The Cinnamon Peeler (3 page)

‘
for there was no more darkness for him and, no doubt like Adam before the fall, he could see in the dark
’

                         My father’s body was a globe of fear

                         His body was a town we never knew

                         He hid that he had been where we were going

                         His letters were a room he seldom lived in

                         In them the logic of his love could grow

                         My father’s body was a town of fear

                         He was the only witness to its fear dance

                         He hid where he had been that we might lose him

                         His letters were a room his body scared

He came to death with his mind drowning.

On the last day he enclosed himself

in a room with two bottles of gin, later

fell the length of his body

so that brain blood moved

to new compartments

that never knew the wash of fluid

and he died in minutes of a new equilibrium.

His early life was a terrifying comedy

and my mother divorced him again and again.

He would rush into tunnels magnetized

by the white eye of trains

and once, gaining instant fame,

managed to stop a Perahara in Ceylon

– the whole procession of elephants dancers

local dignitaries – by falling

dead drunk onto the street.

As a semi-official, and semi-white at that,

the act was seen as a crucial

turning point in the Home Rule Movement

and led to Ceylon’s independence in 1948.

(My mother had done her share too—

her driving so bad

she was stoned by villagers

whenever her car was recognized)

For 14 years of marriage

each of them claimed he or she

was the injured party.

Once on the Colombo docks

saying goodbye to a recently married couple

my father, jealous

at my mother’s articulate emotion,

dove into the waters of the harbour

and swam after the ship waving farewell.

My mother pretending no affiliation

mingled with the crowd back to the hotel.

Once again he made the papers

though this time my mother

with a note to the editor

corrected the report – saying he was drunk

rather than broken hearted at the parting of friends.

The married couple received both editions

of
The Ceylon Times
when their ship reached Aden.

And then in his last years

he was the silent drinker,

the man who once a week

disappeared into his room with bottles

and stayed there until he was drunk

and until he was sober.

There speeches, head dreams, apologies,

the gentle letters, were composed.

With the clarity of architects

he would write of the row of blue flowers

his new wife had planted,

the plans for electricity in the house,

how my half-sister fell near a snake

and it had awakened and not touched her.

Letters in a clear hand of the most complete empathy

his heart widening and widening and widening

to all manner of change in his children and friends

while he himself edged

into the terrible acute hatred

of his own privacy

till he balanced and fell

the length of his body

the blood entering

the empty reservoir of bones

the blood searching in his head without metaphor.

I’m holding my son in my arms

sweating after nightmares

small me

fingers in his mouth

his other fist clenched in my hair

small me

sweating after nightmares.

At night the most private of a dog’s long body groan.

It comes with his last stretch

in the dark corridor outside our room.

The children turn.

A window tries to split with cold

the other dog hoofing the carpet for lice.

We’re all alone.

Stuart Sally Kim and I

watching still stars

or now and then sliding stars

like hawk spit to the trees.

Up there the clear charts,

the systems’ intricate branches

which change with hours and solstices,

the bone geometry of moving from there, to there.

And down here – friends

whose minds and bodies

shift like acrobats to each other.

When we leave, they move

to an altitude of silence.

So our minds shape

and lock the transient,

parallel these bats

who organize the air

with thick blinks of travel.

Sally is like grey snow in the grass.

Sally of the beautiful bones

pregnant below stars.

3 a.m. on the floor mattress.

In my pyjamas a moth beats frantic

my heart is breaking loose.

I have been dreaming of a man

who places honey on his forehead before sleep

so insects come tempted by liquid

to sip past it into the brain.

In the morning his head contains wings

and the soft skeletons of wasp.

Our suicide into nature.

That man’s seduction

so he can beat the itch

against the floor and give in

move among the sad remnants

of those we have destroyed,

the torn code these animals ride to death on.

Grey fly on windowsill

white fish by the dock

heaved like a slimy bottle into the deep,

to end up as snake

heckled by children and cameras

as he crosses lawns of civilization.

We lie on the floor mattress

lost moths walk on us

waterhole of flesh, want

this humiliation under the moon.

Till in the morning we are surrounded

by dark virtuous ships

sent by the kingdom of the loon.

My last dog poem.

I leave behind all social animals

including my dog who takes

30 seconds dismounting from a chair.

Turn to the one

who appears again on roads

one eye torn out and chasing.

He is only a space filled

and blurred with passing,

transient as shit – will fade

to reappear somewhere else.

He survives the porcupine, cars, poison,

fences with their spasms of electricity.

Vomits up bones, bathes at night

in Holiday Inn swimming pools.

And magic in his act of loss.

The missing eye travels up

in a bird’s mouth, and into the sky.

Departing family. It is loss only of flesh

no more than his hot spurt across a tree.

He is the one you see at Drive-Ins

tearing silent into garbage

while societies unfold in his sky.

The bird lopes into the rectangle nest of images

and parts of him move on.

Mad kings

blood lines introverted, strained pure

so the brain runs in the wrong direction

they are proud of their heritage of suicides

– not just the ones who went mad

balancing on that goddamn leg, but those

whose eyes turned off

the sun and imagined it

those who looked north, those who

forced their feathers to grow in

those who couldn’t find the muscles in their arms

who drilled their beaks into the skin

those who could speak

and lost themselves in the foul connections

who crashed against black bars in a dream of escape

those who moved round the dials of imaginary clocks

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.