from Blackwater Quartet, selection 29

Twelve Non-Barbie Episodes

 

1

The correct answer to your secret question will be used

to unlock a forgotten password.

What is your name, your nickname, alias,

taking place likewise by barcode,

the beginning and end signals?

After Madonna planted false tracks from her new record

on P2P nets,

a prankster responded, hacking madonna.com

and posting MP3s of the entire album four days

before it hit the stores.

He said,

it will come again, it will awaken.

It may wear chains but it will act. He said, fantasy goddess,

the first initials were yours, both capitals,

and the second time

first letter caps then second letter lower,

then vice-versa.

Though of modest character, he had the art to calm her.

Here are the initials, he said this is what you came for.

2

Use the hard plastic body.

The lovely vinyl head, long brunette

rooted

hair in flip with possible original ribbon,

some top hair is layered but blends very well.

Vintage factory cotton print dress costume copy,

still very crisp.

Red lips, with open mouth with teeth and tongue

showing.

She still has blush on backs of her hands

and on her knees.

Black side snap shoes,

walking mechanism working well.

Blue sleep eyes with painted lashes, multistroke brows,

one slightly lighter.

Tender waist, moonlit night, perfumed garlands, meat and liquor—

glances shoot an arrow through.

3

Despite the apparent chaos,

we know whom we can trust.

The information, once decoded, is very basic,

and the triumphant plot twists inevitable.

My favourite characters tend to be female,

bright breast pixels and tiny outfits,

smart charcoal grey Prada skirt, a fitted white oxford,

delicious black cardigan,

black fishnets and ankle strap heels.

So exciting.

The corkscrew womb shot, big world weary sunglasses,

maybe a fake mole on her cheek:

the shimmering effect is formed by folding,

the lipstick blood based.

I can live with that.

4

Light exists as particles, the wave state

a suggested accumulation,

distributed across probabilities of where each particle

could be.

What is it, where is it now, this sunny day?

A woman with a birthmark on her face

approaches you, asking if you speak German.

You manage, nur ain bissen,

and she manages to convey to you

her papers have been stolen, her money.

A tourist, she says, looking dishevelled, but polite,

after every sentence, adding the German for pardon.

You know about the Mona Lisa Scam,

but the woman appears desperate.

The right thing, the Christian thing to do,

is to give her money, maybe all your money.

As if by coincidence, she allows you to see

her unique, handmade lingerie

giving proper shaping.

The birthmark seems unimportant.

Looking you directly in the eye, she produces

a gadget to photograph high voltage discharges.

She wears a retro gown.

5

My borders are diffuse.

I am invasive.

You may say that I will be removed,

and that you will make a full recovery,

that you are better for the experience.

In this womanhood, I am the scavenger, vigilant

for barbed wire and dirty needles, beating back

the smoke of rubbish fires.

Whatever crows left on the bone, I see it,

then I show it to you.

Here is the rock I pushed uphill, the one you called treasure.

Here are the men in suits

who broke into my house and chewed at my flesh.

Here are my bare legs and pelvis,

embellished with paints, the ones used to shade

my crotch, making my vagina look five centimetres

too far to the left.

Here are my eyes,

and the colours you never got right for them.

Here are my piercings, and my seventeenth birthday,

and the wall I sit against and the cup with coins in it.

And above my head

the thought bubble you drew, full

of personal regression, and your cock sliding

inside, coming to me, full of apologies.

6

The cigar thing was hot, a little non-flesh insertion.

I am not really adventurous about it,

but the Cohiba from my Cuban trip is something

I would definitely contemplate.

People collect souvenirs of their lovers all the time.

I knew a guy who carried around a fag end I’d smoked

and I never even dated him.

I have a couple of odd items like that, granted

there are no body fluids involved.

No matter how displaced we are, we are allowed

to lapse into our local accent when angry, or drunk.

The guy by the window, turning to you

slowly, saying, in this together, right?

He’s staring at a fat, naked woman

painting her toenails at her apartment window,

and you just know

she has something to do with why no one can sleep.

7

The image of me is from the late 20th century.

The photo was taken by the doctors.

I was quite capable of getting around walking on my hands,

but the doctors had different ideas.

I’ve been on this island so long

I barely remember what life was like before.

I see myself in a room, curtains blowing,

on the sideboard a broken ship-in-a-bottle,

insects, pigeon skull, waxed hydrangeas, twigs and rice paper,

in the ebonised oak frame

the image of me with the prosthetic devices.

I am the girl in pink cashmere.

Not long ago, the professor repaired the radio transmitter

using seaweed and oyster shells.

It was powered by bamboo bicycle, and filled the air

with scratches of static, voice fragments,

an army of ghosts.

When I first heard it, I heard it

the way the radio announces the weather, saying

sea air is wiping everything clean, the sky is turning,

and salt will stream across the sand— here,

where I am standing.

8

Away from the rowdy crowd, this corner

of the bar is my own confessional. My heart

is open to penetration.

From the way I sit, sipping my scotch,

I knew you’d find me.

No smalltalk, no pickup lines:

I can see you have a story to tell, your glance

cut into a million pieces.

Maybe the one about the hitchhiking ghost,

maybe the one about the bride,

the serrated blade through her trachea.

What you saw when you were three

through the keyhole, the past, warm slices of it

making you hate who you are.

Whatever it is, you can tell me,

because my heart is open to penetration.

You’ll recognise it,

wrenching upwards, a firework of blood, something living,

the way some people give other people roses.

9

You are beyond introductions.

You agree never to contact him

unless to meet in room 112, putting your lips, your tongue

across his veined eyelids.

In return, he agrees to reserve room 112

under his mother’s maiden name,

three days in advance of any rendezvous,

but usually a Thursday.

You agree that every sentence should begin,

If only…

You both agree never to lie to each other.

He said he would come back, he made a promise,

and you said you’d be waiting until the world ends.

Tailing him one night, you discover

he inserts himself secretly into another’s sleep,

into the legacy of her hair colour,

dirty blonde, come,

and the stronger smell of chocolate on her breath.

10

A train, more empty faces.

I am wearing my hair down today, the highlights

offset by the fake fur collar of my black overcoat.

The guy with the Clancy novel, leaning on the Hep C poster,

glances over to the station route map,

trying to make eye contact.

I maintain my daydream face.

I can sense him looking at my mouth, my lips,

the way I keep them open just a little.

My hand is tight around the handrail.

He’s thinking,

if he gave my hand a little kiss, I ‘d lose my balance,

miss my stop, somehow make everything his.

Like the moment the previews have ended, the screen

is black and silent for seconds

before the film starts, in those seconds

forgetting what movie I’m seeing.

On the firing range, the paper target silhouette

comes closer. Closer.

I poke my finger through the holes the rounds made.

You know, just getting the feel of things.

11

Two inch false eyelashes, droopy, sultry,

I had to tilt my head up to look in the mirror,

then realised that without half my visual field,

driving was to be done pre-lashing.

In my acupuncture class, the guy observing—

yeah, the premeditated phrases

and can name every Star Trek character by episode—

left the room, his Casio beeping to tell him

other needles were ready.

And A told me how they’d met.

He had made a big deal,

asking two women observers which male

they wanted to observe.

They both passed, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

He wrote a number on a piece of paper,

told them choose, odd or even, the other woman chose even.

He said, nope, it’s odd, guess you’re with me,

A.

We talked about how he never listens, interrupting,

insisting I describe my bowel movements.

I was wearing the lashes with my lime green skirt.

Mostly I was happy with the look.

12

In the queue, a woman with blue lips

whispered in my ear, can you describe this,

and I said, yes, I can, after these months in prison queues

in Leningrad, visiting my daughter, I can describe

the pain that is informed against,

and the whispers awakening from the trance.

For foreign visitors, other services:

the residence in an apartment,

the bodyguard,

the interpreter,

the automobile with the driver,

and the escort girl

waiting, couched in a pavilion above the waves,

her time spent watching the waves,

waiting for a ransom to be accepted.

She grows old in the house at Argos,

far from her own home, busying herself with her loom

in reverence to Apollo, the shadow of a smile crossing

the remains of her face.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 28

Leave of Absence

Windows wide, the faded chintz

flaps in upward draughts, hugs Elizabethan brick.

An old quilt airs across the cill and pantiles, hints

of spring as April clears late mists

though winter chill persists until mid-morning.

The rugs are beaten on the line, dust in bursts

sailing over hedgerows

where startled birds combust.

The season’s pace is matched with small repairs

that intimate recovery in those yardstick lives.

Reed-quaver bundled into sheaves

turns wind and rain, and time

has pargeted the roughcast eaves.

The light condenses on a scale I cannot calibrate.

Fleet, greening on the chase and measured

in the run of fences edging east, the woods

left standing by the train move

relative to position out of view. Space-time

wearies, a milk moon through pines

pale in brightening sky.

I bought a ticket home

and met myself returning, platoons

of presences other than my own,

their voices rising alien, stubborn.

There is an urgency in destinations,

where sparrows rise from stations

liquid with the sound of wings,

on twisting tracks the chromosomal spark.

In my rehearsals of the past, a memory

of time to come confronts each traveller,

defines the present sense of things.

The landscape spools crazily

into the distance. I admire

the painted weather.

Radios leak unsettled forecasts

from windows in the houses flying by.

I stand separate in my life, burred with loss

in that year the cold abraded, next of kin

awaiting word of everybody everywhere,

the lists prepared, the services secured.

In the black plume of the monkey puzzle

invisible birds anticipated dawn.

A weather— creeks rain-peppered

beneath the clouds’ dullness,

the autumn boatyard sprung with masts

and lanyards slapping where the wind slid

through the corrugations—

a sense of place, a local star

deep within nine orbits shot through with time,

a blankness hand-built, a hard life

the wind cut from each stone,

the names now rising, the sunk wreck lifted,

moth wings touching flame: images

to evade the daily disappointments

and with infinite attention

recover the discarded days.

Seventeen-below and cars beneath drifts

like Dutch bulbs set for April,

with that leathery lizard look

of birds new-born, you hugged for warmth

against the windhowl chatter

of winter on the pavements,

the stairs exposed to happenstance of snow

spiralling to firefall in her room.

The pot plants thrived near window rads.

The knock of steam through sculpted iron

sent scent of wet wool rising in a mist.

Her books, selected Donne

and Seven Types of Ambiguity rescued from the stalls,

propped the table legs, righting listing coffees.

Walking barefoot along your spine, small heels

digging deep to rooted pain, an exquisite brutality

commandeered to tractor poses, she stands naked

above you in a world without shadow,

inheritance of light in migraine flashes

wincing upward in her laughter

where the heating bangs, and breath

drifts thinly through the winter room.

In this memory the living touch;

they dug you out in sixty-nine, a cold spring

waiting for bud-break over burns of dirty ice,

watermark lives folded, unfolding

with a clarity that recalled

the long nights and pain’s shining perfection.

You stood unsteady in contraband lives,

still fragile as the equinox drew deeper breath

and warmed the avenues, a leafy promise

parting to a bruise of syllables goodbye.

Time passed featureless as pearls

through napalm peninsulas of soldier gods,

the peacock brightness of the agent light

boiling through the slipstream,

and duty too remote to recognise

except in postcards stamped but never sent.

There was no Second Coming, blameless nonesuch

worked into a sustenance of passage and return,

drifting as a generation burned, clouds

of picture shapes and loss no love could compensate.

The Mekong rotated through the evening news.

The peace sign on your helmet glinted,

a hen’s-claw brand assuming new significance.

A draft card lit illuminated all our lives,

at Kent State later the republic

scattered in a mist of gas grenades,

a sense of honour in sharp relief—

parade ground shadows in the afternoon sun

angry for orders.

We named the apocalypse for those we knew,

for freaks without flags, for the disbelieving dead

in a village without vowels

where AK-47s aped a chorus of the Doors.

She was shopping when we met, thirty years

and no word but the sound our lives make

like ships breaking up; we said we both looked great.

She remembered her hair in beaded plaits

and that everybody died, gone to hell

or working in computers.

We stood on ancient ground, in aisles of bread

and six-pack Coke, converts to a toothless time.

We spoke of everything but you, yours

a life denied, carved in stone in Washington,

a vacancy without consequence.

What do you want, ghost among a snow of ghosts,

that we should remember? We bear you through this cold,

this broken weather, as a spirit recognised.

Smoke and Shadows

I read recently of "true scientists" being criticised for not accepting an axiom without proof, when in fact, in mathematics and logic, the definition of an axiom is that it has no proof. Axioms are posited, and proofs of subsequent theorems are built on them. 

Such conjecture, as a proof, can be applied to the probability of an asteroid striking the planet, or to the frequency of earthquakes in California, but not to the existence of God. The issue hangs on the balance of evidence. An example of this might be that of (Christian) children being taken to their local church, where they listen, sing, and otherwise participate in services. When they get home, they watch TV programmes extolling the virtues of weaponised aliens, werewolves, vampires, and other conjectural forms of life existing arguably outside the Grace of God. Would we regard these children as agnostics?

Clearly, the expression of religious tolerance in accepting a God not of your own belief - Shiva, for example, in the Hindu religion - although politically correct, is dangerous in respect of faith, in that by so doing you state doubt in your own belief. Islamic State, even now seeking to extend their Caliphate into near-southern Europe, retain a murderous focus on faith, and this faith is not contingent on the term of office of the President or Prime Minister, but on revolutionary zeal fueled by the conviction that their belief drives the universe, and that any opposition to this strategem is by definition agnostic.

This is of course just an example, but one that most people would recognise, albeit more in respect of Terror than Faith. There is beguiling comfort in assuming that such organisations will undermine and eventually destroy the societies they try to create, but this is an axiom. Subsequent proof is a creature of smoke and shadows.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 27

Apocrypha

The solstice drives a change of weather.

Frost sears the cape, in patterns

of snapped stars and carcass moonlight,

in the boat I made from fingernails of the dead

and zero in these islands.

Just breath in speaking clouds the panes,

rubbed clear to Bible-atlas cliffs beyond.

This scratch-mark quote,

its icy cursive on the glass, disproves

love’s physics and resolve— the change of weather,

on grey sand the waves’ grey subterfuge, some passing

present tense, lost among the breakers.

Crown of Shadows

On a train between Cambridge and London Kings Cross, I sat next to a man who was thumbing-through a typescript. It was entitled The Great Charter - a play, set in England between the years 1214-1216 (Fourth Revision, July 2014), by Stephen Hawes.

As an observation, I thought that the man wasn't an actor. Actors cultivate an intensity that extends to the smallest detail in the most mundane circumstances. This chap flicked over the pages randomly, a pencil in his right hand. The pencil was never used, however. It was more an extension of the man's nervous or otherwise agitated state: page 57, a touch of the lead point at a character's line, page 124, the pencil used like a ruler, marking the page in a downward sweep of equal measures as though testing the distribution of words on the page against the weight assigned to the lines.

Apart from these nervous tics, the fact that the typescript was tagged "Fourth Revision" and that this revision was dated some ten months earlier, made me wonder if "Stephen" (We shall assume it was he.) had spent the time considering the remarks made to him by a London producer in respect of required revisions. It might be that the revision requests were made, and completed, but that the producer then lost interest for a time. A further scenario might be that the revisions were made, but the author then decided that they weren't to his liking, and he in turn postponed a further meeting.

For my part, when preparing a book of poems for publication, it was with a combination of excitement and dread - the former because you knew that within the next year a book of  poetry would be published, and the latter because you wondered if the poetry therein was 'enough', and whether the poems were correctly 'weighted' for a reader.

As a title,The Great Charter, obviously a reference to the Magna Carta, seems a dry old stick, and more suitable as a secondary leader. As a reference to those troubled times, rebellion, a distraught king slogging up and down the land, dragging his army, his retinue, his treasure, with him, perhaps something more personal might be in order - Crown of Shadows, or,The Broken Realm: Magna Carta and After - a journey, perhaps, not unlike Stephen's own.