The Cinnamon Peeler Read online

  those who fell asleep and never woke

  who never slept and so dropped dead

  those who attacked the casual eyes of children and were led away

  and those who faced corners for ever

  those who exposed themselves and were led away

  those who pretended broken limbs, epilepsy,

  who managed to electrocute themselves on wire

  those who felt their skin was on fire and screamed

                                          and were led away

  There are ways of going

  physically mad, physically

  mad when you perfect the mind

  where you sacrifice yourself for the race

  when you are the representative when you allow

  yourself to be paraded in the cages

  celebrity a razor in the body

  These small birds so precise

  frail as morning neon

  they are royalty melted down

  they are the glass core at the heart of kings

  yet 15-year-old boys could enter the cage

  and break them in minutes

  as easily as a long fingernail

  RAT JELLY

  See the rat in the jelly

  steaming dirty hair

  frozen, bring it out on a glass tray

  split the pie four ways and eat

  I took great care cooking this treat for you

  and tho it looks good

  and tho it smells of the Westinghouse still

  and tastes of exotic fish or

  maybe the expensive arse of a cow

  I want you to know it’s rat

  steaming dirty hair and still alive

  (caught him last Sunday

  thinking of the fridge, thinking of you.)

  KING KONG MEETS WALLACE STEVENS

  Take two photographs—

  Wallace Stevens and King Kong

  (Is it significant that I eat bananas as I write this?)

  Stevens is portly, benign, a white brush cut

  striped tie. Businessman but

  for the dark thick hands, the naked brain

  the thought in him.

  Kong is staggering

  lost in New York streets again

  a spawn of annoyed cars at his toes.

  The mind is nowhere.

  Fingers are plastic, electric under the skin.

  He’s at the call of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  Meanwhile W. S. in his suit

  is thinking chaos is thinking fences.

  In his head – the seeds of fresh pain

  his exorcising,

  the bellow of locked blood.

  The hands drain from his jacket,

  pose in the murderer’s shadow.

  ‘THE GATE IN HIS HEAD’

  for Victor Coleman

  Victor, the shy mind

  revealing the faint scars

  coloured strata of the brain,

  not clarity but the sense of shift

  a few lines, the tracks of thought

  Landscape of busted trees

  the melted tires in the sun

  Stan’s fishbowl

  with a book inside

  turning its pages

  like some sea animal

  camouflaging itself

  the typeface clarity

  going slow blonde in the sun full water

  My mind is pouring chaos

  in nets onto the page.

  A blind lover, dont know

  what I love till I write it out.

  And then from Gibson’s your letter

  with a blurred photograph of a gull.

  Caught vision. The stunning white bird

  an unclear stir.

  And that is all this writing should be then.

  The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment

  so they are shapeless, awkward

  moving to the clear.

  TAKING

  It is the formal need

  to suck blossoms out of the flesh

  in those we admire

  planting them private in the brain

  and cause fruit in lonely gardens.

  To learn to pour the exact arc

  of steel still soft and crazy

  before it hits the page.

  I have stroked the mood and tone

  of hundred year dead men and women

  Emily Dickinson’s large dog, Conrad’s beard

  and, for myself,

  removed them from historical traffic.

  Having tasted their brain. Or heard

  the wet sound of a death cough.

  Their idea of the immaculate moment is now.

  The rumours pass on

  the rumours pass on

  are planted

  till they become a spine.

  BURNING HILLS

  for Kris and Fred

  So he came to write again

  in the burnt hill region

  north of Kingston. A cabin

  with mildew spreading down walls.

  Bullfrogs on either side of him.

  Hanging his lantern of Shell Vapona Strip

  on a hook in the centre of the room

  he waited a long time. Opened

  the Hilroy writing pad, yellow Bic pen.

  Every summer he believed would be his last.

  This schizophrenic season change, June to September,

  when he deviously thought out plots

  across the character of his friends.

  Sometimes barren as fear going nowhere

  or in habit meaningless as tapwater.

  One year maybe he would come and sit

  for four months and not write a word down

  would sit and investigate colours, the

  insects in the room with him.

  What he brought: a typewriter

  tins of ginger ale, cigarettes. A copy of Strangelove,

  of The Intervals, a postcard of Rousseau’s The Dream.

  His friends’ words were strict as lightning

  unclothing the bark of a tree, a shaved hook.

  The postcard was a test pattern by the window

  through which he saw growing scenery.

  Eventually the room was a time machine for him.

  He closed the rotting door, sat down

  thought pieces of history. The first girl

  who in a park near his school

  put a warm hand into his trousers

  unbuttoning and finally catching the spill

  across her wrist, he in the maze of her skirt.

  She later played the piano

  when he had tea with the parents.

  He remembered that surprised—

  he had forgotten for so long.

  Under raincoats in the park on hot days.

  The summers were layers of civilization in his memory

  they were old photographs he didn’t look at anymore

  for girls in them were chubby not as perfect as in his mind

  and his ungovernable hair was shaved to the edge of skin.

  His friends leaned on bicycles

  were 16 and tried to look 21

  the cigarettes too big for their faces.

  He could read those characters easily

  undisguised as wedding pictures.

  He could hardly remember their names

  though they had talked all day, exchanged styles

  and like dogs on a lawn hung around the houses of girls.

  Sex a game of targets, of throwing firecrackers

  at a couple in a field locked in hand-made orgasms,

  singing dramatically in someone’s ear along with the record

  ‘How do you think I feel / you know our love’s not real

  The one you’re made about / Is just a gad-about

  How do you think I feel’.

  He saw all that complex tension the way his childr
en would.

  There is one picture that fuses the five summers.

  Eight of them are leaning against a wall

  arms around each other

  looking into the camera and the sun

  trying to smile at the unseen adult photographer

  trying against the glare to look 21 and confident.

  The summer and friendship will last forever.

  Except one who was eating an apple. That was him

  oblivious to the significance of the moment.

  Now he hungers to have that arm around the next shoulder.

  The wretched apple is fresh and white.

  Since he began burning hills

  the Shell strip has taken effect.

  A wasp is crawling on the floor

  tumbling over, its motor fanatic.

  He has smoked 5 cigarettes.

  He has written slowly and carefully

  with great love and great coldness.

  When he finishes he will go back

  hunting for the lies that are obvious.

  CHARLES DARWIN PAYS A VISIT,

  DECEMBER 1971

  View of the coast of Brazil.

  A man stood up to shout

  at the image of a sailing ship

  which was a vast white bird from over the sea

  now ripping its claws into the ocean.

  Faded hills of March

  painted during the cold morning.

  On board ship Charles Darwin sketched clouds.

  One of these days the Prime Mover will

  paint the Prime Mover out of his sky.

  I want a … centuries being displaced

   … faith

                           23rd of June, 1832.

                           He caught sixty-eight species

                           of a particularly minute beetle.

  The blue thick leaves who greeted him

  animals unconscious of celebration

  moved slowly into law.

  Adam with a watch.

  Look past and future, (I want a …),

  ease our way out of the structures

  this smell of the cogs

  and diamonds we live in.

  I am waiting for a new ship, so new

  we will think the lush machine

  an animal of God.

  Weary from travelling over the air and the water

  it will sink to its feet at our door.

  THE VAULT

  Having to put forward candidates for God

  I nominate Henri Rousseau and Dr Bucke,

  tired of the lizard paradise

  whose image banks renew off the flesh of others

  – those stories that hate, which are remnants and insults.

  Refresh where plants breed to the edge of dream.

  I have woken to find myself covered in white sheets

  walls and doors, food.

  There was no food in the world I left

  where I ate the rich air. The bodies of small birds

  who died while flying fell into my mouth.

  Fruit dripped through our thirst to the earth.

  All night the traffic of apes floats across the sky

  a worm walks through the gaze of a lion

  some birds live all their evenings on one branch.

  They are held by the celebration of God’s wife.

  In Rousseau’s The Dream she is the naked lady

  who has been animal and tree

  her breast a suckled orange.

  The fibres and fluids of their moral nature

  have seeped within her frame.

  The hand is outstretched

  her fingers move out in

  mutual transfusion to the place.

  Our low speaking last night

  was barely audible among the grunt

  of mongrel meditation.

  She looks to the left

  for that is the direction we leave in

  when we fall from her room of flowers.

  WHITE DWARFS

  This is for people who disappear

  for those who descend into the code

  and make their room a fridge for Superman

  – who exhaust costume and bones that could perform flight,

  who shave their moral so raw

  they can tear themselves through the eye of a needle

  this is for those people

  that hover and hover

  and die in the ether peripheries

  There is my fear

  of no words of

  falling without words

  over and over of

  mouthing the silence

  Why do I love most

  among my heroes those

  who sail to that perfect edge

  where there is no social fuel

  Release of sandbags

  to understand their altitude—

                 that silence of the third cross

                 3rd man hung so high and lonely

                 we don’t hear him say

                 say his pain, say his unbrotherhood

                 What has he to do with the smell of ladies,

                 can they eat off his skeleton of pain?

  The Gurkhas in Malaya

  cut the tongues of mules

  so they were silent beasts of burden

  in enemy territories

  after such cruelty what could they speak of anyway

  And Dashiell Hammett in success

  suffered conversation and moved

  to the perfect white between the words

  This white that can grow

  is fridge, bed,

  is an egg – most beautiful

  when unbroken, where

  what we cannot see is growing

  in all the colours we cannot see

  there are those burned out stars

  who implode into silence

  after parading in the sky

  after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway

  ‘Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks – ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes – which he arranged in front of him …’

  ITALO CALVINO

  THE AGATHA CHRISTIE BOOKS

  BY THE WINDOW

  In the long open Vancouver Island room

  sitting by the indoor avocados

  where indoor spring light

  falls on the half covered bulbs

  and down the long room light falling

  onto the dwarf orange tree

  vines from south america

  the agatha christie books by the window

  Nameless morning

  solution of grain and colour

  There is this light,

  colourless, which falls on the warm

  stretching brain of the bulb

  that is dreaming avocado

  COUNTRY NIGHT

  The bathroom light burns over the mirror

  In the blackness of the house

  beds groan from the day’s exhaustion

  hold the tired shoulders bruised

  and cut legs the unexpected

  3 a.m. erections. Someone’s dream

  involves a saw someone’s

  dream involves a woman.

  We have all dreamed of finding the lost dog.

  The last light on upstairs

  throws a circular pattern

  through the decorated iron vent

  to become a living room’s moon.

 
The sofa calls the dog, the cat

  in perfect blackness walks over the stove.

  In the room of permanent light

  cockroaches march on enamel.

  The spider with jewel coloured thighs the brown moth

  with corporal stripes

                           ascend pipes

  and look into mirrors.

  All night the truth happens.

  MOVING FRED’S OUTHOUSE/

  GERIATRICS OF PINE

  All afternoon (while the empty drive-in

  screen in the distance promises)

  we are moving the two-seater

  100 yards across his garden

  We turn it over on its top

  and over, and as it slowly

  falls on its side

  the children cheer

  60 years old and a change in career—

  from these pale yellow flowers emerging

  out of damp wood in the roof

  to become a room thorough with flight, noise,

  and pregnant with the morning’s eggs,

  a perch for chickens.

  Two of us. The sweat.

  Our hands under the bottom

  then the top as it goes

  over, through twin holes the

  flowers, running to move the roller, shove,

  and everybody screaming to keep the dog away.

  Fred the pragmatist – dragging the ancient comic

  out of retirement and into a television series

  among the charging democracy of rhode island reds

  Head over heels across the back lawn

  old wood collapsing in our hands

  All afternoon the silent space is turned

  BUCK LAKE STORE AUCTION

  Scrub lawn.

                 A chained

  dog tense and smelling.

  50 cents for a mattress. 50 cents