A Pretty Sight (3 page)

I’d spread the word that you’re pretty slow

because you’d implied I was less than bright,

and there’s one more thing I’d like to know:

are you wrong or am I right?

If a past disorder caused you trouble,

be it gastrointestinal, tooth or sinus,

if a privileged birth raised you in a bubble,

I’m afraid that’s no excuse, your Highness,

for the back-stabbing habits of an asshole.

If you’re really itching to put me in my place,

fine, let’s drop the gloves, and like Picasso,

I’ll happily rearrange your face.

And while you carve mine to a tragic mask,

we’ll raise a chorus of the same old song,

since there’s one more thing you’d like to ask:

were you right or was I wrong?

The sky’s stretched so white

noon stings, bleached

of shade. In the street,

baked chrome blinds

as a car passes with sudden

starred light, and the lawn’s

a clump of stiff leaves

below the asthmatic scratchings

of the linden’s crown.

Chrysanthemum heads wither

and crisp like rust; the choked

veins of perennials are edged

with brown, flattened to the stem.

Power lines buzz above curb dust.

A cyclist ticks by

beside the construction site;

men chew bread,

looking flayed and stunned

in the faint, bent shadow

of a backhoe’s boom, the jackhammer

planted on the asphalt like a heroic

Soviet prop. The ballpark,

empty, roasts like the Negev,

just sand and brittle tufts

of grass, where Christ might

appear through the haze

and do a deal for one gulp

of bottled water. Sprinklers

whisking in the yards can’t

stave off the parched decay,

their thimble-shallow spray

sponged dry by sun in minutes.

At 4 a.m., we wake

to the window banging back

on its hinges, and the downpour,

a day-for-night burst

of blurred white in street glow,

rain slashing down

and the dry roots slugging it back.

He stood at the front of the lecture hall,

rushed to explain the important themes

of the Twentieth-Century American Novel,

last class before midterms.

Our essays were weak; he wanted us

to get this, to sift the full impact

of the novel’s plot, a book he clearly loved.

It was a quintessential early-winter day, sky

the colour of pasta water, stirred with flurries,

and the small break of Christmas before us.

The painted vents blew hot, drowsy breath.

‘Now, one more thing,’ he said, then talked

of the cancer they’d found, his treatments

and the chance of success. There’d be

a
TA
for the rest of term.

He blinked at his watch; the time was gone.

Silent, we loaded books into knapsacks.

‘Good luck on the exam. Reread your notes.

And please, remember the motifs,’ he said

as we poured toward the door,

‘of the white horse and the pillar of smoke.’

Time sawing its hinds,

it crests the pasture’s rump,

countless long-jumps

in a row, a pelted arrow

fletched for lift.

It shakes off
sleek
and
quick

as too flat; its stride taps the course,

a triple-time tattoo through sprays

of heather and gorse,

where it winks, framed in haze.

Though it’s said to pound

rice cakes on the moon,

a trickster or Aesop’s fool,

it refuses to be other than real

when you see it running. Pity

it can’t sing while the hound bears

down with that boggle-eyed stare

chugging the void

on a whisk of gangly limbs

to muzzle all zags and hearsay.

What would it sing? Psalm,

plainsong, tin pans,

cable in a squall,

cymbal crash, cackle, drag

on a rutted brake pad,

chanson to sum up our fable

before its raw chords are shot,

before its shot chords are ash.

Before I am called into dinner,

you call out, ‘Come here,

come look,’ lifting a cracked wand

of bone from the dry manure

you turn in your hand

and weigh. Kicking around,

we hunt for more parts of the set,

limbs or rib slats fanned

out like smashed bracelets

mislaid in the clover.

‘Let’s go,’ I say, ‘it’s late.’

You turn the thing over and over.

Likely we’ll have no language

to resemble the ones we use now

when the
LAGEOS
satellite finally drops

to Earth. Silver, with a solid

brass core, its arc set

to track our planetary shift

until its highly stable orbit

deteriorates in the year 8,000,000.

Any sense of its first purpose

will be lost to whoever

might still be here. What they’d

look like, eat or dream is anyone’s

guess, but we fixed a plaque inside

with drawings of the Earth, circa now,

and another one with future coastlines

fanned out like a stretched accordion

to show them how the world might look

after 80,000 inches of continental drift,

one every century. If anything’s left

to inspect those shifted silhouettes –

our prodigal land mounted in a dimpled,

silver ball – they might just

read them as portent, threat or tall saga

cooked up by a far-too-distant race

to understand.

In Fort Kochi, Kerala,

a long day of walking the baked stretch

of Bazaar Road past the ferry terminal

to Ernakulam. Textiles, pots, oils, ceramics,

paper and tobacco spilled for sale

from the open shutters of the shops.

Goats nudged garbage while the touts

called out to
please look

at their leather sandals, sarongs

and elephant tea cozies. The dance

of haggling, offers

and countered head shakes.

Mosquitoes devoured your bare legs

under the batik tablecloth

as we sat for biryani and curry.

I’d spread the newspaper out,

looking for news of home

in a tiny font. But read

a report of the Italian snail

thriving on the grounds

at Cliveden and a theory about

how it got there: stowaway in 1896

on a marble balustrade

imported from the Villa Borghese.

Structures of one empire humped

across shipping lanes to another,

the marvel of Rome raided for newer money,

while the snail

plods its slime trail

twenty-seven metres each century.

For those who cite
The Matrix, Rocky

and the
CGI
’d prequels to
Star Wars

as good reason to hate them,

remember the
Aeneid
is also a sequel.

And remember a thousand years

separate Homer and Virgil, only

two thousand more between Virgil

and us. War that follows rage, the care

of fields and horses, some details might

still ring so true that he seems

near each time we hear them.

Hungry, Virgil crosses the bridge

to Trastevere, adjusts his toga

beside a line of smart cars, catching

the whiff of dinner venting through

trattorie
shutters. In a doorway,

he watches the chef bent over

a scratched counter, who steadies

then chops an onion’s soft, rotten

underside until he frees crisp layers

lambent at its core, sauté s them

in olive oil with garlic,

the sizzle and smell

so familiar the poet might forget

Maecenas isn’t waiting to debate

rhetoric or Aeneas’s fate

in the gardens up the Esquiline Hill.

Where does the Danube start?

Magris searches in his book.

He visits Furtwangen

with friends, finds a brook

that drains into a tributary,

the exact source

an argument for centuries, inch

by sodden inch. Near a clear spring

on a hill, they reach a dip

rinsed with rivulets,

and follow a slope to a house

where they knock

at the threshold, squint into a window.

Feet shuffle through half-empty rooms

to the door

which opens on a perturbed old woman

not interested in questions.

But since they’ve

come all this way, she listens, squints

and points to a rough ditch near

a woodshed

gushing cold water. ‘The water reaches

the gutter,’ she explains,

‘through a basin,

which is constantly full because of a tap

that no one ever succeeds

in turning off.’

I never tire of arriving.

At Pamukkale, the wind chucked

leaves and palm fronds as we crossed

the main square.

Barefoot, we ascended

the travertine rock, its stalactites’ drip

and slow froth of calcium

like an overpoured pint of Guinness

cooled to dollops of white-rimmed shelves.

Ruins at the top,

the once-bustling spa town of Heirapolis,

its paving stones still rutted

by the wear of cart wheels.

Here you can walk past the colonnades

of antiquity’s shops. Wealthy Romans

took the hot springs here, retired

and died, their sarcophagi

accumulating to another kind

of stop for tourists north of the baths.

Shells of modern tourism too, lobby fragments

from the 1970s, more evidence of

how eras settle, retreat,

each strata engraved as ghost structure.

This abandoned front desk, the green

marble floor at dusk, light like soft copper,

haunting as any wheel rut

crowded with weeds –

you can find them if you follow

these unmarked goat tracks

further still.

‘If I cannot bend the higher powers,

I will move the infernal regions.’

A favourite quote of Freud’s

and the Secessionist painters of Vienna,

lovers of the glimpse, the held-back, what

beats at your insides to claw a way out.

I wrote it down looking at Klimt’s
Attersee

in the Leopold Museum south of the Ringstrasse.

The words are Juno’s in Virgil’s
Aeneid
,

a summation of alternative options

for those cast outside the party line.

The ode to Plan B.

Attersee
might be landscape

as subversive frill,

the lake’s abstract surface

stroked with turquoise

over green and blue underpaint

like the bangled skies of Van Gogh.

Klimt’s lake

stretches, infinitely if it could,

to the top edge of canvas

and the dark, heavy shape painted there,

an island or shoreline that by limiting

the infinite has given it value.

I thought I saw Sophie Scholl

in a club underground

in Warsaw

that we found by following smokers

down an alley and steep, concrete stairwell,

through tobacco fog to air-sucking bass.

She was nodding at the mosh edge,

beer clutched in her hand

in that post-Cold War dance hall.

I wanted to ask how she got there –

roaming the rebuilt

squares of
Mitteleuropa
– but she looked

too happy to bother

with dredging up the past. Anyway, what

would be the question?

Is everything changed, or the same?

knowing any answer won’t change

the hour of closing time. In that basement’s low ceiling

and sticky floor, furnished

in the dumpster vogue

of old fridges and mismatched chairs,

Sophie hardly blinked, swigged

her drink, her silence meant

as challenge to ‘put up or shut up’

or just ‘shut up and listen.’

In the speakers’ blare

I left her there.

We were returning from the north,

an overnight train

from Sa Pa, sharing a sleeping berth

with two young women from Switzerland.

It was 4 a.m. as the rubbed glow

of the station platform settled in our window.

We lugged backpacks

through the puzzle of Hanoi’s Old Quarter,

amazed at its paused frenzy, dark shops

locked behind metal gates, a few motorbikes

chainsawing past. A cafe opened at 5:30

and agreed to hold our packs

so we wandered to Hoan Kiem Lake

to watch the tai chi groups

balance inner tensions at sunrise.

By then, completely transformed,

the market and streets were stacked

with baskets: crab, pork,

pineapple pyramids, oysters

and sleek trout hawked by vendors,

attendants sweeping park paths

with long, wiry brooms. Police brewed tea

in their dawn kiosk, caps

angled back

off their foreheads

near stereos wired to trees

for the tai chi grannies, conjuring

longevity with techno beats.

Hanoi’s traffic and street life,

no history but the deal, offers

and banter, the good price of fish

caught that morning

in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Fuck silence or permanence.

Fuck elegy. Fuck time and pain.

Dawn sky, sriracha red,

Chiang Mai lunch, khao soi and mango,

a stockpile of sun before

another carousel of departure level,

the sucker-punch intake of takeoff.

Past weightless snatches of sleep,

the drop

to the terminal bus, that sub-zero palanquin

aloft over road drifts

of Baltic night:

watch as we hurried through snowfall

to brew tea and read in the lamplight

of a Helsinki hostel.

Olduvai, really
Oldupai
,

named for the fronded sisal plant

that grows here. Seen from space,

the Rift’s a patchwork

in algal patina, the gorge

a grey-green collage splayed

with evaporated rill beds,

steep cracks tracking the landscape

like plate sutures on a skull. Snacking

on sandwiches, we sat under

corrugated tin, protected

from the sun’s hazy weight,

rock monolith and broken scrub

hedging the Earth’s curvature.

Three and a half million years back,

three apes, predate of humans,

walked past at Laetoli through drops

of soft rain, the shapes of their prints

left by the ash layer, cemented

in tuff, stable enough to last

as the hot and grey ash fell.

Other marks: birds, a hare,

a three-toed horse

and its foal turning

in the opposite

direction. Dimpling the site,

rainprints too. But this trio, tracks

tagged 61, 62 and 63,

we know walked upright, as a habit;

left no knuckle marks, the gait

a ‘small-town walking speed’

like a stroll through the agora.

Tempting to speculate

about the story of their travel,

a family or hunting group

looking for signs of a water hole

in the wake of the volcano’s

tremors, one set of their prints

nested in the hollow of another,

the way we can follow

someone through snow

to make the going a little easier.

On a charity box in the Hanoi airport:

‘For Especially Difficult Children.’

Or ‘We Beg for Silent Behaving’ outside

the Basilica of St. Euphemia

in Rovinj, Croatia.

I mention this not from smugness

but as point of argument. If language blurs

across cultures in the same decade,

how will our songs and stories

translate across ticking inches of drift?

The challenge of Onkalo,

‘hiding place,’ a toxic dump

cored through granite in Finland.

Blasters descend through rock

five kilometres deep,

bore igneous strata, each layer

another geologic age.

So when they drive

their pickups down and walk

through curtains of dust, are

they descending back through time

in corridors designed to be resealed

and forgotten for a thousand centuries?

How silent it will be, down

there, when the ventilation fans

stop whirring,

the new Ice Age crested

and gone, Earth’s surface scoured

like a child’s ribboned aggie found

in the grass near a gravel road.

We’ll have no language

to warn of what we built, no marker

left to explain the world

wiped clear of any signs of us.

‘My bones would rest much easier,’

Virgil wrote, ‘if I knew your songs

would tell my story in days to come.’

Let me be quieter. Go

slow and listen.

Near Lake Manyara,

the unhurried swish

of elephants

gnashing through branches

as we sat for an hour

just watching. Ibises rested

in the umbrella acacias,

velvet monkeys