ZASTRUGIS
On Not Changing a Word in an Old
Poem
‘Zastrugi’ is the shape of the sand on the shore
made by the ocean.
I thought it was the sirocco flying over the waves.
I was wrong.
So I must retrace my poem ‘Learning to Swim in Sicily’.
But a ‘sand storming sea’ doesn’t sound
half as
good to me,
since it was about coming on a body on a coral reef
while diving, an unsolved mystery, shocking beyond
belief.
Maybe I should stick to the word as a gnostic that
reveals all.
The writings on the dunes clearly outlined when the
sea has withdrawn.
Zastrugi
Movie
A Dream, 18 December 2006
I’m again in Barravento -
a Bahian beach that you went to
when life was as it was meant to
be. Modesto’s
youth was ill-spent
here as the turtle gigolo.
The sea is on the horizon.
And the sand is white with the sun.
‘Cachaça is Modesto’s
muse’,
said Jairo, who’d forgot cashews,
and went back for them and limäo.
‘And his poems are caipirinhas.’
Crossing the dunes he took off his shoes.
The sea is on the horizon.
And the sand is white with the sun.
Modesto was
loved by everyone.
including himself. His life’s re-run
in Glauber Rocha’s first movie. Handsome,
beachcomber who has never done
a day’s work. By night he did some.
The sea is on the horizon.
And the sand is white with the sun.
‘Caipirinha is the divine
drink, and I, Modesto,
have refined
how it’s made. You cut the iced lime
on the edge of the glass. Raw rum
absorbs it. It works everytime.’
The sea is on the horizon.
And the sand is white with the sun.
Oscar Niemeyer at High Noon
understood the design of dunes
by way of Mies’s ‘almost nothing’.
Once the force of nature’s withdrawn
what’s left seems like the unborn.
The sea is on the horizon.
And the sand is white with the sun.
The architecture of the strand
is not constant. The tide repands
over the desert, and dry land
disappears. Jairo, empty hand-
ed comes back. Modesto’s
unmanned.
The sand is on the horizon.
And the sea is white with the sun.
Between
the Door and the Hinge
After Brecht’s Entdeckung
an einer jungen Frau
The morning after standing on the stair,
politely parting, bored to death in fact,
I saw a gray streak in her new combed hair
and touched her breast, a quite spontanous act.
‘Why don’t you go now? You’re like all
the rest
who take me in the dark, and leave at first light.’
Distracted by her dressing-gown’s distress,
I think she might be worth another night.
What can I say? ‘I’ll
call you.’ Hypocrite.
‘Let’s talk again’, would hardly be a
tribute.
‘I’m attracted to you when you look a
sight.’
I bite my tongue. She hates me. I’m a man.
Words dry in me as longing drains my spit.
‘I’m going off’, I blurt.
‘You’re not. I am.’
All
Souls Together: Poem for Toussaint, 2006
‘L’homme
pense. Dieu rit.’
‘I’m just back from a
trip to heaven with Malebranche.
It’s not good news. We offered God the olive
branch.
Though the divine philosophy was noblesse
itself, God’s not going to get us out of the mess
we’ve got ourselves into - that’s the new world ordure
of bombing and shopping, and law and disorder
(break the law, and ordering up lots of weapons
paid for by rebuilding what you destroy).’
‘Cretins!’
said God. ‘Let them stew. And tell them to stop
using
my name in vain, or I might find it amusing
to cut off the pipelines which fuel (it’s no joke)
the pollution that has their cities in a choke.’
‘Oui, mon Dieu’,
said Malebranche. ‘It’s
time for man to attend
to one another, not as a means to an end,
but as an end in itself. Their imagination needs to
adjust
to reality.’ Feeding his pet plague of locusts,
God says, ‘You’re a good man, but you
don’t know
men.
‘Attention is the prayer of the soul’
won’t sing
for them.’
‘God is not mocked, but He likes to mock’, said my
sage.
‘He has the best interest at heart for the present
age.
But the withholding of manna means we’ll have to
make do
as best we can.’ ‘Fast foods’, I said.
‘That’s
nothing new.’
‘I like this malbouffe’, says
Malebranche,
over a Big Mac.
‘Keeps body and soul together. Good to be back.’
Down in the town the dead souls and their
next of
kin,
co-exist in the best of all possible worlds. Sin-
ers redeem themselves, and, as saints, are marching
through
the town - women in white, the men in black. They
queue
for wreaths, and soon will descend in waves
of stately sorrow, to flower their loved ones
graves
with sentimental chrysanthemums and dads,
and cactuses for uncles who went to the bad.
What’s trotting through their minds who can say?
‘There’s a lot to be said for plastic bouquets.
Money and time saved, and they last.’ ‘Potted
plants in urns
would be truer to the natural law’, say the worms.
‘You’re worse than
God’, said Malebranche. ‘So
judgmental.’
And I’m duly chastened. ‘Bras de Vendre’s
doing
well’,
I say. ‘It’s the flowers I hate more than people.
At first they smell so good and then it’s all down
hill.
The folk I know are having sympathetic thoughts.
And, even though the world outside is out of sorts,
they’re always in a good humour, doing what they
can
in practical ways to make a more human
life for themselves and those around them too.
Even Monsieurs (‘c’est un bordel’)
Bols and
Manigu.’
‘I trust God’s listening’, says
Malebranche,’in His
heaven.’
‘Believe me, I am’, God laughs. ‘That is
the
problem.’
Learning
Not To Drown
My mother taught me how to swim,
something I love. She pushed me in,
fed up with waiting for the toe
to touch the water. This I know,
without her helping hand I’d be
still fearful of a raging sea.
My father taught me how to float.
He made himself into a boat
for me to bask in, to and fro,
but he was loath to let me go.
That’s why I cannot float through life
with arms stretched out. I can jack-knife.
Yet
neither taught me how to sink
into
the deep, and not to drink
the
waters. How to hold one’s breath
to
stop at source the cause of death,
and
surface up where oxygen
returns
you to the world of men.