The Last House Read online

  It’s evening, when malevolence lingers

  in every bulbous and rotting green thing

  and marsh lights flicker out across the fields.

  I wade home through the stubble, press my face

  to the ground-floor window to see a man

  inside Tracy, the bed an unmade nest,

  the air violet with flying splinters.

  A sudden inhalation from the crowd.

  Their bodies can’t figure what to protect,

  who is dream, who is real, what here, what there.

  As I climb through the bloody broken glass,

  Uncles grab Tracy’s arms so I can tilt

  my cock to her open mouth. Amazement.

  We are all harmed by what we have made clear.

  Overall

  And so her face grows shy, her eyes drop mine.

  Nipples finger the coarse denim. A white

  half moon shines each side of the blue tunic.

  She says, “Look at it this way.” Visible

  waist a milk-curve down into the garment’s

  dark scoop and deeper, sharp hips and deeper:

  tide line on a still sea, a clean red row

  of tiny rose buds, the tattoo artist

  crouched intent over low-slung beads of blood.

  Her belly. Her breath a rise and fall. “You

  wouldn’t want me if you hadn’t lost me.”

  When we met in philosophy she said

  Ludwig Wittgenstein was sexy. I said

  Herakleitos of Ephesos said war

  was the father of all things. She said leave

  that be. We hit my place because she was

  living in her Volvo. Her dentist was,

  she said, the image of Ludwig. I said

  Herakleitos lived in the same city

  all his life. Ephesos, she said, and whipped

  out a brand new toothbrush. Bless you, I said.

  After olives and beer we fucked six times.

  The curtain rises and the room’s full of

  long shadows rippling as she floats across

  roofs and through windows to rooms where couples

  lit by television come apart or

  together and mean something. Her back wears

  a cross: this is yours always: these wrists in

  the circle of your fingers against wood –

  trees or walls. This blood is yours and the quiet

  of the city. A country’s thousand long

  nights. Cock’s crow outside the house of ribbons

  returned to after an absence of life.

  Home

  Again I knock at the door, lose myself

  a moment in the storm. The house seems still,

  a sombre pile of hollow rooms, while wind

  behind me hurls debris against cars and

  trees and amplifies the clatter and roar

  of the mall. I knock again, everything

  in turmoil – sticks, leaves, bags, cans, foil wrappers,

  branches groaning huge in the tumbling dusk.

  All Grandfather’s best friends died under fire

  in the war. Long lines of cars undulate

  as they skewer the mall. This is the gate

  between two worlds. Icy fingers catch at

  the roots of my hair. Then the door opens

  with a click and I’m a child diminished

  in the muted light that bathes and haloes

  the calm silhouette in the hallway. “Yes?”

  She will not recognize me so I kick

  shut the door, pin her arms to the wall. “Stay.”

  This is the atomic state of affairs.

  Wittgenstein of the trenches come. Kneel at

  her feet to pick each thread of each seam with

  the sharp knife from the telephone table.

  The cat pads through the hallway, purrs against

  my thigh and Tracy does not stare at me,

  transfixed, but looks down pityingly while

  winter blows against the house and her legs

  bloom goosebumps. I don’t know what to do so

  rattle the door in its hinges and track

  the fat snow along the concession road

  to the men in town to exchange rounds of

  whisky chased with beer, check out the barmaid,

  fuck this and fuck that, cat got your tongue? If

  you want pussy here’s what. Tracy always

  wears overalls and nothing else when she’s

  aiming to get laid, and if her hair’s in

  a pony tail she’s into something quick

  as frost, I mean, you can open her like

  a ripe tomato, a fresh fig, a grape,

  the way the dentist did her mouth to check

  her bite, see what makes the enterprise tick,

  belly, tits and. Lord save us. This forest

  protect us, amen. Let rain follow sun.

  Only words. Wittgenstein, Herakleitos,

  come to the disco, come. She will dance like

  a cat on hot coals. We will be uncles

  who want more than skin, more than blood, who want

  each rib snapped free, the cage open to see

  what flies out and what’s sucked in, unlawful

  lungs and heart, our own dark secrets. We’ll bare

  muscle, sinew, our dry girl on the street

  to flirt and flick her skirt, show her pelvis

  and spine. But she’s gone. Puff! Gone for a smoke

  between dances. Mountains hidden by night,

  night by cloud. Adult by child. Villagers

  shiver as they pass her by. Each time less,

  she’s dressed in rags at the bottom of war.

  Herakleitos of Ephesos come. Come.

  Forget her hair, forget her face, forget

  her tits and her waist. Every girl is young.

  Uncles are famous and want her taken

  until days flicker twenty-four flames

  a second and wankers arrest themselves

  in the act and hike down from the mountains.

  Trees of this river valley protect us.

  Remember the gentle spring, the hawthorn

  leafing. The chorus of frogs in the pond.

  Light Blinds the Helm

  For the cast & crew of The Winter’s Tale, Vancouver 2006

  History

  Hurricane. Yellow islands. These are true.

  Slaves escape into equatorial

  waters, are swallowed. The Master survives

  a mutiny off the Blue Coast, the ship

  becalmed for twenty-three days, hurricane,

  yellow hills. These are true. Slaves dive into

  southern waters. The sailors mutiny.

  The ship is becalmed for twenty-three days.

  Very true, the Captain’s story, not tame

  before it’s written. Bare hills. Hurricane.

  Twice I exit the ship, enter the waves.

  My father wants light in the world, a path

  sparking water to nearest land, same light

  that blinds the helm this third voyage into

  open ocean. I have never been here

  before. All is new except the water,

  except the light. What shows the way confounds

  the senses. When we turn to instruments,

  we refuse nature, we doubt our bodies.

  My father wants light. My father wants light.

  I can’t let what happened happen again.

  Light is nothing but what it hits upon.

  I cast about, still blinded by the sun

  that set an hour ago, for the North Star,

  and hot vivid winds blow up from the south,

  the churning deck too quick for my square bones,

  yet slow for the new dog at heel, engrossed

  with my foot, her big paws gaining purchase

  where there’s none. She looks through me. I can’t see

  the en
d of her, nor profit in being

  lost again, the ship framed by hurricane

  that seems to speak of home and sleep, silk slide

  of sky across the mate’s worried stubble.

  Nature’s ruin refuses our eyes. Once.

  Uniforms swaying on hangers and words

  floating backward, whence, whence? Notice I give

  the world notice instead of noting salt

  on my skin? Yet on this ocean no war

  rises or sets. Clouds drift, wrack above wrack.

  Nature’s ruin refuses our eyes. Twice.

  At home the principals await jewels,

  and zoological societies

  expect specimens to prove their theories.

  The rock headlands refuse my hands three times.

  Rescue

  Actors – stage a deck, custom overturned –

  are sailors, seabirds scratching the tide wrack

  for dropped lines and cues and hurricane lamps

  while carpenters unfurl the torn rigging.

  This dream. That audience. Even the play.

  All made out of scraps of old scaffolding

  from earlier storms. This rowboat intact.

  Miraculous oars raised high like palm fronds,

  their varnish a mirror in which I see

  eight versions of my old weak face tricky

  as a coconut almost howling glee.

  Comedy No

  We’re rehearsing a tragedy, later

  days, centuries on, director calling

  for consciousness of ideas, more nose

  and eyebrows, and less wind in the tent, for

  the performance will be in a small cove

  on the coast, above the rocks, even though

  it is late in the year. They expect me

  to take the role of son and king. Funding

  is mine because they have borrowed against

  my return. The celebration hopeful,

  tragedy incomplete, my friends all here.

  ‘Play, boy, play’

  And the word is carved inside a cartoon

  heart on the 1926 sidewalk

  the southwest corner of Third and Blenheim

  and I go there most nights before falling

  asleep to bring the Tale, my family,

  from time into Time. We have never seen

  such light in the world. Such light in the world.

  Autolycus rubs hands and face in dirt.

  The shepherd and the shepherd’s son run lines

  outside the green room. And Mamillius,

  my boy, rides his bike through the summer night.

  This Is True

  Dog

  You are wrapped in a green blanket the soil

  presses down, paws folded so, nails too long,

  whiskers as puzzled as ever. Trees rise

  from broken rock in green old age, the themes

  now obvious to all, even to me,

  my arms locked around my body, its bones,

  to keep breath at bay, the blanket’s smell gone

  with the rest of you. The cold weather breaks

  and instead of snow it rains hard, and rain

  pools the ground where you get set for spring and

  for us to hike over the hills again.

  After the Wreck

  Granddad comes in a dream to tell me, “What

  you work on works on you.” When I ask him

  how he is, he says fine thanks, pretty good,

  he has been pressing black olives in Greece.

  You swam by my side into the shell beach,

  then shook, wagged your tail, and put your nose down.

  The swell-fed sailors roll ashore next day,

  pragmatic, assuring me with their eyes

  that I’m no use here. Past the farthest rock

  the tide runs fast and surf leaps in the air.

  Out there we flailed in a monstrous current.

  Unlost dog. Black-eyed Susan. Running stream.

  What are we? Brown hills. Dislocated palms.

  Still cogent in a land where nothing is

  familiar. I’m the body of sadness,

  homesick, while you find the path and lead me

  through the bush, torn between signals, your nose

  a mouse across just-cooled magma, that old

  evolution chestnut and the sweet heart

  song: lost and going where your master goes,

  as old as the moon in thrall to this world.

  And for a moment I can see us both

  as bureaucrats and connoisseurs of sin

  on the hunt for gold and a piece of tail,

  all clues gone. We don’t belong here. Not lost,

  just jittery and unoriented.

  A cigarette would do the trick. I dreamed

  of a standing ewe with lamb in a field

  in America. A thin woman past

  forty against the black-and-white skyline.

  Gaunt pieces. I don’t recognize myself.

  On the white-shell beach crows huddle to pull

  bones over the dead regardless of tide.

  What We Have

  Not much longer now. A joke. Small waves, hills,

  horizon, hills, horizon, all gathered

  for the straggler, the newcomer. Heron

  boredom, glitter fish, inadequacy.

  With whole shells from the beach I try to mark

  my place. When I was young I’d walk into

  a forest and be in a magical

  work, separated from the common parts

  of life by new paths that led to clearings

  thick with incense, with walls of climbing vines.

  Years later the story continues. Time

  doffs its wings, abandons its abacus.

  Exile breathes in the fat shadows of trees.

  I give up listing my different selves,

  measuring the distance from outside to

  inside, from urban to rural. The thump

  of a grouse intersects the jet’s thin jazz.

  The walls of this world are quite soft and rain

  on palm fronds whispers like people coming

  through the forest whose floor unleashes green

  heads of new ferns. I keep going over

  the same ground. Ghosts, music, all under wraps.

  Where’s the ribbon to prettify things now

  there’s nowhere that is not connected to

  everywhere else? Grass will cover the tracks

  of whatever has passed. There is no end

  to the love of animals. Story’s not

  empty either. Wild mint, sage, licorice.

  At home cilantro escaped into lawn

  so next year’s mowing smashed the air with spice.

  The warmth of stepping into your brown gaze.

  In the middle of the bird call is this

  difficult task of husbandry. Inside

  the forest is a tower of bones, moss-

  green, and an alley wide as a desert.

  We call this emptiness, at least I do,

  not knowing what else to hold, having lost

  the need to nurture and all of the names

  but yours, dog. And after you go I’ll have

  these non-sequiturs visit like demons

  each time I set out from the shell beach, you

  at heel, in memory or metaphor

  no matter, to wind up at this clearing,

  this heap of bones resembling less and less

  the building I once fooled myself into

  believing I’d made, mnemonic tower,

  my beginning and end, my dead fellow

  sailors. Green! All season the ferns shout green!

  In the bone room bats fly. I remember

  finding something hidden in a drawer.

  Hard among soft or soft in hard. Secret.

  You killed a duck. Yes, true, you killed a duck.

  She was dying anyway, disembowelledr />
  by an eagle. You brought her to me, so

  warm in my arms, a bundle of feathers.

  I feel the weight lift sometimes as we walk.

  All is not quite lost or not quite all lost.

  A specific here. Lifting joy when you

  run and something in me links to something

  in you. But always when we are alone.

  Alone is the trick. Alone is the trick.

  What particulars about the universe

  are we hungry for? You’re the only way

  to my forgotten self, my human self.

  I dreamed I found you in a Banyan tree.

  Love me? I would, Master, were I human.

  Meanwhile

  Back home my parents wait on the hillside

  for a sign. Meanwhile the creditors play

  poker. Meanwhile I grow older and cry

  hard at night because a dog will not live

  as long as a man. You sleep hard against

  my body, state fluid, metamorphic,

  neither here nor there nor illusory,

  and wake to regard me as though the world

  assembles itself just for us and we

  are its gods. Gentle mist on the water,

  no other land beyond. The tide creeps in.

  In my mouth a bitter taste. Fingers quit

  fretting eyebrows, mouth, cheek; instead demand

  ribs, scapulae, skull. For three days crows and

  pigeons, disturbed not at all by you, dog,

  have sat their nests. Meanwhile a man murders

  his wife, their young, himself. Meanwhile fortunes

  raise palaces and temples and vandals

  tear them down. We know what we are doing.

  But here, among ragged trees and smoking

  sun, I find a stone with a white circle

  as drops of rain fall from the sky’s belly.

  Today I am angry. You know to keep