leashed pards in pastiche Titian,

Faust with Mephisto, Joan, Nathan the Wise,

all were blown, on that Allied bombing mission,

out of their painted clouds into the skies.

Repainted, reupholstered, all in place

just as it had been before that fatal night,

but however devilish the leading bass

his demons are outshadowed on this site.

But that’s what Dresden wants and so they play

the same score sung by new uplifting voices

and, as opera synopses often say,

‘The curtain falls as everyone rejoices.’

Next more TV, devoted to the trial

of Ernst Zundel, who denies the Jews were gassed,

and academics are supporting his denial,

restoring pride by doctoring the past,

and not just Germans but those people who

can’t bear to think such things could ever be,

and by disbelieving horrors to be true

hope to put back hope in history.

A nurse comes in to offer us a cot

considering how bad the blizzard’s grown

but you kissed your dad, who, as we left, forgot

he’d been anything all day but on his own.

We needed to escape, weep, laugh, and lie

in each other’s arms more privately than there,

weigh in the balance all we’re heartened by,

so braved the blizzard back, deep in despair.

Feet of snow went sliding off the bonnet

as we pulled onto the road from where we’d parked.

A snowplough tried to help us to stay on it

but localities nearby, once clearly marked,

those named for northern hometowns close to mine,

the Yorks, the Whitbys, and the Scarboroughs,

all seemed one whited-out recurring sign

that could well be ‘Where everybody goes …’

His goggles bug-eyed from the driven snow,

the balaclavaed salter goes ahead

with half the sower’s, half the sandman’s throw,

and follows the groaning plough with wary tread.

We keep on losing the blue revolving light

and the sliding salter, and try to keep on track

by making sure we always have in sight

the yellow Day-glo X marked on his back.

The blizzard made our neighbourhood unknown.

We could neither see behind us nor before.

We felt in that white-out world we were alone

looking for landmarks, lost, until we saw

the unmistakable McDonald’s M

with its ‘60 billion served’ hamburger count.

Living, we were numbered among them,

and dead, among an incomputable amount …

I woke long after noon with you still sleeping

and the windows blocked where all the snow had blown.

Your pillow was still damp from last night’s weeping.

In that silent dark I swore I’d make it known,

while the oil of memory feeds the wick of life

and the flame from it’s still constant and still bright,

that, come oblivion or not, I loved my wife

in that long thing where we lay with day like night.

Toronto’s at a standstill under snow.

Outside there’s not much light and not a sound.

Those lines from Aeschylus! How do they go?

It’s almost halfway through
Prometheus Bound
.

I think they’re coming back. I’m concentrating …

μουσομητορ ’εργανην … Damn! I forget,

but remembering your dad, I’m celebrating

being in love, not too forgetful, yet.

Country people used to say today’s

the day the birds sense spring and choose their mates,

and trapped exotics in the Dresden blaze

were flung together in their flame-fledged fates.

The snow in the street outside ’s at least 6ft.

I look for life, and find the only sign ’s,

like words left for, or
by
, someone from Crete,

a bird’s tracks, like blurred Greek, for Valentine’s.

(Toronto, St Valentine’s Day)

Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks

shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea.

The first bright weather here for many weeks

for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee,

off to St Andrew’s to record a reading,

doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,

and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding

my doubt extends to Dark Age Good Book too.

Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator

incorporated cormorants I’m seeing fly

round the same island thirteen centuries later

into the
In principio
’s initial I.

Billfrith’s begemmed and jewelled boards get looted

by raiders gung-ho for booty and berserk,

the sort of soldiery that’s still recruited

to do today’s dictators’ dirty work,

but the initials in St John and in St Mark

graced with local cormorants in ages,

we of a darker still keep calling Dark,

survive in those illuminated pages.

The word of God so beautifully scripted

by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite

Pentagon conners have once again conscripted

to gloss the cross on the precision sight.

Candlepower, steady hand, gold leaf, a brush

were all that Eadfrith had to beautify

the word of God much bandied by George Bush

whose word illuminated midnight sky

and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed

by bombs into believing day was dawning

and crowed his heart out at the deadly raid

and didn’t live to greet the proper morning.

Now with noonday headlights in Kuwait

and the burial of the blackened in Baghdad

let them remember, all those who celebrate,

that their good news is someone else’s bad

or the light will never dawn on poor Mankind.

Is it open-armed at all that victory V,

that insular initial intertwined

with slack-necked cormorants from black laquered sea,

with trumpets bulled and bellicose and blowing

for what men claim as victories in their wars,

with the fire-hailing cock and all those crowing

who don’t yet smell the dunghill at their claws?

‘A cold coming we had of it.’

     (T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’)

I saw the charred Iraqi lean

towards me from bomb-blasted screen,

his windscreen wiper like a pen

ready to write down thoughts for men,

his windscreen wiper like a quill

he’s reaching for to make his will.

I saw the charred Iraqi lean

like someone made of Plasticine

as though he’d stopped to ask the way

and this is what I heard him say:

‘Don’t be afraid I’ve picked on you

for this exclusive interview.

Isn’t it your sort of poet’s task

to find words for this frightening mask?

If that gadget that you’ve got records

words from such scorched vocal chords,

press
RECORD
before some dog

devours me mid-monologue.’

So I held the shaking microphone

closer to the crumbling bone:

‘I read the news of three wise men

who left their sperm in nitrogen,

three foes of ours, three wise Marines

with sample flasks and magazines,

three wise soldiers from Seattle

who banked their sperm before the battle.

Did No. 1 say: God be thanked

I’ve got my precious semen banked.

And No. 2: O Praise the Lord

my last best shot is safely stored.

And No. 3: Praise be to God

I left my wife my frozen wad?

So if their fate was to be gassed

at least they thought their name would last,

and though cold corpses in Kuwait

they could by proxy procreate.

Excuse a skull half roast, half bone

for using such a scornful tone.

It may seem out of all proportion

but I wish I’d taken their precaution.

They seemed the masters of their fate

with wisely jarred ejaculate.

Was it a propaganda coup

to make us think they’d cracked death too,

disinformation to defeat us

with no post-mortem millilitres?

Symbolic billions in reserve

made me, for one, lose heart and nerve.

On Saddam’s pay we can’t afford

to go and get our semen stored.

Sad to say that such high tech’s

uncommon here. We’re stuck with sex.

If you can conjure up and stretch

your imagination (and not retch)

the image of me beside my wife,

closely clasped creating life …

(I let the unfleshed skull unfold

a story I’d been already told,

and idly tried to calculate

the content of ejaculate:

the sperm in one ejaculation

equals the whole Iraqi nation

times, roughly, let’s say, 12.5

though that .5’s not now alive.

Let’s say the sperms were an amount

so many times the body count,

2,500 times at least

(but let’s wait till the toll’s released!).

Whichever way Death seems outflanked

by one tube of cold bloblings banked.

Poor bloblings, maybe you’ve been blessed

with, of all fates possible, the best

according to Sophocles i.e.

‘the best of fates is not to be’

a philosophy that’s maybe bleak

for any but an ancient Greek

but difficult these days to escape

when spoken to by such a shape.

When you see men brought to such states

who wouldn’t want that ‘best of fates’

or in the world of Cruise and Scud

not go cryonic if he could,

spared the normal human doom

of having made it through the womb?)

He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool:

‘I never thought life futile, fool!

Though all Hell began to drop

I never wanted life to stop.

I was filled with such a yearning

to stay in life as I was burning,

such a longing to be beside

my wife in bed before I died,

and, most, to have engendered there

a child untouched by war’s despair.

So press
RECORD
! I want to reach

the warring nations with my speech.

Don’t look away! I know it’s hard

to keep regarding one so charred,

so disfigured by unfriendly fire

and think it once burned with desire.

Though fire has flayed off half my features

they once were like my fellow creatures’,

till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy

from Iowa or Illinois,

equipped by ingenious technophile