Interactive Press
Kiss and Tell
This selected collection brings together the best from David P Reiter’s award-winning volumes of poetry: The Snow in Us (1989), Changing House (1991), The Cave After Saltwater Tide (1994), Hemingway in Spain (1997) and Letters We Never Sent (2000), as well as more than forty pages of new text from his innovative multimedia works.
Raised and educated in North America, Reiter came to Australia in 1986. While his more recent titles show a definite interest in Australian subjects, his work continues to have an exciting global flavour. This may explain his evolution to multimedia, since this emerging art form provides a wider canvass and greater access to international audiences.
Not only does Kiss and Tell provide the reader with an excellent overview of one our most highly regarded poets, it also makes us current on the state-of-the-artist at a high point in his creative career.
The Literature Series showcases the best in contemporary Australian writing and is available in digital as well as print form.
Kiss and Tell
Selected and New Poems
1987-2002
David P Reiter
Interactive Press
Brisbane
Interactive Press
an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152
http://ipoz.biz/IP/IP.htm
First published by Interactive Publications, 2002
© David P Reiter, 2002
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Smashwords Edition.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Reiter, David P. (David Philip)
Kiss and tell : selected and new poems, 1987-2002.
ISBN 1 876819 10 3.
1. Title. (Series: Literature series (Carindale, Qld.)).
A821.3
IP’s publishing program is assisted by a grant from Arts Queensland, the Queensland Government’s arts funding body.
in memory of Bob Pinter and all those mountains we climbed both real and imagined
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges with gratitude the following publications in which these poems have appeared, sometimes in slightly modified versions: A Fine Line, Age Monthly, Arc (CAN), Dandelion (CAN), Fiddlehead Review (CAN), Mattoid, Meanjin, Outrider, Poetry Australia, Redoubt, Tickleace (CAN), Australian Writing 98, ABC’s A First Hearing, Westerly, Quadrant, The Tin Wash Cup (ABC Bicentennial Anthology), Prints, Northern Perspective, Overland, Scarp, Imago, Salt, Southerly, Southern Review, Linq, Antipodes (USA), Blue Unicorn (USA), Dragonfly (USA), Wisconsin Review, Maryland Review, Nebraska Review, Bellingham Review, Amelia (USA), Dalhousie Review (CAN), Wascana Review (CAN), Poetry Durham, Canadian Literature, Black River (US), Scarp, Poetry Wales, Plainwraps (NZ), Idiom 23, Takahe (NZ), Ariel (CAN), Fremantle Arts Review, Stand (UK), London Magazine (UK), Toronto Review, Social Alternatives, Sydney Morning Herald, Queensland Writer, Orbis (UK), Matrix (CAN), Grain (CAN), Poetry Nottingham, Antigonish Review (CAN), Poetry Nippon (JPN), Heartland, Looking Beyond Yesterday (Writers for Nuclear Disarmament), Going Down Swinging, Hobo (USA), Bogg (UK), The Canberra Times, The Australian, Small Packages, Prism International (CAN), Michigan Quarterly, Nebraska Review, Island, Divan, Retort, Ariga (Israel), PoeticA (ABC Radio National), The Poetry Review (USA).
Cover photo: ‘Thirsty Work’ by Mark Austin Tate Cover design and other photos: David P Reiter Photo montage for Hemingway in Spain: Jack Perlinski. ‘Soapstone Sketch’ for The Snow In Us: Marilyn Higgins
Also by David P Reiter
The Snow in Us (poetry, 1989) Changing House (poetry, 1991) The Cave After Saltwater Tide (poetry, 1994) Hemingway in Spain (poetry, 1997) Paul and Vincent (radio play, 1999) Triangles (fiction, 2000) Letters We Never Sent (poetry, 2000) The Gallery (literary multimedia, 2001) Sharpened Knife (literary multimedia, 2002)
Author’s Note
I am delighted to be able to share with you a selection of my work over the past fifteen years. Revisiting poems written over such a long period is an interesting experience, to say the least. Having to choose a modest number out of so many candidates reminded me why I prefer to be an author whenever possible rather than an editor and publisher – which I must do so I can go on writing.
In the end I chose many of those poems that still hold their hand up to be read at festivals and the like, as well as those that have travelled well beyond our shores, finding moorage in overseas publications. And I also tried to represent my range of interests and subjects, sometimes leaving out published work in favour of poems that deal with the matter better.
It may help in your reading to know that two of the volumes represented here actually contain two books: The Cave After Saltwater Tide and Hemingway in Spain. The version of The Cave was published by Penguin in five parts. The first four were part of a manuscript entitled Voices from the Flood, which, though written earlier than the title part, was actually accepted for publication later. And Hemingway has selected poems written before and during the time I was working on the main sequence.
Perhaps the most difficult to follow without a scorecard is the group from Letters We Never Sent. Those poems are grouped according to speakers, of which there are two main ones: Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, Ronald Symes in the Cook Islands as well as contemporary speakers who travel between various islands, including Australia, which is, as the ad for Bacardi Rum reminds us, the world’s largest island. The speakers are identified by different type fonts in the four parts from Letters reproduced here. These include poems in “internet” sections, which were written during the process of composing the main sections of the book.
My interest in presenting contrasting voices and exploring how literary work can be presented in other art forms led me to compose The Gallery, my first work of “literary multimedia”. It was drawn from Letters, but contained only selected passages of text. The point was to introduce video, audio, image and hyperlinks to explore how literature might work in a hybrid environment. If the response to The Gallery is any indication, the collaboration of art forms is promising, and poetry may yet have a leg to stand on for another century or so!
The new poems are drawn, almost without exception, from my latest multimedia work, Sharpened Knife, which will be released this year, and The Planets, a fictive memoir that is ‘in progress’, as they say. Knife is actually billed as a ‘multimedia novella’, but the fiction contains links to side works of poetry, micro-fiction, prose and even external web sites that relate to its themes. Other new poems have been published in magazines but not as a part of a book, and two more are actually “internet” poems from different sections of Letters than the ones published here, but they insisted on having their space.
I hope you find much to enjoy from the out-of-print bins and the current, as well as the sneak previews of what is to come.
DPR Brisbane, 2002
Contents
The Snow in Us
Breath Channel
Life-blood
Lead Dog
Inukshuk at Dusk
Kunigseq
Misana
Chewing The Pieces
Arctic Wolf Down Under
Love Behind the Foil
At the River’s Mouth
Bloody Falls
Lantern in Light
Mary Ignatuk
The Fox-Wife
Arctic Gourmet’s Night Out
The Snow in Us
Changing House
Bear by the Jasper Road
Northern Lights, Saskatchewan
Glass Balls at North Beach
Sleeping Sharks
Skiing Bush Lake
Group Photo
Rules for Teachers – Gympie School, 1879
Subway Sex, Mexico
¿Cuanto es?
Mango Haiku
Merida Leather Shop
Fertility Goddess
Rattlesnake Equinox
La Gran Tenochtitlán
The Bubblebath
Stanley Park Seawalk
Spareribs
Cats Slip In
Changing House
The Cave after Saltwater Tide
Voices from the Temple
Good Morning, Bangkok
The River under Kwai Bridge
Sweet and Sour Soup
Sea Gypsies
Washing Her Back
Island Voices
la fleur de l’âge
Cemetery, Circular Head
Rules for Prisoners, Port Arthur, 1843
The Commandant’s Ghost
Voices from the Flood Voices from the Flood of ‘94
David Kane’s Bear
At Ainsworth Hot Springs
Sandon Now
A Gallery of Voices
Mr Bond at the National Gallery
In the Dandenongs
Squashing Devils
Yass, Not Canberra
Snakes and Leeches
Daughter’s Letter from Home
Fishing for Cormorant
The Cave after Saltwater Tide
The Cave after Saltwater Tide
Small Creatures
The Next Father
A Galah, Unrhymed
Hailstones Fell
Nullarbor Song Cycle
Night Bird Transformed / Your Father Cocooned
Dom Rosendo Salvado and the Bushfire
Fantasia for Two Feet
The Water Ate Them
Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems
Selected Poems
Two Synagogues
Not the Atlante Star
Still Life, Café Medici
Mick Angel’s Six-Minute Vatican
Two Views of Trevi Fountain
Plaza de Spagna, Econo Class
snake temple
peasant girl
Man in Barbed Wire, Gallipoli
The Green Violinist, an Update
Paul Revere Still Rides
Mr Flinders and the Aborigines
They Stink Most Sweetly
Saturday, Kingston Markets
Getting Away
Sugar Shacks
Immortality
Baby Talk
Phone Call Home
The Lift at Morning Tea
Hemingway in Spain
At Plaza de España, Madrid
A Clean Well-lighted Place
At the Hotel Florida
The Walls of Toledo
Down the Back Streets
The Chains of San Juan de los Reyes
I Pick a Fight with Maimonides
I Have a Chat with Christopher Columbus
At El Corte Inglés
Francis Drake Sparkles in Cádiz
Watered Down Wine
Roadside Haiku
Bluffing at Gibralfaro
Picasso under House Arrest
Saturday Night Rumble at L’Scandalo Pub
Life is Very Short and Ugly Women Very Long
Ferdinand and Isabella in Stereo
Ghosts of the Castle at Calahorra
Clint Eastwood at Tabernas
Christmas Eve at the Rincón del Principal
Mira a Miró
The Bull on the Hill
Contrasts at Cuenca
Making Love as Best You Can
Prince Pedro’s Nanny
In the Calle de la Juderia Vieja
What the Aqueduct Said / What Maria Did
Return to the Valle de los Caidos
Letters We Never Sent
preludes
intoxicants
masks
twilight of the gods
New Poems
Unnaming
Audition
No Animal Suffered in the Making of this Poem
Daddy
Hosing
Truckin’
Lavenjula’s Script
My Masada
To Autumn
Snowpath
Missing
Tract-ion
Genesis 2.0
After the World Has Ended
El Niño Tryptic
Falling Water
The Changeable
What We Won
Two Elektras
Love in a French Patisserie
More than a Sniffer
Call of Nature
from The Snow in Us
Breath Channel
They squat along a channel of blue water that seams
a shelf of ice soon to be a floe in spring:
a father with steady line, a mother with sharpened blade,
a child wishing the myth of seal might shatter
the surface calm. Breath’s debt to air
gives them patience.
Blood always takes its time.
Under cloudbanks of ice, a seal surges
toward the fissure of shadowy green light,
air sacs nearly spent. Down here the choices
are never trivial. The blur between breath and death
depends on monotony, unrelenting silence, absence.
A single shift of bone above can echo against eardrums
like a quavering spine.
Blood always takes its time.
Above the gap, death is never kind, only sudden –
a slap of bear claw that rends the skull,
or a thrust of sharpened steel. The seal must finally choose
its channel or drown. So, after knives and ropes,
it bleeds spring onto the warming ice.
Blood always takes its time.
Life-blood
naked, we sleep the warmth together between caribou skins, mama, papa and me then my breaths wake to dance one finger of seal oil flame into bear and muskox shadows on the curving ice walls
father, uncle and grandfather today they sharpen best for seal the dogs already leaning blood tongues through darkness to lighten for harness
How can summer be for sleep when the sun disk always keeps her toes dry day into day?
Papa dreams for the mines and sleeps mornings with women he drinks with, mama plays bingo the hours, and I watch sister whine after her gone boy and nibble uncle’s pills.
papa thickens his hands with wolf gloves to go the wind, his hairs whitening to grandpa with frost threads then yells behind the sled pitching ice at the dogs for speed
far enough, the dogs loose pad to sniff air out of old bubbles, then grandpa, he slices snow down to the hole banking it for the wait, harpoon stiff as char drying on sun poles
Her eyes slipping to white, sister sleeps the wrong, so I must run on gravel bare past the sticking honey
pots to where the nurses are, and ring my thumbs sore on the night bell. Nurse tries for a bottle game as they lay sister to moan on skins not caribou but red:
‘Can you tell us, honey, how many, what colour, the pills were?’
girls laugh the morning as mama eyes tight spins for our darting, laugh when she traps our sound points in her fingers, laugh to her skins when she nets us like leaping char
outside us, the boys laugh snow drifts into dunes – they are owl diving claws for rabbit, bear
sinking teeth into walrus – their steamy rolls warm the wind
Sister tries to twist from their needle after the tube snakes down her throat bringing back the pills in pink splatters.
‘Enemies!’ she shouts at them, twisting. To miss her touch, I find low corners, as they strap her in red skins on the plane ‘for rest.’ But her eyes pinch my lids in sleep: ‘enemy!’ she screams in me.
harpoon copper deep between her darkening eyes, the seal is heavy as soapstone as papa lifts her to spurt blood onto snow like midnight sun freshening clouds into day
seal’s blood-spirit rises in us from this liver we chew:
I laugh at mama’s fingers red as spring flowers and do not wash away the sticky before sleep
Lead Dog
The sled is ready yet even its whip
depends on you to see over ice
that sun forgets
At harness the other dogs wait for the tug
of leather that sparks
with you
How do you find the track before the footfall?
How do you find the heat before the flame?
How do you find the will before the thought?
Inukshuk at Dusk
Eyes of stone, I sit sentry to a bog, seasons braced
beneath my toes. Caribou screams bloody the canyons
of my hypnotic spears. I direct hunters to fish, the cold
arcing to flesh in igloos. I better the melting footprints between stars
because no clouds can conceal my shoulders. As a radiant
on this slice of tundra, I eclipse the sun.
I knead desert into shoals for slavered paddles.
My chorus casts the very flicker of gods.
Kunigseq
Before his flight down into underworld, Kunigseq swilled the floor with salt water to please the helping spirits. He put his foot on them to pass through a reef slippery with weed.
When he met his mother she tried all day to kiss him but a spirit
thrust her aside: ‘He visits only.’
Her sack full she offered berries red as blood but a spirit snatched them back:
‘If you eat, you will not live again.’
His brother chided: ‘Return to snow? Here is no end to seal or your kin!’
Never had Kunigseq seen shore so smooth with summer. Two kayaks laughed and threw their bird darts. Others dried on an island of men drowned at storm.
They said: ‘Send us ice for we thirst for cold down here.’
After the helping spirits set him back again, Kunigseq thought of winter breath. His son died, and Kunigseq caught guillemot and raven and ate both to die.
Then they threw his smiling flesh on the sea.
Misana
Imarasugssuaq’s last wife, sister of many brothers, who would not be eaten.
Her belly already fattened with his salmon she licked snow for days to lighten her stomach then stuffed flesh inside her tunic and taught it how to shriek for his harpoon.
At last she did amulet herself into wood to stanch her blood.
Before his axe, she flew behind the skin hanging at her brothers’, who mocked Imarasugssuag’s false tears with song then fell on him so Misana might stab him.
At his chest, her fingers lost their hate.
But then they saw him already dead.
I see nothing more
Chewing The Pieces
If you only dry and scrape, the sealskin lies tough
even for ulu* no needles prick through.
Once the foot curves are scratched on
see how you must slice against stiffness
to trim the edges of sole!
From toe to heel and a finger more for duffel –
that’s a kamik’s right measure.
Then you chew.
Until your jaws ache and your tongue feels dry
as a ledge rasped by winter wind.
While babies lean on your hips by the night coals
you chew until heavy eyes flicker you at last to sleep
Sometimes your chewing goes on for days.
Not easy for us women to soften death into a second skin.
*a curved slicing tool
Arctic Wolf Down Under
Pack howling is not a haphazard affair. It is initiated by one wolf, not necessarily the pack leader, but the animal with the most active inclination to howl at that time.
– Rutter & Pimlott
What icebridge of dream brought me to your Snowies?
You promised soft throats of rabbit too many for teeth
or bullets, a land so sparse of predators its lifeblood
seems bored as a pebble submersed by a constant stream,
an easier snow, eager for claws to assert fresh legends.
So how could I be content with the pack?
You kept me below deck to buffer me from the roil of waves.
I never knew land could be so parenthetical in this pitch
of primordial liquid. But you steered with the confidence of bones
born to export the tentative through undefined currents
until I felt subordinated as a child-bride sifting sticky sand
for grains of definition. On the beach my fur clotted with seasalt
and I cried out for the shelter of snow-caves:
there is warmth in deflected cold.
Whose nightmare was I breathing in?
The Snow in Us
When I awoke at dusk on the hillside you tossed me a slab of stringy meat.
‘Wallabies’ll be your dole,’ you laughed,
‘if you’re fast enough!’
Then you left the night to mock me like a bristled wing
dancing out of reach. Well, a wolf is
kept fed by his feet,
so I padded through darkness pools to fence my stake
with scent. There were no hackles,
nothing to reproach my lolling tongue;
everything cringed before my fur. Like a brutal prince,
I assigned each
unfamiliar some niche in my dimension
until every spoke spun to its proper wheel:
gum forests exchanged their leaves
for needles, a dwarfy bear slothed by,
even the birds took an alpine script.
A week had gone before I could rest
from my revenge. And wait for snow
to frost the land familiar. What luck –
the hares took their season from dust!
***
Alone on these bluffs, should I fret over pups?
No lasting meat in that!
I lick my fur clean of such totems.
Love Behind the Foil
No drapes are thick enough to wool this midnight sun,
so we coat the glass with tin before sleep. Our scripts
of love all night wear thin when boys can whistle outside
the window as though they know our song before we sing it.
We wonder at Inuit mothers and fathers in naked patience,
feigning sleep for such eyes.
Can their lust wait seasons for its privacy?
At the River’s Mouth
Their hands fat with sticks, two Inuit girls, dwarfs,
stretch a sack between them:
‘We camp,’ they say, glinting for our camera,
‘since summer.’ I see South in their clothes –
sandy joggers and jeans – and wonder about their kindling.
‘Where are there trees?’ I ask.
‘Days back,’ says the one with steno frames low on her nose, pointing.
‘River bring. Then smash to fire
bits on the rock, for us to pick.’
Down the beach, others play their part among the stones:
father slitting morning’s
seal, mother chewing hide into soft soles,
grandmother pinning char* to line like damp socks.
To our eyes, these sparkling flowers will die in a glance;
no tenting here for strangers.
*an Arctic fish, similar in taste and appearance to salmon
Bloody Falls
You called it so, Samuel Hearne, after Chipewyan spearheads
struck down the Inuit host here over copper chunks.
For days, the falls lost its green and flowed with Inuit sap,
all for your copper. And your pleas spent in leaves.
That morning, falcons looped for blood over tundra
as the Dene bore your sacks on skin hulls. For weeks,
Klugluktuk spewed foam to test your metal.
The fires of Fort Prince of Wales flickered down
into cooler threads. One night, ice thickened the tongues
of your dream.
One less ulu was the difference that crushed skulls.
You could not predict the sting of such imbalance.
Nor believe the tangles your silver could cast.
Your pleas, then ashes, lost in leaves.
Water spills into green again beneath the falls.
Not far, a river’s mouth polishes stone.
Lantern in Light
1. Father Rene’s Maid
She leaves him wisps of dirt
on the counter where everyone will see –
the invisible spots are clean.
Father on his tiptoes, dusting
mugs. What hymns for today?
He never gets it right: A pot of Earl Grey
for reception – two bags or three?
He sets out a tidy three (father, son, spirit)
then a fourth for good sermon.
‘That Mary,’ Father moans, laughing with himself.
‘Will she ever come clean?’
2. Windows, Outdoors
No sheep here, but still Father’s grass is cropped in patches
mower met a rock that rose to wrinkle the blade
in summer, grass asks for dusk, a pension –
must our roots spew green without end?
how quickly we forget the ice
no sheep
3. Last Supper in Pelts
seals died for this scene:
taste this Our tanned skin sip this Our furry blood
the Word is sinew all blubber forgiven in Us
is light eternal
(in English, even Inuktitut, the songs kiss)
summer bones soften
that sword in soapstone is our cross
4. People
for fish, more work than a kneel to this god
the children curl their plate coppers into fists
though the South expects no tribute
men circle in columns from the weekend
haze and have no nails for oak
(their women, always then never theirs,
share themselves as they are shared)
how they murmur in this strange equation!
5. The Sermon
Father Rene worries only windows:
his toes are Jesuit, French,
today, Jesus must be browner than ever
to melt this indolence –
flint against brimstone
they nibble the corners of hymns
and hunger no longer
three bags full, three bags...
6. Reception
‘More tea?’
‘Thank you, Father Rene.’
‘Cookie?’
‘Sin to my waist.’
‘Our sin, my child. Ours.’
‘But please.’
Mary Ignatuk
She carves during ad blips for Three’s Company
this soapstone woman who squats behind
a pot simmering with caribou bones. A kettle tries
to boil for tea, while she bends
kindling for a spitting fire. Fillets of char
sag on lines like fleshy wool
to dry in some blue Arctic breeze.
A husky pup forms to loll after heads and guts.
‘Finish by Thursday,’ she murmurs to the worried man
who will pay her $90 for what will fetch $400
in Edmonton, ‘if Mary not lazy.’
Her eyes reflect Jack Tripper.
Her kindling almost snaps.
The Fox-Wife
This man lives alone with a wife who slips away to the water
in his day-work. One morning
he paddles short to shore and watches her from a nearest point.
Out of a sack she wets
rises a man who wraps her in mist; her clothes moan
on the rocks. For this
the husband stuffs her with vermin then buries bones
under the bed. Nights
later in his lonely tent he finds smoking meat served up,
his boots dried for kayak.
From the shadows he sees a fox turn woman to trim
his lamp. Her eyes, her tuft,
forgive the scent, and she licks him clean, so he takes her
for his wife. A cousin by sea
comes in mischief and pinches his nose until she grows a tail
to smother the lamp.
‘Ka, ka, ka!’ she cries, fleeing to cave. At his calls
she pushes a beetle, then
a caterpillar, at last a spider. Upon which he heaps fuel
and burns her alive
then himself, before a sputtering lamp,
into madness cold as moon.
Arctic Gourmet’s Night Out
Starters (Served with Hot Bannock)
Reindeer Head Soup
Muktuk Chowder
Hot Brined Beaver Jerky
Fresh Slivered Caribou Tongue
Smoked Herring and Fireweed Shoots
Moose Head Cheese
À La Carte
Bear Stew à l’Espagnole
Boiled Cariboo
Hooves Reindeer Goulash
Marinated Moose
Smothered Muskrat and Onions
Rabbit à la mode Squirrel
Fricassée Quail in Toast Cups
Fluffy Codfish Pie
Newfoundland Flippers
Complete Dinners
Medallions of Char with Vegetable Marrow
Roast Polar Bear with Glorified Cabbage
Stuffed Caribou Heart with Seal Brain Fritters
Jellied Moose Nose with Clean-Up Day Potatoes
Fried Woodchuck with Sweet and Pungent Carrots
Desserts
Mamie Leonard’s Saskatoon Berry Pie
Wild Cranberries in Bear Fat Pastry
Eileen Thrower’s Brownie Cake
Matrimonial Squares
Eskimo Ice Cream
Blueberry Slump
bon appétit!
The Snow in Us
The motive for north, where it began, a glacier ago,
yet almost a print of yesterday’s foot:
In you, a need to clothe again, leaf the brittle fjords
of love’s inland
sea, find a breath without his silky waters
inching to other tendrils.
In me, to thaw the metaphors of foggy peaks,
chute all pause from the mythy
air, feather our dialects by divining
fresh rungs in your dusky ladder.
The length of light this far north is critical.
from Changing House
Bear by the Jasper Road
A tall man stood in the shadow, took her arm, Led her to his home. He was a bear. In a house under the mountain She gave birth to slick dark children...
– Gary Snyder
Come this far and not touched a bear?
You slept in tents with honey,
sandwiches and toothpaste for bait
but no bears tickled your zippers.
No thought of bets on your ankles,
you padded through berry patches,
eyes eager for cubs or steamy dung,
but no bears burped in the thickets.
You loosened your blouse
dabbing musk perfume down
your nape, even rubbed knee
with warm trout skin at dusk
but no bears offered their arm.
Bags packed, you called a conference.
‘Gentlemen of the press,’ you said,
‘I fear your bears have fled.’
The bear by the road wasn’t
large, but too porky and black
to be discharged as a dog.
‘Shall I stop?’ I asked.
‘No,’ you smirked. ‘I hear
they bite the hand that feeds them.’
Northern Lights, Saskatchewan
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
– William Cullen Bryant
Soft pedals of arabesque, washes in pastel
delicate as Cbopin ‘s crystal touch at piano.
We canoe the meadow lake until the glassy
calm of sunset overcomes our paddles.
I lean against the stern, and you against me,
as we watch the colours click down into dark.
In grey ahead, a loon quavers like a sultry
myth. Our eyes expect a flicker of lamps:
can night really go so unqualified?
You shiver, the canoe rocking in its ripples.
I whisper my love, and mean it.
Glass Balls At North Beach*
Floats escaped from Japanese nets.
Opaque, once dry with a skin of salt.
As the sun sips his tea behind silks
of cloud, you refract first light calm
as a breath of haiku. You seek refuge
among driftwood and tousled kelp
but soon you’ll be bounty to those
who scavenge the wet sand at dawn
for what the night tides wash ashore
Whose macrame nets you’ll fill
is a question of polish and taste:
all that gleams must have its price.
*Queen Charlotte Islands, Canada
Sleeping Sharks*
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more . . .
– John Donne
Whose dream is this? Soft light
of dusky sea has a palette
that warms the palest skin.
Your green eyes have plunged here
before. In waters deep as winter
sleep, your flippers ply a path
for me below the coral. Without
sunlight, all colours become a lie.
The cave comes true: two galanos
loll in the shadow’s shadow, too thin
to match my apparitions. You tease
the leathery lip above the ridge of teeth.
Prompted close, my fingers wilt like petals
on a tomb. Is this the love to outlast decay?
*In underwater caves between Isla Mujeres and
Cozumel, Mexico, divers may come across ‘sleeping
sharks’, supposedly feeling the effects of excess oxygen in the water.
Skiing Bush Lake
for Megan
only the snow can begin to explain how children are apt to forget to remember with up so floating many bells down
– E. E. Cummings
Father and young daughter, on snow
pristine as a poem before the page
can track it into the dried flowers
of print. His skis know the angle.
She’s fine so long as the trail holds
to level but spills on every incline
laughing as her feet splay. He never
rescues her from the drifts, pretends
to sight owls as she brushes mishaps
from her mitts. Soon she’s balanced
enough to jab a pole at needles slumped
with snow and create her own storms.
At lunch, his thumbs rubbing warm
back in her cheeks, he wonders how such
smoothness could bequeath from a skin
so worn with experience. As she twists
away to plead for next outings with you
just you, he gently folds her phrases
into those private bins of memory
fortified against the spillage of age,
like a snow that never dares to melt.
Group Photo
A bird sings out in solitariness
A thin harsh song. The day dies in a child.
– Theodore Roetheke
I took two by tripod:
three chidlren, and me,
trying to seem centred,
a father in fallen leaves.
Depressions’s a valley
or declivity of dry mind
swayed by clouds of no
spillage, rocked by wond.
We walked on sandy hills
until we met a line of trees,
locked by moisture to upper
slopes, and bursts of towhees.
You threw stones at the trunks
to scatter your mother’s anger.
But no cries for greener times –
acquiescence of bar after fire.
How do we behave before the rock
of being less than what we dreamed?
When shadows crawl down the shale
what impress of bone is concealed?
Rules For Teachers – Gympie School, 1879
1. Teachers will fill lamps and clean chimneys each day before beginning work.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
3. Make pens carefully. Whittle nibs to the individual taste of the children.
4. After ten hours at school, spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
5. Men may take one evening a week for courting purposes or two evenings to attend church.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Lay aside from each pay a goodly sum for your declining years so you will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool and public halls or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
Subway Sex, Mexico
What glossy, what silver screen?
He’s kissed scripted lips, breasts,
so often the sheets dampen to silk.
Lighting’s the thing: lesser men
crowd the aisle, but only his limbs
win the beam. Your burgundy hair
and Mercedes skin must be for him.
He’s sure, as he rubs against you,
that all this concrete and glare
will soon soften to linen and shaded
leaves. When you try to edge away
he smiles (an apple must be polished
before the bite) then rubs again
like a tabby prompting a leg
for his evening meal. But you flare
and the screen explodes; only then
can he admit your jeans and freckles.
Perdóneme, señorita. ¿Puedo pasar?
Next stop, he dissolves into anonymity
like some metaphor wrought from a chilly
dream. You want to cover your bare arms.
¿Cuánto es?
So who can help being Jewish? You don't have to chew leather or worry over silk and buttons in stalls on the Lower East Side to have bargaining in the blood. Where’s it written that God’s Chosen should have to pay retail? In winter, I’m happy enough to buy a log or two and sit the evenings by a blaze, and a sip or two of port never goes down the wrong way, but Miriam, my dearest, she has to shlep me on a plane.
‘For a rest well-deserved,’ she proclaims, fluttering tickets, bags already half-packed.
For such a rest, I have to fly all night to Mexico?
My mother should only be alive to see her son a big shot on the streets of Cançun! Tequila this, Tequila that. Who was it told me a Margarita was a flamenco dancer? Miriam, her money itches inside her purse, so I must walk miles of shops to help her spend. No trifle, no mere trinket will satisfy her. ‘I should come all this way for a straw hat?’ So she’ll not be happy until we pile up boxes. Our arms, they must cramp. A trip’s not a trip until the baggage limit’s squeezed!
The second night, God help me, she finds these plates.
‘Our old set,’ she tells me, rubbing glazed rims, ‘it’s worn.’
‘That’s news to me,’ I say. ‘So where are the chips, the scratches?’
‘As if you’d see one even pushed under your nose!’
‘Our chicken breasts slip off? The soup, it runs away?’
‘How can I talk to such a man?’
It’s the green she loves. Never water so green as the Gulf, and it’s here in paint that we can shelve: a green bird balances on an opulent spray of green petals, mindless of green bugs itting by in a grey sky. Each plate, bowl, cup, saucer, hand painted, an original. Never a happier scene for smearing liver pâté!
‘Service for ten?’ says the clerk. ‘With platters, creamer – the works?’
‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘¿Cuánto es?’
His eyes darken. ‘So you want to bargain, amigo?’
Shark teeth, they all have them. So white. So sharp.
I’ve rehearsed the phrases from Berlitz – my questions, his answers. What more can I do to shave off the dollars? Miriam, she fidgets like a sparrow over her nest of eggs. At his Japanese calculator this salesman pecks. Smiles. Pecks again. Smiles. Shoves it aside.
‘In dollars, only five hundred,’ he says.
‘Eso es demásiado caro,’ I say. ‘What do you take me for, a banker?’
‘No más baráto,’ he says. ‘Discounted already.’
I tug Miriam down the aisle. This I’ve rehearsed, too. He follows. Dollars slip away. We reach the door. He follows, in a panic. Suddenly his children are sick, can barely lift a burrito to their lips. But more dollars slip away. On the street, he pinches my sleeve, nearly weeps.
‘Come back inside, señor, señora. I give you best deal, though it kills me.’
The works for three hundred. Such a deal, you say? But wait, the story’s not over! I worry about the packing, when I see these boxes our salesman pulls out. Many heads of lettuce they’ve had cramped in their corners.
‘Leave it to me, amigo,’ he smiles. ‘We ship all over the world.’
‘But in what condition?’ I ask. ‘Splinters of pottery, we don’t need!’
Then Miriam gives me her look, that I’m supposed to get on with it already, so what can I do but sign the trembling cheque?
We get them home, slit cardboard, unwrap, and one in four is cracked. No paper pads the bottom. Miriam whines like a kitten, milk snatched away. ¿Cuánto es?
Mango Haiku
Cançun street vendors
slice fruit into cups sweaty
with morning’s lime dew
Merida Leather Shop
Short as a child, this grandfather
whose veined hands awaken hides.
How many canvasses to a briefcase?
On just one face, he’ll carve yucca,
moon, serpent, an Aztec in helmet
of cougar jaws spitting at arrows.
‘Bueno work,’ he declares when you
touch it, ‘only needles – no machine!’
Trembling, he takes your fingers
to trace the confidence of his seams.
‘It lasts more than a life,’ he says,
‘maybe as long as Chichen Itza. Bonita.’
You ask the price and he blushes.
‘Not so much – for a life!’
Fertility Goddess
What myth directs those hands
that carve you from softwood
along forest paths between pyramids
at Chichén Itzá? Even now, finger-
nails could furrow your skin.
How your neck must ache
from its headdress of plumed
serpents with eager fangs!
Oh, trendy Mayan maiden,
can your eyes still see the stone*
that crossed them for beauty?
What of the boards that pressed
your infant forehead steep
as a ski slope? Whose dream
of suck are those pert nipples?
No puckered Marilyn, though,
you squat in birth, spurting out
a baby between your folded hands
and bended knees. Of course it’s you,
no less than diminished reflections
on a windless lake are you.
*Mayan infants wore a stone between their eyes to create this sign of ‘beauty’.
Rattlesnake Equinox
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core...
– John Keats
Kukulcán’s head waits at tbe base of his pyramid
for sunlight to restore bis body. As light bathes
tbe balustrade, seven perfect isosceles triangles
warm tbe staircase, slitber down the stone.
It’s autumn
You ask where my words sleep
under snowdrifts, as if spelling ‘love’
must swell the buds. Not enough
to know spring by a leafy curl,
even the sap’s pithy source must
be traced to test the fact of veins.
Autumn is ycomen in. Dance
in masque to shade the blood!
For seasons, Kukulcán’s forgotten his flesh.
As he slithers among the crops, his belly groans.
The people hear this and gather goats and children
of a race subdued for sacrifice. To please him.
Blood harvest begins
You fight these pools of silence
for both of us. You hand me
pebbles to skip across the calm.
So easy to just let a surface glass
over into ice. Beneath the skiff of memory
water can flow, pristine. Untouched.
It’s autumn
autumn
La Gran Tenochtitlán *
promise
Not a burning bush, but a cactus –
and on it a fiery eagle tearing
flesh from a serpent. Such sweet
manna did Tenoch taste then
that he bid his people take rest.
He closed his eyes to sharpen
the prophecy once again. Was this
valley the cradle to last all time?
Why does an Aztec doubt
when he meets his dream?
volcanoes
Ixtaccihuatl gathers a gown
of flimsy snow around her,
content to save her lava face
for love’s split ends.
But Popocatépetl is smoky as a god
chained to clay for stealing fire.
What covenant stirs in congealed
stone? What priests of slaves’ blood?
We do what we must in present time
to forget the dream where earth shatters
our stones to dust. Her sudden teeth.
A throat deep as screams between stars.
temple
Ours. Staircases of dripping gore.
How quickly the Spaniards absorbed
this sacrament of sacrifice to distract
inner worms from their own heart sack!
This the great Quetzalcoatl said to me:
Go down, Tenoch, to tbe Anahuac.
Once you find hands for my pyramid
the sun will set behind your shields.
market of Tlatelolco
She cannot choose, this goddess
of petals, between her suitors.
Her eyes wilt at the severed arm
with fingers stiff as winter
roots. Such coin for a kiss!
And this flute hollowed from human
Bone – will that melody part her knees?
‘From him, you buy frogs and iguana;
over there, maybe turkey or duck.
But none better than my escuintle2
steamed for tender chew in brine!’
Above them all, with feather fan
to breeze himself, sits Tlatoani,
dour regent to an empire at dusk.
When he leaves his plushy bunk
to pass through the stalls, if he soils
his garments, their taxes increase.
The eagle grows drowsy, its talons
tighten or’ tbe fleshy cactus limb.
Moon chills lattice tbe air.
* Diago Rivera’s 1945 mural of Mexico City in 1325, two centuries before the Spanish invasion. 2A dog, reputed to be the first domesticated animal in America, often eaten during Aztec religious ceremonies.
The Bubblebath
Decadence. We all seek a nuzzle
between its fleshy curves. Even
the very letters are creamy thighs
enclasping the dreamy, ascendant
‘d’. What tease of cabaret is mimed
when we unzip before a stranger’s gaze?
I have watched my mother at bath
in swirling, private waters she scents
with tingling, bursting bubbles. This
for no impatient male, my father long
dead. I wonder at the door: is it half-closed
against my shadow, or half-opened?
For instance, in Luncheon on the Grass
how Manet screens his couples with such
sensuous leaves and reflective pools that we
must give each detail its due: the careless
cherries and pátisserie strewn from basket;
Victorine, naked, amused at our buttoned scorn.
My turn. The bubbles drift around me
humid as a winter’s downer. Cloudy touch.
Eyes closed, I flood my mind with skin
until I’ve dappled you into this porcelain
frame: floating breasts, pubic filaments,
love’s mystery before the drooped familiar.
Too much with us, Le Salon. Why accept
their scratchy towels, let their fingers
drain our reverie? Why kiss unpetaled
only on forest needles of our own excess?
Never mind their steam. True art’s here
in the pose. Please pass the soap.
Stanley Park Seawalk
A winter's morning without mist
dawns so seldom in Vancouver, so precious,
even gulls forget to blink in naked sun.
So how can we yawn over toast and tea?
Saturday headbands, joggers, fleecies:
our badges of idle sweat. ‘Last one down
the lift,’ you say, bounding for the deadbolt,
‘buffs the silver and feeds the dishwasher!’
(We have no silver though you primp it
space like a promised first child,
and the dishwasher’s thin fingers
already bristle with plates and soft scraps,
flotsam of Friday’s aprés-théâtre.)
Our blue limbs spill onto the track
like arrogant petals after a frost.
Sun teases steam from mossy rock
and shells utter sharp memories
of vacated flesh in the telegraphic
air. You lead. I hear your lungs set
a blowy rhythm for our pace.
Anchored at English Bay, Korean
ships calmly shoulder their German
cargo. (In these waters, everything
must take a number before its bow)
Ours is a different stream, runners
faster or slower, younger or older,
measuring success by heartbeats
and the obedience of muscles.
Not even halfway, I’m drenched,
ready to confess an excess: was it
gin, crisp chablis, or a final port
that siphoned my breath? I curse
your sylphy gait. Was it any wonder
feathery Proserpina was dragged down,
spilling lilies? I feel my feet slow
in dampened syncopation with yours.
Each bench beckons like a perfumed
mat, their slates friendly as foam.
First the balding, then the grey haired
manage to pass me. Even sparrows
mock me from the pine needles.
You look back in polished sympathy.
‘Shall I ease off?’ you ask, easing off.
‘Tired?’ I rasp, spurting ahead.
How can I give in to breath?
‘Last one home’s a liver pâté!’
Spareribs
Only a taste of meat, yet you
thaw them for supper. This sauce
you simmered without print
in the tangy days before
me: you’ll not halve its secret
if we shift to separate gardens.
You show me
where the bones divide,
how marrow always trembles
beneath its sheath of gristle.
You teach my teeth to tease then sever.
Cats Slip In
1.
Cats slip into the gap: between shrub
and fence, lid and can, leg and screen,
absent parent and child. They patrol
the suburbs for indecision, dangling
mouse-pelts before our averted eyes
like leaflets urging verandah baptism.
2.
Before the split, I conceded no gaps
for cats. The neighbours suspected
subversion — three children and no
pets? But the flag of my daughter’s
asthma silenced them to sympathy
like men who think in mistresses.
3.
On access days now, I trip over cats
at the gate. My daughter, I’m told,
is miraculously healed of all that I
denied her: she absorbs adrenalin
from her mother’s heat. The fur
she strokes sighs like a sleepy father.
Changing House
I've changed house since you and maybe
for you many times, but only your photos
know what shells I contemplate now.
Why write to scratch the past for odour?
We have it here in dreamy courtyards.
A stay against confusion? We build
them to contain our selves, as a jar
gives shape to faint spurts of water
otherwise absorbed to no dimension
by the thirsty democratic ground.
I had a wife and baby the spring
you came to town. Were you
planned, like a fresh window
poised to assert its view?
Shards of mud and scrub suffice:
we dig down deep to fix the concrete
footings before we hazard planks
and peaks. Roots must excuse us.
You taught young children to dance
to your timbre. That first night,
encircled by indifferent voices,
you eased your braids down
dampened stones to my words.
Splinters masked, we paper all
verticals with skins that suit us,
stipple sparkles overhead, muffle
floors to carpet. Only we know
the ragged secrets of our corners.
In the mist outside your blinds
young greens saturated the hillside
as we loved. Under the cooling sheets
could we deny the clichés of blood?
Nothing lasts beyond our breath;
we merely slow the rust, the eroding
teeth of time. Who takes comfort in next
year’s promise to unbleach the sun?
from The Cave After Saltwater Tide
Voices from the Temple
Good Morning, Bangkok
Above, he faces the sun, opens his pores
to morning like leaves shedding a night
of snails. Stretches so hard from toes
to fingertips even his bones seem elastic.
He does not watch the city below
as it rubs the grit of fitful sleep from its eyes –
he has escaped the broom he once took
to the wet garbage of lesser lives. From here
sewers can silently swallow fish bones
washing them down with dark suds.
From here the alleys can glisten with dew
not urine, and no women have to wake
with semen crystallizing their pubic hairs.
Still, the sun demands its tithe of devotions
from those who squat and bend on rooftops,
eyes closed, as if they are the high priests
of tin and brick. Bare-chested, he is thin
enough to sweat if tied to the splinters
of sacrifice but not for the saffron robes
and brass bowls of Buddhas scuffing sandals
along the damp curbs, weighted down
by so many spoonfuls of rice. No centuries
touch him now when he touches his toes:
he tunes his muscles for his next life.
The River under Kwai Bridge
Heap up the mound there and implant on it the oar I pulled in life with my companions.
– Elpenor to Odysseus
Prologue
Not the bridge: it’s been recast to suit
the sunsets, stubborn blood sanded away
from shivering grains by a new troupe
of grateful coolies, deafened to the litany
of water below, who still whistle marches
for movie cameras. Before Charon’s current
could be crossed, his toll exacted seven
Burmese and Laotian skulls for every
precious Imperialist who gurgled adieu
to his king. Where are their plaques?
The River’s Aria
when aching bones cluttered my banks
i gave the doomed a bed to cleanse
their blackened skin for watery sleep
every lung surrendered its air
to whirlpools of trancing relief
above my silt and patient fish
no stones beneath to prick their sack
the veins decayed so quietly
like leaves dissolved by tiny jaws
A Pilgrim’s Canon
‘Death Railway’ means nothing to a fresh
plank: no initials are scratched on these
spikes to console those who seek the raspy
throats still crying out for proper burial.
On the span you dodge the stray hooks
of Thai fishermen scudding on Japanese
motorbikes, their flapping cuffs, legs apart
for balance, your shoes sticky with creosote
(these timbres were dedicated to tyres)
glazed on the beams to glimmer under
December fireworks of lusty commemoration,
and then the thin girls in wedding dresses
so white, but going blue as the sky clicks
down to darkness in a liturgy of Nikons.
The River’s Refrain
why seek ashes and baptism from the sky
when heaven’s girders always come to rust?
better to bathe below in sympathy with mud
War Cemetery Canticles
Knees on the damp sod, a dedicated army
of gardeners clips grass away from marble,
tidies discreet trenches edging each grave,
rakes the river gravel smooth along the paths.
Every marker is flanked by native shrubbery
trimmed back neatly as uniforms saluting
a final sacrifice, as though heroism in chorus
weren’t hushed by the clarity of a single voice.
Only steps away, the Chinese dead in crypts
of granite left to dust and weeds. Snapshot
ovals smile out from the stone, as though still
sniffing the dewy flowers of faithful tribute.
No picnics or parasols browse this requiem
of coughing neglect. Will Buddha provide?
The River Hums Back in Aphorisms
no channel or flesh is sacred in flood
without compassion, no war
without war, no compassion
when levees break, it’s every treaty
for himself – sand’s better than slime,
clay better than sand, branches better
than clay, rocks better than branches,
a steady hand better than rocks
trust nothing more than your final breath
Epilogue
above the murmuring river ghosts
the bridge wears its darkness well
Sweet and Sour Soup
You edge up to our table with a basket
of crisp roses – stems long as your arm
and bleeding like green bamboo severed
from its roots. You have fewer words
than fingers at first, and let your eyes
and the petal scents speak for you:
by me show your love for your love
mere sips of wine and food can never
web such beauty to your pleasure
But we say nothing to you, only avert
our eyes to menus, as if that should be
enough to discourage any stranger
from disturbing our evening’s intimacy,
as if all should know what perimeters
of privacy defend a fortified lawn
from the impertinence of leaves.
‘This Tom Yam soup,’ I say to my lover,
with whom I conspire to be childless,
‘how can it be both sweet and sour?’
She smiles, pretending you’re a ghost
at my elbow only she’s allowed to see.
‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’ she asks.
You shake your head. ‘That not for Mister
and Sweetheart,’ you say. ‘Burn tongue.
Only Thai want such heat!’ I bristle at you
– ‘Isn’t it past your bedtime?’ You shrink back
‘Forget sweet flowers, this night I promise
to speak only English! But please, no Tom Yam!’
This must be a trick, I decide, some cult of lime
and coriander to distract us before the sting.
So I snatch a rose from the basket and brush
you off with baht. You stare mutely at the coin,
listening to the waitress jot down our order,
then you simper away. Were you watching
from a shadowy palm as we gazed down
into that foggy steamboat of lemon grass,
prawns, and chilies sliced to smile back
like taunting lips? Were you watching
as I tasted how pride can burn a throat?
Sea Gypsies1
You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?
– King Lear
1.
Her eyes search you for amulets,
a fish skin sack perhaps – anything
to ward off the salty teeth of sudden
storms. Who can know what missions
a falling branch fulfills? Didn’t you feel
the rocks shift to decode your footsteps?
No creaky wagons here, no copper pans,
cunning knives or even damp silk for sale.
This woman knows no ballads of silver
earrings, or spurting semen in haylofts
(while Lady’s away) grafting urgent passion
onto her womb, though her eyes still
question your buttons. She has babies
enough to dampen this dust. If she could
she would shake all twilight free of men.
She smashes oyster shells against a stone
with a blackened hammer. Those pearls
you glimpse are your dreams, not hers.
2.
Now opaque, his eyes could see once –
but why should late blindness matter
to an old man whose oars would make
the dolphins skip? When a man becomes
a spirit his flesh no longer mourns the grave:
memory’s the place where colour sings best.
He’s a capsule of days before these huts,
a catechism of the winds and waves
that brought their probing pod here
to moss this narrow reach. The children
clamour to touch his stomach for wisdom,
watch him chip bits of god from dry bark.
3.
Naked boys peek behind you for faces.
‘Hello...bye,’ they say, trailing you down
to the dock, circling with stamping feet.
‘You – one baht!’ they plead, diving in
to float on their backs, genitals bobbing up
like buds seeking sun, until you flip in coins.
You photograph their eager, lupine faces,
hands uplifted with the glinting coppers.
‘You – ‘ they shout, waving. ‘You one baht!’
4.
Fishermen stand in water up to their thighs,
fingers busy at knots and bait, boats leaning
into shore like sharks sleepy with air.
They chart the course of clouds, paddling
to where their nets will swell. They read
the skin of sea like a trembling lover’s back.
5.
Hands behind her, a young woman listens
to a Frenchman murmur tales of St Denis.2
Her nipples harden in the evening breeze.
1 No relation to European gypsies, this clan has lived for generations on the island of Phuket in southern Thailand. Their place of origin is a mystery.
2 Denied access to Paris, the early bohemians, as the French called them, were lodged at La Chapelle, St Denis.
Washing Her Back
The dawn is damp in Bangkok
and the dust and smoke are slow
to wake until sun can dry the air.
He washes himself first so Buddha
will taste no sweat on his knees
nor sin in his contrite, lonely sighs.
He wears the same white shirt,
the same silk slacks and thongs,
as though a week’s wrinkles might
bring her back, his tourist lady,
whose touch wakened him to skin
pale as paper before the kiss
of ink. Blond hair, soft red lips
with a hint of mocking tongue –
she watched him dripping suds
on his feet, the rag limp in his
fingers. ‘Do you wash your car
every morning?’ she asked,
her eyes loosening the buttons
of his shirt. ‘Yes, lady. Metal,
it hates the grimes of night, so I
must scrub it always clean to save
the paint!’ He dropped the rag
in the pail like an apology after
twisted words, but she bent down
and drew it out again, a hot dream
cupped safe from the murky depths
of sodden wishes. ‘No, please –
don’t stop. I saw you first upstairs.
You rubbed in circles along a spine
as if you massaged to sooth muscles
not steel. How I envy your lover’s limbs!’
And so he began again, washing the car
this time for her, feeling downy hair
on fenders, each headlight becoming
a breast eager to flood with passion,
wiper-blades begging for the tease
of warm water. Yes, even his mirrors
moaned. But when he turned back
to ask her name, there was nothing
but indifferent stone, not a whiff
of her remained. She had vanished
on wings shy of those confessions
sunlight demands, this tourist lady,
his tourist lady who wouldn’t see him
drop his pail in mourning, dark suds
lapping across his feet, like blood
from a coffin’s wound. Now he tells