The Cinnamon Peeler (9 page)

‘
You’re an actor, aren’t you?
’

The man nodded silently and averted his eyes
.

‘
I’ve seen you in films. You always seem embarrassed at the thought of what you have to say next.
’

The man laughed and again averted his eyes
.

‘
Your trouble, I believe, is that you always hold back something of yourself. You’re not shameless enough for an actor. In my opinion you should learn how to run properly and scream properly, with your mouth wide open. I’ve noticed that even when you yawn you’re afraid to open your mouth all the way. In your next film make a sign to show that you’ve understood me. You haven’t even been discovered yet. I’m looking forward to seeing you grow older from film to film.
’

PETER HANDKE
The left-handed woman

A somewhat convex dark or coloured hand-mirror, used to concentrate the features of the landscape in subdued tones
.

‘
Grey walked about everywhere with that pretty toy, the claude glass, in his hand, making the beautiful forms of the landscape compose in its luscious chiaroscuro.’ Gosse
(1882)

He is told about

the previous evening’s behaviour.

Starting with a punchbowl

on the volleyball court.

Dancing and falling across coffee tables,

asking his son Are
you
the bastard

who keeps telling me I’m drunk?

kissing the limbs of women

suspicious of his friends serenading

five pigs by the barn

heaving a wine glass towards garden

and continually going through gates

into the dark fields

and collapsing.

His wife half carrying him home

rescuing him from departing cars,

complains this morning

of a sore shoulder.

                         And even later

his thirteen-year-old daughter’s struggle

to lift him into the back kitchen

after he has passed out, resting his head on rocks,

wondering what he was looking for in dark fields.

For he has always loved that ancient darkness

where the flat rocks glide like Japanese tables

where he can remove clothes

and lie with moonlight on the day’s heat

hardened in stone, drowning

in this star blanket this sky

like a giant trout

conscious how the heaven

careens over him

as he moves in back fields

kissing the limbs of trees

or placing ear on stone which rocks him

and then stands to watch the house

in its oasis of light.

And he knows something is happening there to him

solitary while he spreads his arms

and holds everything that is slipping away together.

He is suddenly in the heat of the party

slouching towards women, revolving

round one unhappy shadow.

That friend who said he would find

the darkest place, and then wave.

He is not a lost drunk

like his father or his friend, can,

he says, stop on a dime, and he can

he could because even now, now in

this brilliant darkness where

grass has lost its colour and it’s all

fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows

this colourless grass is making his bare feet green

for it is the hour of magic

which no matter what sadness

leaves him grinning.

At certain hours of the night

ducks are nothing but landscape

just voices breaking as they nightmare.

The weasel wears their blood

home like a scarf,

cows drain over the horizon

                         and the dark

vegetables hum onward underground

but the mouth

               wants plum.

Moves from room to room

where brown beer glass

smashed lounges at his feet

opens the long rust stained gate

and steps towards invisible fields

that he knows from years of daylight.

He snorts in the breeze

which carries a smell

of cattle on its back.

What this place does not have

is the white paint of bathing cabins

the leak of eucalyptus.

During a full moon

outcrops of rock shine

skunks spray abstract into the air

cows burp as if practising

the name of Francis Ponge.

His drunk state wants the mesh of place.

Ludwig of Bavaria’s Roof Garden—

glass plants, iron parrots

Venus Grottos, tarpaulins of Himalaya.

By the kitchen sink he tells someone

from now on I will drink only landscapes

– here, pour me a cup of Spain.

Opens the gate and stumbles

blood like a cassette through the body

away from the lights, unbuttoning,

this desire to be riverman.

Tentatively

               he recalls

his drunk invitation to the river.

He has steered the awesome car

past sugarbush to the blue night water

and steps out

speaking to branches

and the gulp of toads.

Subtle applause of animals.

A snake leaves a path

like temporary fossil.

                         He falls

back onto the intricacies

of gearshift and steering wheel

alive as his left arm

which now departs out of the window

trying to tug passing sumac

pine bush tamarack

into the car

               to the party.

Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate

and over the car invisible insects

ascend out of the beams like meteorite

crushed dust of the moon

 … he waits for the magic star called Lorca.

On the front lawn a sheet

tacked across a horizontal branch.

A projector starts a parade

of journeys, landscapes, relatives,

friends leaping out within pebbles of water

caught by the machine as if creating rain.

Later when wind frees the sheet

and it collapses like powder in the grass

pictures fly without target

and howl their colours over Southern Ontario

clothing burdock

rhubarb a floating duck.

Landscapes and stories

flung into branches

and the dog walks under the hover of the swing

beam of the projection bursting in his left eye.

The falling sheet the star of Lorca swoops

someone gets up and heaves his glass

into the vegetable patch

towards the slow stupid career of beans.

This is the hour

when dead men sit

and write each other.

               ‘Concerning the words we never said

               during morning hours of the party

               there was glass under my bare feet

               laws of the kitchen were broken

               and each word moved

               in my mouth like muscle …’