Miles of louring cloud
over the sodden peat
and huddling cottages.
Who’d live here but
the lichen and the crows?
Only the men who
keep this art alive:
to set the rain on fire.
Category Archives: Places
Uisge
The View
In a place of vast surpassing beauty
a man started building a path
to a view that was
just as fine as
any other
there.
Why is he doing it the locals asked
you can bet he’s going to
take money off some
foreign dupes
too stupid
by half.
And in time people came from afar
to climb that path to a view
that was just as fine
as any other
and just
as free
only
far steeper.
And so he grew
into a contented old man
happy in the surreptitious gift of
beauty he’d given the foreign dupes.
Yellowstone
After the geysers come the restless nights.
I’m my own Yellowstone: as sulphur mists
dissolve the rim of consciousness
my superheated soul spouts similes,
mixed metaphors thud from the mudpool
of my bubbling brain, hissing hyperboles
ricochet off the walls of lodgepole pine;
from underneath the floorboards fumaroles
steam acid vapour. The silver lining
to these endless nights: sleeplessness
crystallized in syllables; the scalloped edge
around the hotspring of my seething mind.
Transcendence in the RV Park
In the cool
after-dawn quiet
outside the becalmed
450-hp, 10-cylinder, 30-foot behemoth
dwarfed by two thousand years of redwood tree
paring my fingernails feels an uplifting, almost
spiritual experience. You have to wonder
what’s wrong with us
humans – or
right.
Collioure
late morning stroll to the boulangerie
baguette and coffee and
the badly written crime novel
about la France profonde
where the bestial slaughter
of a beur hardly disturbs the idyll
gelatinous time
just now and then the whistle of trains
behind the bougainvilleas on fire
on the beach the babel of Europe on holiday
silhouette of a windmill
above gnarled vines
red soil of foothills
walls washed in Southern pastels
clink of ice cubes
impossibly green diabolo menthe
watch the summer melt
in the dark the fan spins
in the windowless bedroom
telling lies of a wide open sea
Prague awakening
A blackbird binds the fragments of dreams
with the twine of his song;
a scattered archipelago of reality
emerges from the night:
clang of dawn deliveries; rumble
of dustmen’s carts on cobblestones;
the dragging steps of the Golem
after a night’s watch over his precarious city.
Birds of the early morning
The cheerful confusion
of unidentified dawn birds,
punctuated by the bisyllabic
cackle of pheasants.
A little bird has dreamed
a strange amphibian dream
and practises a timid
ribbit – ribbit?
A blackbird and his rival
soar above the chorus;
another pheasant screech,
followed by heavy flutter.
A goose honks, once.
The ribbit has grown in confidence.
The bathroom Schwanen, Bernau
A welcoming bathroom, this: blond wood and glass,
the white enamel washbasin fashionably raised
above the shiny white top. And it was talking to me.
The air was alive with hissing and burbling, with ticking
and clicks, snatches of songs; and borne on this stream,
now, and again now, half-caught, the ghosts of words.
Doubtless a rational explanation applied, involving valves,
matters of pressure, bubbles of air trapped in pipes –
but still: that room had a message for me. In the dark
it was whispering secrets; in the small hours its hisses
grew desperate, offering the answers to all my questions –
and I lay listening all night, too tired to understand –
Tourist Boat, Tonle Sap, Cambodia
The fisherman
hip-deep in muddy water
waits for the tourist boat
to pass.
Cigarette dangling
his bright eyes never leave me.
When the tide turns, Barang,
they tell me
I’ll slit your throat.
The boat belches diesel.
We pick up speed.
Monument Valley
A fat man on horseback rides into the sunset.
Blue jeans, red shirt, black cowboy hat.
“That’s Dave,” says Rosie over the microphone.
“He’ll stop there on the bluff for you, four minutes.”
The shutters click. He stands immobile.
Four minutes, and he trots towards the tourist bus;
heaves his redshirted belly off the little horse.
His face is dark and still.
This is the famous dignity of the Navajo people.
Two dollars for a photo of yourself astride his horse.
There are no takers. He just stands.
Later, in Suzie’s hogan, we watch her weave a rug.
She’s ninety-five, says Rosie, and almost blind
behind huge spectacles. When time is up
we file past her, from south to north, to show respect
and stuff a dollar in a cigar box. I saw Dave earlier
in Goulding’s campground store: a fat man
buying candy bars, something to keep him going
while he hitches up the trailer, loads the horse, and
drives out to the bluff over his nation’s holy land
to ride for tourists until the sun goes down.
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