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.
Tourist Boat, Tonle Sap, Cambodia
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.
Footprints #2
I came across this poem called Footprints
in The Nation’s Favourite Twentieth Century Poems
by ANON. (and by God he or she knew why):
an overpowering poem for sheer mawkishness
and one hundred per cent genuine cringe value –
and I caught myself loving its message.
It’s about this man walking the beach with the LORD
(reliving his life in a dream), and looking back he sees
only one set of prints at the most difficult times,
and he accuses the LORD of deserting him
in his hour of need; whereupon HE replies
then HE was carrying him… I blinked back a tear,
then retraced their steps in the sand
to measure the depth of those solitary prints.
They were no deeper than when the man walked alone.
An unread book
In the middle
of his fifth decade,
all at sea and lost
in office murk,
he strikes out
for the shores
of his favourite bookshop.
Stroking faces and spines,
scanning the shelves
for the one
that will cut through
the fog,
a Companion to Life,
he has no eyes
for the shy assistant’s
sideways glances.
If he knew how to read
and what
they would speak
volumes.
February Nights
All through the night the glow of orange snow.
We cannot leave the world to black and white;
someone might reach out to the dark, and go.
Exhausted ski lifts drop their freight, and low
on fading mountains lies departing light.
All through the night the glow of orange snow
battles the deepening shadows; but although
we double-lock our doors we know tonight
someone might reach out to the dark, and go –
a ship caught in the Arctic undertow
that’s lost her north and given up the fight.
All through the night the glow of orange snow:
the Northern Lights coldly observe her slow
descent below the ice, and out of sight.
Someone might reach out to the dark, and go –
tune out of life as of a tedious show
he’s watched too long. Too noisy, busy, bright.
All through the night the glow of orange snow…
Someone might reach out to the dark – and go.
Verdun crossing
Caught like a wasp under the tumbler
of a stifling Verdun summer afternoon,
an ocean of dark trees
decants me to an open place.
A thousand rows of crosses
cross a thousand equal rows.
School parties tumble out of coaches,
ready to be bored by history.
Among the endless lines an old man’s
tacking to and fro in search of names
of men who drowned in mustard gas
crossing a sea of mud and shattered trees.
The wood stretches forever.
This must be fertile soil.
A word of advice
When continents of
black ice close in
and, pressed against the wall
of your cave, you succumb
to the darkening embrace
of your very own Ice Age:
hibernate.
Hibernate.
Hold on till a ray
of the newborn old sun
slants in at the mouth of the cave
and, like a latter-day Stanley,
shakes your pale hand with a smile
of triumphant exhaustion.
Relief, it will say, is at hand
just around the next berg.
But, hey – watch it
as you stumble half-blind into thin light:
the polar bears are famished
and you don’t know where
beneath that smooth white expanse
the abyss is getting ready
to pounce.
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