Portrait of the Author
I wear a floppy white hat and reflector shades
and look as though I stepped out of the wrong picture.
My hispanic skin is deceptive, carapacing
a pale Irish soul blanching to be cleansed by ice.
The squint of my eyes to the sliver-plated sun
is torment on the back burner. Do you want a light?
I stand easier than I sit, always wanting to
move off. My step deviates to the right because
of a crooked spine. I know what it’s like to be
a sixty-year-old vine contorting its grapes out
against the earth’s rotation. The force of the sun
blinds me into shrivelling fecundity.
If the way were straight, I would strike out for ever.
But I’m faced at every step with the twists and turns
of staircases and spirals and mountain impasses.
Reaching exhaustion, I stop for a breath of pure self.
And then go back by the route I came. This time it seems
more straightforwardly crooked, like somewhere I’ve been.
Requiem for a Clochard
Four-part choir
If you sleep underneath a garbage truck,
when it begins to warm at dawn, wake up.
It is the idling hour. Do not forget
your bed, once mobile, can crush you to death.
Mr. White Abroad
Unmistakable from the rear.
The well-fed infant bones bow bent
as though expecting the worst,
ready to toss a succubus
wanting to ride him piggyback.
Briskly bedecked in starched fatigues
from a schoolboy past, not forgotten,
he may stoop, but not to conquer,
benign as his reliable behind
which holds its haunches with aplomb.
And the stride he takes in his stride
veers between a dance and a hunt.
Once military, it’s pacified
by a rambler’s staunchness. He’s bent
now on doing the decent thing.
No one else will. His uprightness
whistles a truth that he’s resigned
to keep to himself. The back, turned
on a world that might cross him, bows.
His face somehow is never seen.
In Memory of My Neighbour M. Jacky
1.
You know all about the sea.
When it is safe to go out,
or not, as the case may be.
Not as a sailor. I doubt
you ever were on water
other than the drinking kind.
How dryly you speak your mind
in sips and listen to mine.
My slips are patiently heard.
There is talk of a daughter
you visit from time to time.
Otherwise, you’re a lone bird.
Ancient railway man, the line
stopped here for you, a slow grind
to the buffer. Defunct stock
creaks to a halt. You were not
on the last train. A whistle
in the night. It’s running still.
2.
It was said you ran on smoke,
like the man in Twice Told Tales.
Though, ran’s an exaggeration.
You were a stoker who’d choke
on a fag, then light another one,
and move along at snail’s
pace, coughing. Puce complexion
trumps the heart over a stroke.
But it was both. The stray cat,
who doesn’t like to be touched,
finding you dead in your flat,
licked you to the next station,
where you were in quarantine
three weeks, having been adjudged
a migrant without a fare.
Now you are back on a line
that the grass has grown over.
And you are going nowhere.
Ceremony in the Rain
When the Pyrenees are angry,
and the clouds are down on the coast.
I like to stand on the spot where
Monsieur Jacky installed himself
to regard the waves break over
the lighthouse, and boulders rearrange
themselves when the Spanish winds
are up. I listen to the foghorn,
blindly remembering my old friend.
I’m a statue in this corner
for unsung invalides, a spot
on the belvedere overlooking
the port. There is nothing sacred
about a stone-bench facing backwards
that you must stand on, except
it’s somebody else’s pedestal.
Monsieur Jacky’s, a hero
of an everyday life that’s past.
A cigarette in his honour
must be smoked even if it means
coughing just like him, a hack
I remember with affection.
I don’t indulge in the habit,
except on ceremonial
occasions. Now I contemplate
the sea shrouded by the mountains.
I return with my respiration
disrupted by the smoke to my
pied-à-terre above his basement
to watch on his behalf daytime
television with the sound down.
And lunch on a slice of pizza
washed down by a bidon of wine.
A feral cat purrs me to sleep.
The Nicotine Cat, Five Years On
‘I look into myself, and see… your eyes fixed on me.’ Baudelaire, ‘Le Chat’
You’ve settled for an easy life, what’s left of it,
moving sometimes to trap the odd fly. You’re couchant
on the table under the mimosa tree in
the hanging garden where Messieurs David and Jacky
talked of higher things while the Creole fed them
delicacies. Her man-without-a-name poured the wine.
Lilies abound on the terraces and roses
climb the walls. The sun drops down behind the mountain,
and the glow of the yellow and white marguerites
lingers in the air with the whiff of cigarettes.
The man-without-a-name raises his pot of red
to me, and the chat stops to observe my passage.
Now the Creole hacks dead flowers in housecoat and scarf.
The gown she wore to host the ancient evenings
is a shroud of silk from the South that wraps the dead
when the time comes to raise them as a reminder
to watch over what remains. Those voluptuous nights
are black and white prints in your one surviving eye.