Relic Environments Trilogy: Book I, Part 1.xiv

from Book I, Part 1, Mystery Tramp Eclogues

1937
 

In Manchuria, I sat up half the night

with the Emperor’s consul, observing with contempt

the vacuum sea of planetary break-ups,

and other transient phenomena.

The movements of living beings

in our resettlement campaigns

had no external references

to the positions of the comfort-women.

Their melodies were ‘sighed for’.

Moon Mountain above the Nu Jiang Gorge,

tortoise clouds, the network delta of lakes

and extremes of the seasonal,

bore an authentic authorial haunting.

The shamans there maintain that ghosts,

in search of human victims, are attracted

to those whose souls have been fractured –

these, dishonoured in the Kiao-Chow raids,

ending here at our whim, under a sky

full of absolutes.

We agreed such things must be accepted,

these tendencies towards flesh and rage.

Both of us a little drunk perhaps,

he said he sometimes recalled an image

from a former posting – one midnight, losing count

of the arrests, his old friend Arturo Mauritius

spiriting integers across the municipal gardens.