Festivals, conferences, forums all have their formalities. Even here, on the edge of the Indian and Pacific oceans, in Sydney and Perth, they can begin with long official speeches, intellectual humour, and the buzz of excitement. Or, they can begin, as the Ubud Writers Festival did, with Balinese court dancers glimmering in their finery to the sound of gamelan until the culmination of the striking of a large ceremonial gong, loud enough to wake the God of Attention.

Still, having travelled in various parts of Asia, I don’t think any intellectual event in this part of the world actually begins until a proper dinner, until everyone can sit around a circular table with a nest of plates revolving in its centre, shout their names to one another, and then, for good luck, toast and toast again the nascent event.

In the mountainous centre of the Indonesian island of Bali, every evening at the Ubud festival was a banquet, partly I’m sure because the festival director, Janet De Neefe, is a famous author of cookbooks and like many other Westerners on the island is ‘involved with hotels’. It was likewise in Sydney a few weeks later, where on the first night after the launch of the China-Australia Literary Forum, I was spontaneously invited by Mabel Lee, the translator of the poet Yang Lian and the Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian, to join her and a number of local Chinese writers, artists and journalists at a nearby Sichuan restaurant.

There we made toasts, and I made the acquaintance of Ouyang Yu, the Chinese-Australian translator and writer, as well as the quietly spoken Julia Leigh with whom I discussed her novels and the controversies surrounding of her recently released feature film Sleeping Beauty. She managed to keep it secret that William Defoe would be the lead in her friend’s then forthcoming film adaptation of her first novel The Hunter. Then Mabel, talkative, in her Australian accent, was saying something about the fun she’d had the last time she was in Beijing.

On the other side of the table was the painter Guan Wei. He and the other Chinese painter and Ouyang Yu conversed, laughing, in Mandarin. At one point the entire table switched to speaking English to allow Julia and me to understand what the journalist beside them had said about Tibet. She had met the Dalai Lama on two occasions. She explained that the Dalai Lama’s brother had studied with one of the forthcoming leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. This gave her cause to believe that in the next few years it is likely there will be a change in policy on Tibet. We fell silent, pondering what that might mean.

Why do I remember all this about a meal, merely the first dinner of the four day China-Australia Literary Forum, where Australian writers and their Chinese ‘peers’ – among them Mo Yan, whose novel many know from the Zhang Yimou film Red Sorghum – sat in a room, all wearing headphones, while two besuited interpreters in soundproofed telephone-boxes decoded the speech? Why, when I think of Ubud, do I remember most clearly the enormous outdoor dinner of a hundred or so ‘select’ guests at a mansion behind a hotel, a residence we reached by being led down a long lane lit by tea-candles, where I started to feel violently ill, as if my head were reasonable and diplomatic but my guts remained virulently anti-capitalist? And why do I recall, vividly, that occasion in Perth, where I booked the conference dinner for Jane Camens’ now Hong Kong-based Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership at the trendy Raffles Hotel overlooking the dark shimmering Swan River, embarrassed that an international yachting competition had meant we ended up at a restaurant named after the British founder of Singapore? No one from the ex-colonies seemed to mind.

That meals are key to the success of writers’ gatherings is in keeping with the very ancient tradition of making offerings of food to the ancestors and gods and then having the living eat last, together, harmoniously.

It was at those meals that we poets and writers could stop our publicity, our performing, and speak as individuals, talking our way into friendship. If dinners are intimate theatres of conversation, the events themselves – the presentations, the panels and the readings, enacting our Presences – might be our offerings to the disembodied God of Attention.

There were surprises, too.

In Sydney, the moment at the forum when Ouyang Yu – many seemed concerned he was going to throw a firecracker into the political silence – asked the renowned Aboriginal author Alexis Wright if it was true that she has Chinese ancestry. Indeed, it is. There was that awkwardness when the crime-writer Shane Maloney wanted to cajole Zhaxi Dawa, the president of the Tibetan Writers Association, to admit to his not really being a Tibetan writer because he isn’t writing in the Tibetian language, with all its implications.

On a panel entitled “Sense of Place” with Alexis and Julia, the courtly Zhao Mei, whose distinctly Manchurian visage is fixed in my mind’s eye like an ahistorical portriat, spoke of the Westernized cosmopolitanism of her youth in Tianjin, while the deceptively girlish Sheng Keyi, dressed like a bleak hippy and the only writer to disrupt the cool, diplomatic tone of the forum, astonished us with her direct affirmation of the importance of Kafka to her writing. She declared that he is the only writer she finds relevant, then described the poverty of her native village, the desperation of the villagers and the ecological devastation of the surrounding landscape. It was dystopic. She admitted that she was very pleased to have left there and to now live in a city. She added that she had returned to the village after the outbreak of swine-flu. Everywhere there were slaughtered pigs and the river of her childhood was bloated, black with their stinking corpses.

It is striking that the most memorable panel sessions of the past months, like the one above, all featured women writers.

At Ubud, the best attended session I managed to get into was “The Motherland”, with the poet-architect Avianti Armand, the filmmaker Djenar Maesa Ayu and famously outspoken sociologist Julia Suryakusuma. In defiance of the festival directive that participants couldn’t read or smoke ‘while performing’, the first thing Djenar did was light a cigarette and take a slow, theatrical sip of a beer. She frequently referred to her sex-life in a light-hearted, emancipatory way that Westerners associate with the Swinging Sixties. Arviati and Suryakusuma addressed their literary and gender concerns without feeling the need to charm the audience, as if they were comfortably responsible with the time allotted them by the God – Goddess? – of Attention.

I had met Aviati, an associate of the circle of Jakarta intellectuals gathered around the alternative culture forum Salihara and the legendary Goenawan Mohammad, the night before when a few of us had gone to Denpasar, the capital of Bali, to give a reading. On the journey there and back in the minibus she had translated a three-way conversation between myself, the young Achinese novelist Arafat Nur and the Iraqi poet Rodaan Al Galidi. We were intrigued by Arafat, not only because he was still living in the conflict zone in Aceh, a small but important province at the northern end of the island of Sumatra, a province that until the Indian Ocean Tsunami a few years ago had been actively fighting a war of resistance against Indonesian occupation, but also because he had managed to write seven novels. He told us that he felt that the purpose of his work was to share with the world the reality of life in Aceh. He was born in Medan, the Sumatran city I visited shortly after Suharto, the nation’s long-running dictator, had been forced out of office, describing my experience in poems and the prose book Semar’s Cave: an Indonesian Journal. Medan is also the birthplace of Indonesia’s first modern poet and literary hero, Chairil Anwar, a figure whose work is still well-known and widely quoted.

The Balinese novelist Ni Komang Ariani had read first. When Avianti read her poems the audience of students and political activists was spellbound. When those of us who couldn’t understand the Indonesian asked her what her poems were about, she replied that they merely used contemporary ways of thinking to retell biblical stories. In a country, like Indonesia, where most people are Muslim, this would be a surprising thing to them, she quietly said.

*

Along with the meals and the encounters there were the readings that resonated. Foremost was the Japanese translator Kyoko Yoshida reading “(spectacle and pigsty)”, a poem by Kiwao Nomura she that she and the American Forrest Gander had translated. It was recently published in the book of the same name in the US. Read in a measured voice, in the largely empty bookshop at the University of Western Australia, the shop having all the charm of an abandoned McDonalds, she mesmerised us with its scatological metaphors and Artaud-like incantation, all the more amazing as in person Kiwao couldn’t be a more gentlemanly figure.

*

And then there are the books.

After accompanying Mabel on a visit her friend’s gallery near Bondi Beach, she gave me a brown paper package of a number of translated Asian books, all published by her Wild Peony press; the Filipino poets Joanna Lynn Cruz and Isabela Banzon slipped their slim volumes into my hand as if they were secret messages; the Sri Lankan Sunil Govinnage, whom I hadn’t met before our meal at the Raffles Hotel but who professed to know me, gave me his book at the table, then revealed he actually owned signed copies of my books because a mutual friend had given them to him before becoming a Buddhist monk in the hills south of Perth; the fiction writer Xu Xi and I immediately swapped books after hearing one another read, spending the rest of the conference wondering when we had had met before, until we sort of agreed that it must have been in Stockholm.

It is only afterwards that it is possible to start reading the work of the people met, and it’s then that other conversations come to mind composed of all the questions that could have been asked.

Then there are also the books that one forgot to buy or to exchange one’s own book for: Qaisra Shahraz, if you are reading this, I owe you a book…

*

I did keep a diaristic account of those four literary events and my Sydney book launch. But maybe it’s more interesting to reflect on my memory of them. There is the possibility of recalling only the more impressive encounters; like discovering that, after the China-Australia forum, the New York essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger was in the crowd attending the presentation of my book Southern Barbarians. It was as if he was there – I wonder if my publisher, Ivor Indyk, would have agreed? – in lieu of the God of Attention. Mabel and Julia and the novelists Gail Jones, Nick Jose, and the poet-critic Martin Harrison, were there, as well as the younger Australian writers Suneeta Peres da Costa, Michelle Cahill, Fiona Wright, and Kate Middleton, who made me hopeful that I may be read in the future.

It was a pity the novelist Brian Castro, a friend of Mabel and author of the introduction to my book, wasn’t in Sydney as he was the one who’d led to my initial trip to Macau.

The last time I had encountered Eliot was in a backstreet in Macau, after I had spent some months in mainland China and was on my way back to Australia. I was just there to consult the ghosts of the Portuguese poets of exile, Camilio Pessanha and Luis de Camoes. Eliot was in the company of two other familiar faces: Bei Dao and Gary Snyder. I remember us four and Gary’s son and Bei Dao’s wife conversing over a wonderful Macanese lunch.

*

In the midst of this all this literary socializing of the past months, I found myself thinking on how this might be made sense of in relation to what we used to call Literature. Sometime I remind myself of that statement in Neruda’s memoir where he fears, having just raced from one reading to another, that one day in the future writers might have to fly from place to place, crossing deserts, solely to find a single reader.

In the midst of today’s noise and fury we must wonder how it is that writers and poets in the future will make meaning for their public, and how this can occur in public. Instead of literary events being either an avenue for so-called soft-power, for academic exchange or for the promotion of globalized writing – with the hotel industry as backdrop – to my mind there must still be instances, in addition to the lonely activity of reading itself, that can allow us to believe in the Literary.

Were being in the midst of all these activities a crime in eyes of the God of Attention, the pieces of evidence, drawn from those events in this distant, southern part of the world, that I would produce in my defence would start with these:

1) The five minutes I spent crouched on a balcony with the Balinese historian Sigi Linus and the poet Ketut Yuliarsa discussing the Real Bali, how much more humane the Dutch were than the Balinese rulers, and the life of the late mystic poet and master-carver Sidemen, while they finished their clove cigarettes.

2) The moment at the China-Australia forum, when, over a coffee, a translator of Chinese stepped out of earshot of the others to say that the novelist JM Coetzee – my compatriot twice-over, and the patron of the Sydney PEN Centre – had sent autographed copies of his books to be given to all the visiting Chinese writers.

*

We can assume that Coetzee, “the Nobel Prize-winner”, under the all-seeing gaze of the God of Attention, was sending the Chinese writers – and us – an encoded, literary, message.

Ubud Writers and Readers Festival “Cultivate the Land Within”, Ubud, Bali 5-9 October
China-Australia Literary Forum, Sydney 30 August-2 September
Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership “Writing Out of Asia”, Perth 2-5 December
“Literature and Culture in the Era of the Digital Revolution”, Perth 4-7 December

Dennis Walder was born and brought up in South Africa, and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh. Emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University, he has published numerous books and articles on 19th and 20th century literature, including the best-selling critical reader Literature in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2003) and most recently Postcolonial Nostalgias (Routledge 2010). He has had several short stories published, was runner-up for the V.S. Pritchett Prize in 2009, and is currently working on a memoir.

THE SWEEPER

Luca first turned up during the siege. He was ragged and unkempt, like any morlach from the mountains. He came striding into our midst, his black hair brushed forward over his brow, deep lines on either side of his mouth, his eyes staring, like he was a little mad. He said the soldiers had attacked his farm, destroying the crops and killing the animals. And his woman had disappeared – raped and murdered, he guessed. He said he was one of us. How were we to know, one way or the other?

Old Judita the washerwoman took pity on him, and gave him a bed in her house in the Pustijerna. Then one day a shell dropped on the roof, and a piece of shrapnel sang down and cut her head clean off. They tried to put it back on when they laid her out in the coffin, but it didn’t fit properly. When they took her to the cemetery, they had to run with the coffin, Luca in front. The cemetery was being shelled at the time.

Maybe that was when Luca began to see things. Or maybe it was living in the Dominican monastery that did it. He was always there when we went to fetch water from the well in the courtyard, the town supply having been cut off. Sometimes he would ignore us, just look up at the sky and mutter. Padre Marko said he was a man of piety. There was a lot of piety springing up in those days.

One day in December when the shells were coming in like a swarm of hornets some of us decided to go to the beach over at Lapad.

‘To cool off,’ laughed Frano, ‘even if it is St Nicholas.’ The big man with the moustache was always worth having along, he kept our spirits up.

‘Do you know the Russian story about being a good neighbour?’ said Frano as we made our way through the old city gate. ‘One day God came down,’ he said, ‘and asked Boris what he would say if he was offered anything he liked, only his neighbour had to have twice as much. “Okay,” says Boris, “tear out one of my eyes.”’

As we made our way up hill, we could hear more and more shells exploding behind us. This was going to be a bad day for the city. Soon we reached Babin kuk, and the shelter of the trees and bushes up there. I knew the area well, I used to shoot guinea-fowl up there in the old days, even before the hotels were built, when it was still wild. Now there were hotels all over the place. They weren’t empty because of the war, they were full of refugees from the hills. But this didn’t stop them being targets: you could see the pockmarks from shrapnel on their walls as you passed by.

The guns up on the mountain suddenly fell silent.

‘It’s a holy day, after all,’ said Ivo, the taxi driver. He was a bit simple, Ivo. But even he knew they might start up again anytime.

We climbed higher up, towards the old monastery overlooking the sea. The pebble beach down below was where I used to go swimming with Ivana. I could still see her white body flash in the sun as she dived down into the dark blue water, her long black hair streaming behind her. The mermaid, we called her, although she came from the hills. Weekdays, she worked in one of the new hotels, in a white uniform, looking after the gym and the pool, keeping an eye on the kids, handing out and collecting towels. We used to meet up when she was finished, take time to go down to the beach. More often than not, we would just sit and look at the sea. I couldn’t easily forget her.

‘Who’s got the rakija?’ asked Frano.

‘Always funny,’ said Goran. ‘Where can you get it now?’ Goran was a fisherman, and he liked his booze.

‘No, the joke’s on you,’ I said. ‘I have some right here.’

We stopped beneath a clutch of holm oak. I took the bottle out of my pocket and passed it to Frano. ‘The funnyman first.’

‘Nazdravje!’ said Frano, lifting it to his lips. ‘To the Americans!’ He wiped his hand across his moustache, and passed the bottle to Goran, who took a good swig, and smacked his lips. ‘That is a real joke,’ he said. ‘You think they will come here? Nobody gives a damn, not the Americans, not the Germans, not the English, none of them. And why should they? They think we are some crap little country full of half-wits who can’t run themselves. Just right to go and visit for a bit of sun and drink, and maybe take in the Roman ruins. Only now they cannot.’

Nobody said anything. After a while we began to make our way down towards the beach. Suddenly there was a thrashing noise in the undergrowth. ‘What’s that?’ exclaimed Ivo, ‘a boar?’

But it was Luca, looking as wild as any boar, his hair sticking up, his eyes staring mad. ‘Go! Get out!’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘It’s coming.’

‘What?’ I said.

There was a whooshing sound, and as we fell to the ground a loud noise filled the air and emptied our heads, and then we heard the whistling metal fragments, and twigs fluttering down around us. Where we lay under the trees there was a smell of shit.

Frano was the first to get up. ‘Nazdravje!’ he said, dusting himself down, still holding the bottle. ‘The JNA cannot aim straight. But I can,’ he said, upending it and opening his mouth.
‘Where’s the prophet of doom?’ asked Goran.

But Luca had disappeared. Maybe after a near miss, you knew when it was coming, like an animal in the woods.

When we finally got to the beach we sat there for a long time, watching the sun setting over the darkening sea. It was flat and secret like old lava.

The next time we saw Luca was when the Old Port got it. He seemed to be connected with bad news. They were using wire-guided missiles. Black smoke was twisting up into the clouds hanging over the city. Soon the harbour was full of wrecks. Goran’s boat was one of them, you could see the stern sticking up out of the water, the name Judita in black letters on the side of the bow. Boxes and nets floated around on the oily water. ‘No more fish for us,’ said Goran. We stood with our backs against the old city wall as we surveyed the mess. ‘Well, we’ll turn Turk, then,’ he continued, ‘and not bother with Friday fish, eh?’

Then the explosions started again. We turned and ran, right up to the other end of town. Maybe they would stick to the Port this time. Soon we reached the Placa. The big round fountain was encircled with sandbags. It looked like an old woman in heavy skirts, squatting. There was quite a crowd there, too. And then a mortar bomb landed down the street, and there was a bit of panic. Some people crouched down beside the fountain hugging the old stone sides. Some ran into the convent. Others ran back down the Stradun. I yelled to my lot to follow me as I made for the Franciscan church. The saints at the entrance looked sadly down at us as we ran through. It was cool and dark inside, and we made a lot of noise with our boots on the worn stone flags. I turned into the Mala Braca next door. I could hear booming outside, but we felt safe in the still cloisters. The plants in the garden were dry and brown for lack of water. The monks’ pharmacy was still going, after six hundred years. The old pharmaceutical instruments hanging up on the walls reminded me of things I did not want to think about.

‘Look!’ exclaimed Ivo. ‘It’s Luca.’ There he was, all right. He was kneeling in front of the cabinet of relics. St Ursula’s little metallic head looked down at him from behind the glass. I always thought the head was too small. Maybe she had been a midget. She seemed to be smiling a silvery smile down at Luca.

‘Hey, Luca!’ cried Frano. ‘It’s too late, the Huns are coming.’

Luca shook his head. ‘They will not come.’

‘What?’ said Frano. ‘How do you know? Ustashe bastard, are you praying for them? Or just for one of the eleven thousand virgins?’

Frano knew a lot. He used to be a teacher in Zagreb. Later that evening, when we had all gathered for coffee in his house – our first coffee in six days – he said, ‘You know Ursula only had ten virgins with her. It’s a misunderstanding of the Latin M in an old inscription that gave the church the idea of the thousands of virgins.’

‘There isn’t a virgin left here anyway,’ said Ivo, grinning like the idiot he was.

‘Just as well,’ I said. We sat down on the low stone wall. There was nothing to be done, but wait. I thought of Ivana, and her long black hair like a river down her back. I had not heard from her for months. Her village had been in peace when I left her there, but soon we heard that it was neighbour against neighbour in the hills. I thought she would get out. A of them came down from the hills in the first weeks, but there was no sign or word of her. Then I heard there was going to be a roundup, so I went back to find her. I was stopped at a checkpoint by a couple of militiamen in combat fatigues and boots. One of them came up to me. He had long black hair tied back with a red bandana, and he held a Zastovo machine pistol in his hand. He leant down and put his head close to mine. I could smell the liquor on his breath. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked. I told him. ‘Get out,’ he said. He took my arm in a firm grip, and walked me to a farm house some distance off the road. There were men inside the farm house, lying tied up on the floor, or sitting against the wall. Some of them seemed to be asleep. Others were just looking down in front of them. They had been roughed up. They were not a pretty sight. A uniformed soldier sat behind a table in a large, leather-backed chair, smoking. He had cropped grey hair and a big jaw, and there were some metal instruments on the table in front of him. He tapped his fingers on the table, and then beckoned me to approach him. Red Bandana released my arm. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked the soldier. I said I was searching for my woman. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he said. Before I could say anything, somebody knocked me down from behind. Then I felt boots kicking me, and I blacked out. It must have been a long time before I was found. My rescuers had pulled me out from under a pile of bodies. They said they heard me gasping for breath. I was lucky, they said.

As spring approached, and the swifts began gathering in the skies in the evenings, the shelling stopped. Maybe enough people had been killed. Maybe Luca’s prayers had worked something. The whole thing had been pointless, anyway.

The city recovered. Sandbags were removed, roof tiles replaced, boats repaired; walls, churches, houses patched up and in some cases rebuilt. A Memorial Room was set up in the Dominican Monastery, with photos round the walls of some of those who lost their lives. At first I thought they were all men. But then I saw her. It was an old ID picture, and she was looking sternly out at the camera, a slight frown on her brow, her lips parted as if she was short of breath. I remembered seeing photos of women rounded up by the Nazis. All that was left of them was these paper images. I looked at the picture for a long time. Then I took a walk around the room. There was a TV set against one wall, and on it you could watch a video of the shelling of the Old Port. I couldn’t believe I’d seen the real thing. It was like watching some old war movie.

Soon the people of the city he people came out of their homes, and sat at tables having coffee, or strolled down the Stradun in the bright sun, eating ice cream. After a while, the tourists returned. Things were looking up.

We didn’t see Luca about the place for a year or more. Then one day he turned up again, his head shaven, but with the same old wild look. I had opened up a bookshop in the Od Puča by then, and was not doing too badly. Maybe the loss of all those books at the Interuniversity Centre made people think they needed some replacements. I even sold a copy of Plato’s Republic.

Luca walked in, and greeted me, just as if he hadn’t been away. I asked him what he’d been doing. He said he’d seen angels in the sky, bearing swords. He said what had been formed out of clay was easily broken. I guessed he was talking about the war. I asked him if he remembered the time we met on Babin kuk.

‘Sure. To forget is impossible,’ he said.

‘I’d rather forget,’ I said. ‘But there are killers and rapists and torturers walking the streets. What will happen to them? Nothing.’

‘God is merciful,’ said Luca.

‘But is he just?’ I asked.

‘It is difficult to forgive.’

‘Maybe. Anyway, I will not forgive,’ I said. ‘Are they sorry? I do not think so.’

‘The war lies deep in our bodies,’ said Luca. ‘So it is difficult.’ And he walked out.

Not long after that a uniformed man came into the bookshop. He asked me did I know where Luca could be found. He had an American accent. ‘What do you want him for?’ I asked.

‘We need him,’ said the American.

‘What for?’

‘He was a witness.’

‘So was I. So were lots of people.’

‘I know. But this was something special, a war crime.’

‘Try the Dominican monastery,’ I said. ‘Maybe they know where he is.’

We watched some of the trials on television. Goran said they should have tried the men in their own country, not somewhere else, with a foreign judge.

‘Then they would’ve got away with it,’ said Frano.

‘Here, everyone forgets what he saw, said Ivo. ‘Even me, I forget.’

Then I saw the soldier with the cropped hair and big jaw. He looked relaxed, and his arms were folded over his chest. I felt sick inside.

Then Luca appeared, and we hardly recognised him. But it was him, all right. His hair had grown, and it was combed neatly across his head, and he was wearing a dark blue suit with a yellow shirt. But even at this distance, and with the wavering image on the TV, we knew him. It seemed that he wasn’t a witness, although he had witnessed things. He told the court he’d lost his family and his farm, otherwise he would have left the country before things got so bad. Then he joined up, and one day his unit was sent to a field, and told to wait. After a while, a group of civilians were led out of a farm house. When he saw them, he knew what was going to happen, because the civilians were thin, many in rags, and they were blindfold. Some of them were being carried or dragged along, he thought they were unconscious. He made an objection, he said, but the commander said he would be shot like the rest if he did not obey. So he took up his Kalashnikov, and did what he was told to do. Yes, he regretted it. He would never forget that day, it had changed his life, he was a different man now.

Later we heard that he’d been given six years, reduced to two on appeal, on account of duress. Two years is not much.

Today we call Luca The Sweeper. He works in the square with the bronze monument to our famous poet, Ivan Gundelic, standing on a high pedestal decorated with scenes from his great poem, ‘Osman’. The north side of the pedestal shows King Vladislav on horseback, victor over the Turks. I like to sit there in the square on a sunny morning, and take a coffee, and watch the market stall-holders hold up their fruit and shout out their prices. Then, if I stay long enough, until about noon, when the market stalls are cleared, I will see Luca. He has oilskins on, and big yellow rubber boots and gloves. He screws a fire hose onto the hydrant in the square, turns the handle, and sweeps away the crushed fruit and vegetables with gush after gush of fresh water. The tomatoes make the water red, so it looks like thin blood. Sometimes he lets the stream wash right up to the plinth of the Gundulić, where the tourists sit and rest their feet. He lets the water sweep over the hot white flagstones and just touch their toes, forcing them to jump up and walk away. He pretends he does not see them, he carries on washing the stones of the square with his hose until they gleam white in the bright midday light.

A selection of Burning Deck chapbooks.

Over the next few months I will be writing a serial essay for Molossus that looks into the 50-year history of Burning Deck, including mini-reviews of more than 60 of their titles, an extended email interview with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop and a consideration of the development of the aesthetic of the press and how it reflected or differed from the various aesthetics simultaneously developing in the poetry and writing world at large. I hope to make this a highly informative piece for people who are new to the press and for those already familiar with the press. I hope to expose Molossus readers to a variety of interesting and intriguing aspects of the press as well as to writers and books they might not otherwise be familiar with.

Much of the history of the press I will present here has been collected from fairly easy to access online research, which I will attempt to exhaustively cite. I plan to write this piece as what I might call a conceptual writer’s essay, not because I’m necessarily a conceptual writer or that this will be a conceptual essay (for an example of a conceptual essay see my book The New Poetics, from Les Figues Press). Rather I will allow myself, here, to quote extensively from sources that have done a perfectly good job of covering some aspect of the Burning Deck project and which I feel it would be wholly redundant to rewrite. It is my hope that I will be able to present the material in a sensible and engaging manner, and that perhaps this serial piece will add to the body of scholarship on the press by covering a good portion of the Burning Deck catalog while the press is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

As I started researching Burning Deck I learned a lot that has absolutely nothing to do with the press and then, of course, a lot that does. For instance, there’s the burning deck street magic trick, where the magician finds your card by burning a hole through the center of the deck all the way down to your card. More likely related to the actual press is the 1826 poem “Casabianca” by British poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans: “The Boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled;/The flame that lit the battle’s wreck/Shone round him o’er the dead.” The poem was written in ballad meter as a memorial to the French ship Orient that went down in 1798 during the Battle of the Nile. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this poem was a staple of elementary school readers in the United States, memorized and recited to such an extent that it lost any meaning and became a topic of innumerable parodies. The poem notably appears in Mark Twain’s unpublished autobiography as part of a story he tells about buying his first typewriter. Astonished at how quickly a type-girl in a store could type (57 wpm), he bought a machine before realizing the typist was turning out and repeating a memorized phrase, “The Boy stood on the burning deck…” I had heard that the original poem was, in fact, the inspiration for the name of the press, but unfortunately, I cannot find that reference anywhere in my research now, so the namesake may remain somewhat of a myth. Most of the rest of the story of Burning Deck on the other hand is fairly straightforward, and it’s the real particulars that make Burning Deck the mythical press it has turned out to be.

In 1961, the Waldrops bought a secondhand 8 x 12 Chandler and Price platen printing press for $175 and started Burning Deck Magazine, a publication they called a “quinterly.” This was in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Keith and Rosmarie were studying for their respective PhDs in Comparative Literature. Eventually, they would transition to printing a series of pamphlets and chapbooks, and then to publishing books of poetry and short fiction, after their move to Providence, Rhode Island in 1968, but the press was dedicated to “experimental poetry and prose” from the beginning. And by 1981 Burning Deck was printing its one hundredth volume, an anthology celebrating its twentieth year in business.
Rosmarie has said of the early years:

Publishing was Keith Waldrop’s initiative. He wanted a poetry magazine and, as we were penniless graduate students, decided the only way was to print it ourselves. The early 60s happened to be the moment when print shops all over the country dumped their letterpresses… It took a little while to learn to print, but we did. Burning Deck Magazine was slated to come out 5 times a year. Instead it came out 4 times in 5 years. Keeping a fixed publication schedule was clearly too much for us, so we shifted to printing chapbooks of poetry, which would appear whenever we could manage.

Burning Deck developed among a group of writers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as Steve Evans has documented in his entry on Rosmarie Waldrop for the Dictionary of Literary Biography v.169 (1996):

“James Camp and Don Hope (who along with Keith coedited Burning Deck [M]agazine between 1962 and 1965), Dallas Wiebe, John Heath-Stubbs, X.J. Kennedy, and the Waldrops composed the core of this circle, known playfully as the John Barton Wolgamot Society. Wolgamot was the author of In Sarah, Christ, Mencken, and Beethoven There Were Men and Women (1944), a fascinating if arcane book that Keith had stumbled upon in a used-book shop. Contributing to the aura that this author assumed for the circle was the fact that Wolgamot is a near-homonym of Wohlgemuth, the maiden name of Rosmarie’s mother. Along with [Donald] Hall, W. D. Snodgrass—then teaching at Wayne State University in nearby Detroit—also participated in the circle. Both men were represented (along with Kennedy, Wiebe, Camp, Heath-Stubbs, Keith Waldrop [under the pseudonym 'Bernard Keith'], and Hope) in the first Burning Deck title, a 1961 anthology edited by Hope and entitled The Wolgamot Interstice.”

Burning Deck began as a literary clique, a small sort of salon society of writers who passed their work among each other, a secret literary cabal, and they started like many literary groups as a joke that some members took pretty far down the road. The best source of information about how they came upon the name The John Barton Wolgamot Society can be found in an interview with Keith Waldrop conducted by Peter Gizzi, published in Le Germe #4 by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card in Spring 2000, which I will summarize below and quote from extensively to finish the first installation of this series on Burning Deck’s 50th Anniversary.

To summarize the story, Keith found Wolgamot’s book In Sarah, Christ, Mencken, and Beethoven There Were Men and Women in a bookstore in the summer of 1957 and after contemplating it over the course of a few visits he bought the book for 50 cents and noted that the author’s name was the same as the publisher’s. When the group in Ann Arbor needed a name for their group they went with Keith’s suggestion to name themselves after Wolgamot and its members began to slip references to him in everything they wrote, including into a few of the members’ doctoral theses. Eventually, Keith and the rest of the circle were curious enough to actively seek out Wolgamot using any method they could think of, “including asking the I Ching whether he was still alive—which gave us what seemed to be a perfectly unequivocal reply: that he was still alive, but in decline.” (ibid.) They found a reference to Wolgamot in H. L. Mencken’s literary estate—recall the title of the book: In Sarah, Christ, Mencken, and Beethoven There Were Men and Women)—because Sarah referred to Sarah Haardt who was Mencken’s wife and who was very sick when Wolgamot first published the book. Mencken made a note in one of his books about coming across the volume saying “I called him on the phone [Wolgamot] and I said, ‘Wolgamot, are you crazy?’ And he said, quite unpreturbed [sic], ‘No, I’m not crazy, I just like to write that way.’” (ibid.) Through a friend of a friend of Wolgamot’s nephew they were finally able to track the writer down at a hotel where he was living in New York City. Keith somehow got the phone number and called him one night to invite him to read at the University of Michigan, but apparently Wolgamot didn’t believe in giving readings.

Some years later, after the Waldrops moved to Providence, Robert Ashley composed a piece based entirely on the book and as he was touring it around he met a woman in Los Angeles who claimed to be Wolgamot’s “only confidante.” A meeting was arranged through the “confidante,” and Ashley called Keith Waldrop to New York City from Providence, and they went to finally meet Wolgamot in person. Incidentally, Wolgamot refused to listen to Ashley’s piece, but he told them that his book was based on the four movements of the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven.

And as he listened to it, he kept hearing names. And he wrote down the names—he said they were names he didn’t know, that didn’t mean anything to him—but he wrote them down as he heard them. Then he went to a biography of Beethoven—this is what he claimed—he went to a biography of Beethoven, and he said he found all those names…. And he realized, after thinking about this, that rhythm is the basis of everything, and names are the basis of rhythm. He said that’s why, when a woman gets married and changes her name, she loses her character. He said, ‘You know, you can even hear this in the name of fictional characters. For instance, Anna Karenina: listen to that—ann-a-ka-ren-in-a ann-a-ka-ren-in-a—it’s the railroad: that’s why she gets run over by a train.’

…

When [Wolgamot] realized that names were the basis of everything, he decided that all you’d have to do is write names, and that’d be it. So he wrote a name, and then on another page he wrote another name and so forth (in four movements). He soon realized that wasn’t quite enough—you had to have different names to play off each other, to make a more complex rhythm. So he put together big lists of names, mostly of writers. He said, ‘I didn’t read all these authors, but they’re all good authors.’ And some artists, musicians and so forth. He had big lists, and he claimed that to the one name on a page he’d put these other names up next to it and ‘when there was a real spark between them,’ he would know those names went together. So then he had three names on a page. And then he collected other names around each of these three, and he said that then he knew it really was perfect. It was all it needed to be—each page was perfect—except that there was no reason to turn the page. He knew he had to have a sentence, only one sentence. That one sentence would be on every page. He claimed that’s what took him so long. All the rest he did fairly fast, but it took him ten years to write that one sentence. He said that it was so difficult ‘because, you know, it’s very hard to find a sentence that doesn’t say anything.’

…

Keith Waldrop “found that a year before [the book he had discovered in Danville] came out, in 1943, Richard R. Smith in New York had published a book by Wolgamot, with a slightly different title, In Sara Powell Haardt Were Men and Women—close, but not the same. … So [he] bought it, and it turned out to be exactly the same book, except for the title page and the size of the margins. [Keith] got to thinking about this and again came up with an outrageous theory: that Wolgamot was working on a trilogy, and these were the first two books. The third would be the same, but with a different title page and he’d have a trilogy of great formal unity.

…

I said, ‘Are you working on another book?’ And [Wolgamot] said yes, yes, he’d been working on another book since his second book came out. He said, ‘My first book was no good. My second book began to gallop. But you haven’t seen anything yet.’ The third one, he’d been working on … for thirty years. He said, writing took longer now because he had to work. At the time he wrote the first two books, he didn’t have to work and could spend all his time on them. Now his money had run out and he had to work. And I said, Now your next book—the first two books I had, which were, you remember, exactly the same text—I said, ‘Well, the text of the third book—is that going to be…’ And he said, as if it went without saying, ‘Oh, same text, same text.’

Wolgamot’s third book would be the same, of course, except for the title page and the size of the margins. When Wolgamot died, in his will he had appointed Ashley his literary executor.

Ashley was supposed to receive the contents of this famous safety-deposit box, which we assumed would be the plates for the book—because Wolgamot had told us he still had the plates. After some legal folderol, the contents of the box were delivered to Ashley, but all that was in the box was a metal stamp—the kind of thing you stamp a book cover with. It was for the new title, the title for his third book. Its title is Beacons of Ancestorship.

Sunetra Gupta is an acclaimed novelist, essayist and scientist. Her fifth novel, So Good in Black was published in February 2009. She has just been named as the winner of the 2009 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific achievements. Sunetra, who lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters, is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, having graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London in 1992. Sunetra was born in Calcutta in 1965 and wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali. She is an accomplished translator of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.

Sunetra’s childhood and her family’s peripatetic lifestyle have had a great impact on her work. Her early years were spent moving between Ethiopia, Zambia and England. When she was 11 the family returned to Calcutta, a city which continues to inspire her writing.

“My father, Dhruba Gupta (1934-2004), was an extremely important figure in my life. He had a profound influence on every aspect of my thinking. He was an extraordinary person and had indefatigable energy for creativity and what he called “creative criticism.” He lectured in African history at Calcutta University but he also spent time writing and lecturing on cinema. He wrote novels, short stories and essays on a wide number of topics. He managed to expose me to all types of art and he educated me in criticism – how to receive art. He inculcated within me the spirit of being able to move between the areas of art and science with ease. He didn’t find it at all interesting that I was a scientist, but he made it seem natural and easy for me to be a scientist and also to write fiction.

I can still see him sitting cross-legged on his bed with a little table over his knees, typing, with my rabbit Andropov stretched out beside him. I remember many evenings just sitting at the dining table, our plates cleared away, talking until midnight. He had an extraordinary sense of humour – I can still hear his generous laughter echoing through the rooms of our flat in Calcutta.

My mother, Minati, always supported our peculiar habits and if she hadn’t looked after us as wonderfully as she did, I am certain we would have been destitute. My father loved to travel which is why, during my childhood, he insisted on taking teaching jobs in Ethiopia, Zambia and Britain which brought much excitement into our lives, but not much security. My father was a very principled man and would easily resign a position without any regard as to how it might imperil him financially. My mother was never very good at making him change his mind, but always saw to it that there was some other practical solution, usually involving a lot of hard work on her part.”

FERNANDO

To find herself in a space like this, who would have thought it? Walls newly plastered and the wind sweeping through, when a rare wind there was, and otherwise the stillness, the sullen heat of the afternoon, and the tap-tapping of the builders, two floors below, putting in the kitchen – ripping out what had been installed there in the 1970′s and replacing it with gleaming steel and marble that harmonised strangely with the yellow arches – in a way that she would never have been able herself to conceive of, and yet was so easy for her daughter to see.

Her daughter’s house this, a narrow mountain village house recently purchased in this remote corner of Italy, where she had agreed – nay begged – to be installed to oversee the building work that had to be done to make it habitable.

Are you sure you want to do this? Anamika had asked her.

Well, why not?

You do not have to do this, her daughter had said.

But it is what I want, she had assured her.

Anything but to have to return to the flat in Calcutta where there was nothing more to do now but to tell the servants what to cook for lunch and dinner, and then to sit and read, perhaps make a few telephone calls, and receive those that came, and then the stillness of the afternoon with nothing else to do but read again, and finally the world coming life again and a semblance of duties emerging from such necessary events as the re-opening of shutters, children’s voices in the communal garden, footsteps outside of people once again starting to come and go, nothing to do with her at all, but dragging her in nonetheless into a sort of ceremony of living, nothing more than that. And how was it different when he was alive? Her husband, the renowned brain surgeon, with whom she had so little in common, and yet whose habits had girdled and protected her to an extent that she had never supposed until his sudden death had pressed it upon her that she had nothing to do, no-one to be, otherwise.

And now, here she was, enclosed within another kind of solitude, inhabiting the top floor of a many-levelled mountain house, while the rest of it was restored to provide her daughter and her family with the kind of retreat they felt they deserved after a year of grinding at their respective jobs and studies, studies, yes, the twelve and fourteen year old girls, her granddaughters, whom she had often been requisitioned to guard while their mother was called to attend to her duties, now securely embedded in the next layer of the English school system, and happy in their lives. Lives that she had once feared might not be easeful on account of their being of mixed race – an opinion formed out of her own limited experiences in the United Kingdom, those years in London and then in Leeds, while her husband pursued and acquired those necessary letters to his name and she looked after their daughter and suffered a sequence of miscarriages – how kind they were, the landladies with their tea and jam and endless willingness to let the child sit on a sagging corner of the sofa while she wept and wept upstairs in their lodgings, what a relief it was to return to Calcutta, to try no more to have another child, to have a spacious flat of her own to decorate with fabrics of her choice and prints of her favourite pieces of contemporary Indian art and servants again, good reliable servants too, what an orderly life they led for a time, her husband absorbed in his profession, her daughter excelling at school, and she – in mid thirties now – adored by all and not at all sure what to do with her own self.

Time had passed, it had not been entirely wasted either, she had spent much of it in the company of her old friends who still occupied themselves with what her husband called intellectual pursuits. Anamika had grown up, left home, first to study in Delhi, and afterwards to Cambridge University, where she had met and married a fellow student by the name of Harry Wyvern. This son-in-law of theirs, contrary to her husband’s expectations, had proved to be quite capable of supporting their daughter, having wrenched himself free of academia at an early stage, he had done very well indeed on “the dark side” as he so frequently put it, Harry Wyvern, their flat in Holland Park had been extended and cleverly reconfigured so that there was almost an enclave created for them – his wife’s parents – for they had been frequent visitors there, with her mainly occupied with the granddaughters while her husband attended to his various commitments, met with old friends, or just walked around London, adding to himself, or so she supposed.

And then her husband had died, he had reached his sixty-seventh year and died, a classic heart attack, he had known exactly what was happening to him all along, from the moment of summoning the driver to drive him to the emergency department of his own private clinic, and she, there with him, or outside the chamber where he lay struggling with life, she, knowing that he suffered his pain in full knowledge of its consequences and forever herself be backbraced by the enormous dignity with which he bore it all.

In due course, they had all arrived, Anamika, Harry, her lovely grand-daughters, they had taken charge and it had all happened as it should – the funeral, the grand memorial service, they had entreated her to return with them to London but she had declined and they had been respectful of her reasons. She had told them that she would come, as planned, the following year in late March. That had been the usual time of her visit – to coincide with her grand-daughters’ Easter holidays when both parents were especially busy – and she did not feel she had any reason to alter that yearly routine.

She had said goodbye to them, no tears, firmjawed, the vermillion rubbed clean from her parting, she had watched them disappear into Customs and Security and come home to an empty flat. The servants slept in their quarters down below and it was late enough for none to be awake setting that final jug of milk to cool in the refrigerator or snuffing out the last mosquito coil. She realised suddenly as she entered that she had never been just by herself in any kind of private dwelling ever in her life. And so what of it? She snapped on the light in the living room and sat herself down on the settee. She could of course telephone someone, they would understand, be prepared immediately to come to her, be anguished that they had not realised that there was nobody to be with her right now. She sat for a while trying to decide who to telephone and then suddenly raised herself from the settee and instead of reaching for the telephone headed towards the drinks cabinet which she had never before even thought to open and poured herself a small glass of whisky. She returned to the settee, glass in hand, but the sense of herself sitting there like this did not suit her and so she put the glass aside and made her way to her bedroom and lay primly down upon the bed, sometimes sleeping and sometimes not, until morning arrived.

In late March, she had arrived, as promised, in London, and they had taken her with them to their new house in Italy, in a remote part of Tuscany, which they were only part way through renovating. The two top floors had been fully realised as they had intended with four excellent bedrooms, all ensuite and an enormous living space below, in the corner of which there existed for the moment a slab of marble and a gas ring, and a wonderful marble basin which was to stay and be made a feature of when the floor below was transformed into the sort of kitchen her daughter wished to walk into when she returned to this alternative home of theirs, this paradise. Another level down was a swimming pool and a set of neglected spaces that could easily be turned into rooms, or something else entirely – who was she to comment on their possibilities, just a tired old woman who had been left to keep an eye on the Italian builders – had begged actually for the privilege, and had spent the last six weeks or so feeling useful again after a fashion.

And she had made friends, unexpectedly good friends – first, the woman from whom her daughter had purchased this property who lived in a nearby village and had hoped herself to restore it and bequeath it to her own children – and others too, through her, this wonderful Jane Hempshaw, her own friends – some just like her, Englishwomen in their sixties, and others terribly different – like Marcella from Rome, not quite forty even, who came here only sometimes, and with whom she had stayed up more than a few nights talking and talking while she, herself drank tea and Marcella drank wine and smoked cigarettes – on this very terrace – this very terrace, where she sat now, staring our onto the Apuan Alps, the morning light cheap and dreadful upon the edge of the table.

This evening, Marcella will take her to nearby village fete, there will be music and dancing and much general merriment for her to observe, and they will be plied with food of many colours and textures. Amid all this, they will sit, Marcella and herself, and try and talk of this and that, and so many other things. And during the course of this evening Marcella will unexpectedly let slip that in the last few months Anamika has been diagnosed and operated on for breast cancer – oh my god, she will say, I had no idea that she was keeping this from you, oh my god, what a fool I am, she will say, hiding her face in her hands, her cigarette poking out through her rich blonde hair.

She probably did not want you to worry, Marcella will tell her.

And just at that moment, the village band will break into the Abba song ‘Fernando’ – and instead of thinking of her daughter, her imperillment and her treachery in concealing something so consequential, she will remember a similarly hot evening in Calcutta, a party at one of the clubs, the band playing these same songs, and the sudden unexpected attraction she had felt for one of her husband’s younger colleagues as he had gazed upon her then. She had carefully avoided him after that occasion and he had emigrated to Canada soon after, so it had not mattered at all.

There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright, Fernando.

I am certain it was caught early, and she is going to be fine, Marcella will try and reassure her.

Yes, of course.

She was only trying to protect you.

Yes, I know.

They were shining there for you and me, for liberty, Fernando.

Will you tell her that you know?

No, I will not.

Marcella will light another cigarette and eventually they will talk of other things. But something will be broken between them forever by her careless revelation, and when Marcella drops her back home and they embrace and say goodbye, it will not be clear to either of them whether will want to see each other again.

Linda Neil is a writer, musician, performer and producer whose work across multiple art-forms is unique in the world of literature, performance and music. Her essays and short stories have featured in national and international journals and her family memoir, Learning How to Breathe, was short listed in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards for Emerging Author in 2009 and long-listed for The Age Book of the Year (non-fiction) in 2010. Her documentaries have won numerous awards at the New York Radio Festivals and have also been short-listed for the United Nations Media Peace Prize. The documentary, The Long Walk of Brother Benedict, which Linda wrote and co-produced, was awarded Gold and Bronze medals at the 2011 NYRF and was also nominated for an Australian Writers’ Guild Award. Linda was the ABC National Radiophonic artist-in-residence in 2009 and her year-long performance project, My Year of Singing Love Songs, features in the ABC documentary of the same name. Linda’s work frequently integrates writing and music in stories about travel in both print and audio texts. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts and a Music Degree from the University of Queensland, where she has taught Creative and Academic Writing, as well as Cultural and Media Studies. She has toured with orchestras and rock bands–playing both classical and new music–and recorded and performed on numerous CDs. After receiving several writing grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Queensland, in 2005 she travelled to India, where she was a writer-in-residence at the Sanskriti Institute in New Delhi supported by Asialink. She was the 2010 recipient of the Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ composer’s fellowship at the Composer’s House in Paddington, Sydney and is currently writing her next book, Singing Love Songs in Kathmandu: Adventures in Travel and Music, which will also feature her original music. In 2011, she was a Writer-in-Residence with the Shanghai Writers’ Association’s International Writers’ Program and in 2012 she will take up the Australian Council’s Writer’s Residency at the Keesing Studio, Paris, supported by the Council’s Literature Board. The theatrical adaptation of her critically acclaimed book, Learning How to Breathe, for which she has written the script and songs, will have its world premiere in September 2012 at the Brisbane Festival.

DAL BHAAT

From Singing Love Songs in Kathmandu (Linda Neil’s current project, which will be published as an e-book with accompanying music soundtrack)

The walk back to our hotel was like a dream. After the serendipity of our discovery in the Tibetan Square, Kathmandu seemed carnivalesque. The brightly coloured saris that adorned the Nepalese women and girls were dazzling in the lights of the evening bazaars. Although the kaleidoscope of merchandise, food and humans walking, running, cycling or driving recklessly through the cramped streets would normally have overloaded my eyes and ears, I walked in a bubble of almost eerie silence, as if I was listening very carefully for something.

Gabriel strolled beside me. I noticed how long his arms were in relation to his legs and body; how they swung slightly as they hung loosely at his side; how his hands curled casually at the end of these overlong arms; how his head moved from side to side as if he was listening for something too; as if we had both heard something back there in the square or in the recording studio we had discovered near the Buddhist Stupa that needed careful processing. Once or twice I found myself staring at his hands, wanting to brush myself softly against them. Or at least to move my hands closer to the space his hands occupied.

Hands. For me, they carried the same kind of signal that a peacock carried in his feathers; I was, I often thought, a peahen for these appendages. I knew I was attracted to someone when I found myself stealing glimpses at that person’s hands. There were no particular hands that I thought more beautiful than other hands. But as some might read the soul in a person’s eyes, I saw something inward in hands: the way they occupied their space; the ease they might have in how the fingers worked in relation to the palms. I could spend hours secretly staring at hands, watching in a kind of reverence the clues that a hand could give about the inner life of the person it belonged to. I could see more that toil, or occupation, more than what short, thick fingers might mean, or long, carefully manicured ones. What they did for work with those hands seemed not to matter either, although I’d once seen a butcher’s hands so thick and red-stained that I couldn’t help but envisage the dead flesh with which he worked for hours each day. But I’d also seen a musician’s hands that held no mysteries for me. Years of knocking out songs, melodies and rhythms in a workmanlike way hadn’t refined this man’s hands at all. The passage of time had only made them—and him—dull and complacent. Yet I’d also observed hands which had toiled in the soil during years of manual labour that were as agile and elegant as a dancer’s hand might be.

The only thing that I can compare to what this perception brought as a picture of a person’s inner self—what some people might call the soul—occurred to me once when I was watching the Soccer World Cup in which the French Algerian player, Zinedine Zidane, was the star player. Watching Zidane move the football around the field was like watching something deeply internal and focused become manifest in action. It seemed possible to perceive the soccer star’s entire life story, and those of his ancestors back in the deserts of Algeria, in the movement of his legs and feet: the deep pride, the intense focus, the ability to slow down time and direct so elegantly the flow of movement around him. I thought of him then in Kathmandu, because there were traces of Zinedine about Gabriel: the same bald, oddly shaped head, the same internal drive, the same ability to move things around according to his own rhythm. He had, after all, managed to move someone as stubborn and self-directed as I was for hours through the crowds of Kathmandu, over my protests and malingering, until we had arrived at the destination he had promised me: somewhere beautiful.

I saw, or imagined I saw, other potentials in how a hand had formed. Sometimes I thought I could recognize grace in a hand. And, if it was there, tenderness. From that tenderness I could imagine the exchange of hands, of another’s with mine. How a hand could glide softly across my face or skin until I raised and stretched out my own hand, fluttering through the air, like a tiny bird towards its mate.

We stopped at a small footpath café close to Durbar Square and ordered Dal Bhaat, a local specialty. As we waited, Gabriel turned to me, his face creased into a smile.

So you see, you never know, do you? he said, in his stumbling cryptic way, as if he had just picked up a train of thought he had left idling hours ago; not so much pleased with himself as relieved, perhaps, that all the twists and turns he had led me through had ended up somewhere significant. Didn’t I tell you?

Tell me what? I replied, not able to help smiling too.

He replied, almost shyly. That I would show you somewhere beautiful.

Yes, you did, I responded. You certainly did tell me.

Well then…what do you think? he asked.

You told me. And you showed me, I answered, suddenly re-energized by the thought of sharing a meal with Gabriel. I smiled then too, with a smile that was beginning to feel familiar. Now, let’s eat!

I’d stopped enjoying food some weeks before after a severe bout of dysentery that had confined me to my bed for five days. As a result, I’d become noticeably thinner, as many people do in India, and my jeans, which had fitted me well when I first arrived in the sub-continent, now hung loosely off my hips. Since I’d been in Nepal, my diet had mainly consisted of curd and plain rice and the thought of food still made want to throw up. But now, next to Gabriel, my mouth was literally watering in anticipation as I ordered a Nepali Thali: a plate of Dal, a selection of three vegetables curries, rice and papa dams.

Gabriel ate with his hands, Indian style. I asked for a fork and parceled the food carefully into my mouth, still remembering the effects of the last full meal I’d dared eat. To my surprise, though, the taste of the curries unfurled in my mouth as if I’d swallowed aromatic flowers; I closed my mouth in pleasure and made small squeals of delight.

Oh my god! I spluttered, shaking my head in wonderment.

See…? So beauty, he said enjoying me enjoying my food. You look like you eat like a bird. But perhaps this is ok? Perhaps you sing like one too?

I laughed, unable to make any coherent sound because of the food I kept stuffing into my mouth. As I ate my meal, I shyly observed how Gabriel ate his. I noticed how his hands covered in yellow curries still managed to look clean and spatially elegant. Spatially elegant. I’d never heard or used that phrase before. At least I didn’t believe I had. It was a sudden invention, inspired by my companion and his hands, as we shared a meal in the Nepali night. What it meant was what it felt like—as if there was a sense of appropriateness to how his hands moved through the air in relation to both himself and what he was doing and also, now, in relation to me.

When we finished our Thalis, Gabriel ordered two sago puddings, but I refused to eat any more.

I’m full, I protested. Gabriel didn’t try to coax me. He just took my dessert and prepared to eat it after he had finished his. But the sight of him consuming the sticky sweet made me suddenly ravenous. I playfully took my fork and stabbed at the pudding.

Mmmm, he said, taunting me with his pleasure. So beauty. So beauty, he repeated licking his hands.

Our laughter was becoming a habit. I had no idea how it happened, what chemical combination of our contrasting beings made such joy possible. But it was there and it felt as tangible as a song.

Gabriel carefully took my fork, dug it into the pudding and delicately transferred it from his plate onto my now empty dinner plate.

So, he said as he filled up my plate with the sticky dessert. How long are you in Kathmandu?

Ten days, I told him. We both smiled. I’ve been here three days, so seven to go.

Seven. It was a good number. The number of colours in a rainbow. The number of basic notes in Western and Indian scales. The numerological symbol of scholars and yogis. And, some say, the number of spiritual perfection.

Seven days was all I imagined I would have to get to know Gabriel. And perhaps all I would need. And then, as I had many times with other travelers, I would say goodbye at an airport or a bus stop or a train station. After our emotional farewells we would exchange emails, daily at first, then more sporadically, until their frequency petered out. There was nothing unexpected in such ebbs and flows of love and affection. It was the decorum of travel to understand the impermanence of connection—to not cling or expect anything long-term from these brief, fleeting encounters, no matter how poignant or beautiful, but to celebrate and honour them, without hope or regret, as they arrived and departed. Arrived and departed. These were also the gifts of travel: to move, to love, as freely as a bird might sing its sad and joyful songs.

Poet Ed Bok Lee’s first collection, Real Karaoke People, was a national bestseller in poetry, and his second, Whorled, has already been listed on several yearend best of lists. John Freeman writes, “Whorled is a book that believes love is like a superior kind of capital: It’s a force that flows into new markets, sensing absences, and fills them, whether it’s a debased kind of space or an ennobling one.” A powerful endorsement for a powerful book, Freeman’s enthusiasm is justified—I cannot recommend Whorled enough. Ed Bok Lee and I conversed by email, discussing his new book, the past as sacred text, poetry as the dismantler of wisdom, and the Slavic soul.

Growing up you were exposed to a wide variety of religious traditions, from Confucianism to Christianity, from Buddhism to shamanic animism. How has that varied experience affected your writing? One similarity, I would think, is those tradition’s respect for their texts, for text, even when spoken. I sense in your work a respect for text, but also a struggle with the single account. 

The “single account” is a good way of putting it. My parents both moved around a lot from their early childhoods on due to repeated political upheaval, and then were immigrants to the U.S., and so maybe because of that, wherever we lived was always pretty bare. They also shared very little of their stories and histories with their children. So, in a way, the past has always been a kind of sacred text to me, luminously blank, always humming at a strange, incomprehensible frequency that I could either try to ignore or engage with in some meaningful way.

What about place? Your parents come from Korea—one from (what is now) North and one from South, and you were raised in Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, before studying and traveling through South Korea, Russia, and even Kazakhstan. How does place figure into your poetry, and into your practice of writing poetry? 

I love so many of the great Southern U.S. writers who can imbue every sentence with such a strong sense of place. Mine is probably a more a synthetic relationship to place, in part due to what I mentioned above. Or, maybe a more nomadic sense of place. For whatever reasons, I like Milosz’s: “Language is the only homeland.” Each poem can then become like a little home made of wattles, titanium, ink, etc.

I know you’ve worked as a business translator. Have you ever translated poetry? 

More Russian creative prose into English. Some Korean poetry, which I’d love to get involved with again.

You’ve said that in your first book, Real Karaoke People, you were looking backwards, but in your new book Whorled you’re looking forward into the future. Could you explain that? How does that manifest itself in the work itself?

Lacan wrote, “The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.” As I’ve commented elsewhere, to riff off of that, one reason I think I write poetry is not for memory, but to dismantle it utterly and follow where the animating spirits go from there. And, lately, as in the final, title poem in Whorled, that’s been leading me into the future where, for example, 90% of the world’s languages are scheduled to go extinct by 2050.

Your grandmother was an unpublished poet. How old were you when you found that out, and what did (does!) it mean to you?

My grandmother grew up during the Japanese Occupation of Korea (1910 – 1945). Many of that generation of Koreans were forced to learn Japanese better than their native tongue, in their own colonized nation, to survive. She made a point to struggle to write poems later in life in Korean. They truly read like a “secret” tongue. Unfortunately, she died before I knew any of this, when I was in college. When things get particularly hard, thinking about this secret language that was a kind of paradise to her in her life helps me get back on track.

Why Russian poetry? What about it appealed to you so much that you decided to study for a PhD in it?

I was drawn to the Slavic soul, which felt very different than the American soul. It’s hard to generalize, but, for instance, if you look at, say, soul music and the immense influence of Black music in general in America, you can feel and hear characteristics unique to the culture and history it comes out of. Things are changing, but this generally goes for any people’s (especially traditional-based) music, in which you can hear distinct qualities and flavors of the human soul—be it traditional Irish, or Zulu or Balinese music. You can also hear it in any contemporary music, but maybe, maybe we’re too close to hear all that objectively, given the way globalization has shot-gunned. And, regarding Slavic literature, I’m not just referring to a romantic or majestic quality, but equally a strange, warped, absurdist, splenetic soul. At the time, I was starving, and it’s really hard to find that kind of savory stew anywhere else.

I think you’ve contributed to the great savory stew yourself, Ed! Thanks for your time, and thanks for Whorled.

Cristina Rascón Castro was born in 1976 in México. She is a short story writer, Japanese poetry translator, cultural promoter, and economics consultant. Her books include: Hanami (To see the flowers bloom, 2009), Latin American Short Story Award 2005; El agua está helada (The water is cold, 2006), Sonora State Short Story Award 2005, Cuentráficos (Storytraffics, 2006), selected for the Sonora Editorial Programme 2006; and Puede que un sahuaro seas tú (It could be that a sahuaro is you, 2010), Northwestern Literature Prize of in 2008. Rascon has translated Japanese authors into Spanish. Her translated books include: Sin conocer el mundo / Without knowing the world (2007) and Dos mil millones de años luz de soledad /Two billion light years of solitude (2012) by Shuntaro Tanikawa.As an economist, she recently published the book, Para entender la economia del arte / To understand the economics of the arts (2009), essay under practical and economical approach.She has received several artistic scholarships to support her writing and translating work, some are: the National Fund for Arts and Culture of Mexico, Sonora State Fund for Artes, the Writer´s Lab on the Border at Tijuana/San Diego, and UNEQ (Union of Writers of Quebec), in coordination with FONCA (Mexico´s National Fund for Culture and Arts). In her hometown, she created and coordinated the First Bilingual Literary Contest Jiosiata Nooki (Yaqui-Spanish) in 2005-2006, promoting and integrating contemporary first nations´ literature in her region. Cristina has a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the Technological Institute of Superior Studies in Monterrey (ITESM), Mexico and a Master Degree in Public Policy from Osaka University, Japan. She has taught creative writing workshops in fiction, poetry in several countries. She was a consultant for NGOs in Mexico and the United Nations in Vienna, Austria. In 2011, she was invited by the Shanghai Writers Association in China for the Writer-in-Residence international programme. Cristina Rascon was recently selected to be one of the youngest members of the National System of Artistic Creators in Mexico.

THREE STORIES

1.
THE VISIT

[From the book Cuentraficos / Storytraffics (2006).
Translated from Spanish by the author and Amal Chatterjee]

In front of a window that, for the first time, open its curtains and reveals to me her virgin scenery full of maternal trees and planted bougainvillea, sipping a chicken soup and listening the Televisa channel, came in walking, unbalanced, The Word… (do not confuse it with the word of certain religion, this word is non religious, non political, it is any word of the any language in which you are reading this short story).

- What’s up? – she said nonchalantly.

- What’s up? – I answered, also nonchalantly, as if it hadn’t been a year since she’d last appeared in my house.

The Word saw me with her smile on top. The truth is that I was just thinking of spending some time with you, I confessed, I feel you being born in my throat… One of those words that ends up being a piece of prose or a poem but are not translated precisely as they resonate in the voice and in the aorta vein.

She walked coquettishly around my room, she smiled condescendingly in front of the TV and turned it off. I am finally here, she said in the voice of an eager lover, as she lay down on the bed, posing like a transvestite diva. You know I hate poses, said my voice without my permission. Ach, you haven’t changed, she said and though she didn’t move, there was something about her that made her look like a sprawled out little girl about to hear a lecture. That was her, I know her, without poses.

- Hey, Word, I think you’re imperfect, you’re an incomplete drawing, a volute which doesn’t fly, a sheaf of papers dispersed by the wind…

- All right stop it, What do you think I am if not a human invention? That’s why you can’t capture me as you feel me in your throat. I am The Word… The same since before you… a ball of wool with the soul of a sweater. Hahaha. So simple, so non complicated. No language has been the same for more than three hundred years and yet you, the human being, you’ve had the same DNA, the same brain size, the same stock of ideas and the same lexicon for ten thousand years, always the same, the same, the same…

- What? Words don’t change?

- Not the true ones, no. The ones used by those of your species, in speech, in labour, in the letter and the songs… Those, yes, those words are always changing. In Holland there are some who understand us… There they make dictionaries every year. In Spain, on the other hand, they want their Castillian to remain ceteris paribus, to keep English out, which is like saying I don’t want my Causcasian daughters to marry an Arab, a black man or an Asian, and, of course they should mix, maybe then they would find The Exact Word.

- What would you say if I dared to draw you?… Would you pose naked for me?

- Begin – she said in a tired voice, lying down as La Maja – it’s been you and so many others. You’ll enjoying drawing me with the other words, the unfinished ones. You’ll enjoy your piece of art, of course. And also the frustration later, when you learn that my image, as you have seen it today in your bed, cannot be reproduced. I do not exist in your world. The others live there, the impostors. But I will be with you in all the drawings of human speech, in the songs and in poetry: in the song flowers, as the other yous used to call it over five hundred years ago.

And as I wrote as a short hand typist what she said, her silhouette began to disappear… She drew out her smile and at last that look between evil and know-it-all. The shapes disappeared through the bougainvilleas, her unsteady step, the cadence of the phantasmagoric wooden leg. I felt a fluttering of drums in the pectoral, it was her, that’s how she filters through all the cells and charges of air, the socket of the eyes. Word, come, I want to draw you. And so many years have passed like this since we initiated this infamous relationship that I do not know if it is sado-masochism of schizoid fiction of what humans call of being human.

2.
DIATRIBE TO MY FRAGMENTED FACE IN A BUNCH OF GLASS THAT I AM ABOUT TO STIFLE IN THE PALM OF MY HAND

[From the book Cuentráficos (ISC, 2006 / Sonora, México, 1976).
Translated from Spanish by the author and Amal Chatterjee]

I didn’t want to be like my father. But like my mother, a 1960s intellectual hippie, an economist and a sociologist (she studied for both degrees at the same time), who cohabited, with canaries and parrots flying around her house; head of the family, because my father didn’t have a job. I also wanted to know a lot of things, to read a lot of books and smoke marihuana (without drying out my brain, getting the balance right, as she used to say); to have several lovers and get to know my body; to walk naked around the house; to sunbathe with my children in the garden and discuss Marx at night, with the noisy soundtrack of the typewriter and the word “Madera” on a blackboard. I didn’t want to be like my father.

Books he saw with suspicion, reticence, like an indigene would white people arriving in his land with papers in their hands. Other men he challenged with his eyes, and towards women he looked with lust. He didn’t smoke that penetrating odor, he held back from the discussions and inhaled white powder whose name I learned later. He wouldn’t let my mother walk naked in the garden, nor let the birds fly around the house. Little by little, I understood that the nights without the typewriter were a caged nightmare, that the shouting and the sobbing were not the far away sound of a soap opera. I didn’t want to be like my father. Although, I said it once as a child: the one who shouts most wins, the one who kicks the furniture. Right, Mom? She stifled a sob and inhaled nicotine (she stop smoking smelly cigarettes when I learned how to say “joint” and grandma heard me). No my little one, it’s not like that. But she never told me how it was.

I wanted to be the kind that wins, that succeeds, that can do everything. Something in my brain registered that shouting the loudest, kicking the furniture, saying the most hurtful things would dissolve all the obstacles in the way. Then you arrived, with your eyes full of butterflies with yellow-black wings, with your eyes of traveler’s dreams and of life together.

In this life you either win or lose. And, if you lose, you are like my mother now, whirlpool after, swamp where the woman is left behind in an empty house, the man leaves. He has the money, she doesn’t; he manipulates and threatens, tries to strangle her, time and again, in that caged nightmare called bedroom. And in the silence. That is why I had to win, to be my mother, that distant intellectual young woman. To be the woman that has other men in order to possess you, in order not to lose you, to be the woman who has money even though she is not interested in earning it, even though she prefers to be near her children rather than spending long afternoons in the office. Because she cannot afford to lose, she cannot let you become a man like her father.

To shatter the fine porcelain of the town where the car broke down and we had to ask for a ride and you said, as if in jest, marry me and I heard my mouth say yes and my heart pound in the back seat. We said the sanctuary would be to be together, we don’t have a place, we said.

There is something in the rage that doesn’t know about objects, names or persons. It’s a compelling need, stab that which hurts somewhere else, that must be removed. I needed to do it – I really needed to – to hurl the phone against the wall. But you, suddenly in front of my rage. The phone on your head, looking into your eyes, knowing they were your eyes and not the wall, knowing those were your eyes, time and again. Why didn’t you leave me alone? That’s the only way of calming me down. It was the only way my father would come around, alone.

He would return hours later, after threatening us, saying he would never ever return and that he would crash his car to die and that we would never see him again. So, I, the eldest, was trapped by all the eyes on me, my brothers would do what I would do. First, cry. Later, when I stopped believing him, I would lock myself in my room or say come on, let’s play. Finally, to challenge him, I would look him in the eye with a look that was no more that of a little girl. I couldn’t articulate a go away and leave us in peace. But he knew I was about to say it, he never dared touch me. My brothers, the three of them, learned how to look that way and they were never the weak, the beaten ones. They became the enraged ones, like me, with tenderness as intense as unpredictable, and a curse that no medical prescription can cure. But you are a woman, my mother would say, the mother of now, the unknown one, the one who hides her books under her bed and says don’t smoke, my little one, it looks so bad.

Forgive me, I love you (my father would say, time and again, when he came back at dawn, without the promised crash and Mom would forgive him). But there was no answer, your fluttering emigrated elsewhere, your eyes became a swarm of other butterflies, the ones called nocturnal, giant moths. Your eyes vibrated noisily and your serene voice said: thus far. The fine porcelain I pick up, shard by shard, says that there will be no canaries and parrots flying in the home of my past. I won’t know what to say to our children when they come back from school. I’ll go to the office and you will be here to take care of them, I know. Night will fall and I also know you will not stay. How good for you. That was the condition, when we got married. I said it very clearly: the first blow, divorce. And we said yes and we swore an eternal love, a different love. Till the death of the butterflies do us part.

My hand bleeds.

The rage… is never going to end, ever.

3.
SIBACOBY, AT NIGHT

[From the book of short stories, Puede que un sahuaro seas tú / It could be that a sahuaro is you, 2010.
Translated from Spanish by the author and Amal Chatterjee.]

 Espacios encimados, Overlapped spaces, montañas que separan Mountains that separate nuestra realidad despeñada Our fallen reality (…) el aura (…) (…) the aura (…) susurra eternamente Whispers eternally el mismo tono. The same tune.

- Mara Romero, Identidad.							                - Mara Romero, Identity.

“That’s not true”, said Josefa’s grandmother. “We were all at the party, here, on my house patio, as if it was a ramada, Luciano told the girl that if she wanted to see the ghost lady he would take her. The ghost of the old house, she appears in other places too, at the crooked tree and other places, there our Luciano took her. They are cousins, they are. But you see that Josefa’s mother is from Obregon and there they sent her, when she was a little girl, she doesn’t know a lot of things, the girl, things about us, that is why she is saying that she hit him, with her being so thin, that’s not true. The ghost is a yaqui woman, this is what is said, one of many that the yori people killed in this town. Almost always at the old house, but there’s people who say they saw her in the Hotel or at the crooked tree, but she is always around here, reminding us. The ghost lady laughs a lot when she frightens horses. Last night she laughed, we all heard her. Then the boy was clearly heard to shout ‘Damn horse!’. That frightened the horse, it turned mean and finished him off. That’s how it is when they are frightened, they don’t know their masters”.

“That’s not true”, said the bull tied to the raw wood of an improvised fence. “The one who finished the damn boy off wasn’t a horse, it was me. I clearly saw him jumping onto the girl and she tried to run. I know her by sight, I’ve seen her long, when she walks, when she carries the water to her grandmother’s house, when she comes and visits from Obregon. I’ve seen her long and, if it was up to me, I would marry her, but I was waiting for her to come of age. This damn boy overtook me. I transformed myself into a man, for him, I turned into the beast I am and I went up to him, I went very straight for him and I saw how she ran, without seeing either my face or this rope that was still hanging from my neck as the boy shouted ‘Damn horse’ and the damn horse ran off”.

“That’s not true, I clearly saw goat legs sprout from the girl and how she started to kick the boy, once she found herself alone in the scrubland with him, near the crooked tree. She kicked him, laughing out loud. Then I felt all the blood run, the blood that has been spilled on my streets and my plaza. I felt that the boy was part of me, the girl wasn’t. The trees were heavier than usual and it was difficult to breathe through them. The white haired logs of the cactus at the edge of my fertile soil pricked me and told me that a yori had crossed into our territory and was already causing us damage. The boy turned into a serpent, he didn’t have a choice, and the girl grew even more fearful and kicked him harder. But the truth is the boy never attacked her. Nor did he die completely, just half-dead. And we know what happens when those who are serpents don’t finish dying. Luciano accused the girl and she has to be punished”.

“That’s not true,” said the girl when interrogated for the third time. “The truth is I was afraid of denouncing my Luciano and that’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. But now that you are showing him to me, with his face crooked and his legs broken, now I do know that he is dead and not alive somewhere else, fugitive and filled with guilt. What happened is that Luciano and I, we love each other very much, we were going to get married. We started kissing, he tickled me and I would laugh at his talk. Then another man showed up, a very big man, very strong. He started to hit him, to hit Luciano, and he had to defend himself, I handed him a thick wooden club and he used it until the other man fell, bloodied, his eyes open. We felt very afraid because we were sure the man was dead. The horse circled the crooked tree, a very big tree, ‘Damn horse’ shouted Luciano and the horse came and Luciano climbed up on him. Don´t be afraid and got to your grandma, he told to me. I have to go or I´ll be jailed. So I had to return on foot, but I didn´t know the way. So he came to me, riding the horse and said: get inside of this tree, it doesn´t matter if you are half yori, and I got into the tree. I walked under very high wood doors, everything very dark, very humid. While I was inside the tree I could hear Luciano’s voice, so clearly, which was guiding me and I would answer him, he would tell me where to turn. When I came out it was day again, I came out of another tree, closer to home. Luciano was not there anymore, nobody knew where he was. That´s why I don´t know how he died, nor when”.

“That´s not true”, says a voice in the dark every night since August 21st. Soon after, you hear a horse whinny.

Notes:
Ramada: is an improvised roof made of branches. When there is a community party, the Yaqui people fashion such a roof and conduct storytelling under it, while eating a traditional banquet.
Yaqui: First Nation from the Sonora Dessert. Northwest Mexico. Yaqui people live in both Sonora, Mexico and in Arizona, USA.
Yori: Originally, Yaqui people called the White people “yori”. Nowadays, Mestizos – who are mixed “yori” and First Nation people – are also called “yori”.

WHAT WE THOUGHT WE KNEW

Once we might have believed, like Pliny the Elder did, that honey
comes out of the air and is chiefly formed at the rising of the stars.
There is no honey, said Aristotle, before the rising of the Pleiades
just before dawn: once just before dawn we had that sense of honey 

rising, stars flowed wordless through our bloodstreams, we imagined
we would take our place among the Pleiades – figures chalked against
the sky, the great lovers, star crossed: but space between us condensed
then flew apart until we could no longer touch skin through heaven’s  

architraves while species died in their thousands and what we thought
we knew also faced extinction; once someone somewhere built an ark
but forgot to tell the animals so the last Bouvier’s red colobus, the last 

Puerto Rican tree frog, the last gold Martinique Parrot which all ought
to have been saved instead became faint watermarks orbiting the dark
with soot-ringed eyes watching dancing bees become a thing of the past.

[Highly commended in the Café Writer’s Prize, 2011]

* * *

TWO POEMS FROM FATHOM (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2007)

WOMAN BRUSHING HER HAIR

after Degas

In spring, I lived underwater with it –
my dappled hands held auburn hanks
like uncoiled ropes to brush and brush
while my thoughts drifted upwards
into the pearly green and umber.

By summer, my face was a scribble –
no eyes, a mute mouth, I forced the auburn
from its lair at the nape of my neck,
brushed it over my brow in torrents
with hands like ham bones: by now
I knew I couldn’t tame it by myself.

That autumn, I sat on a bed while my maid
tried to groom it. Does it hurt? she asked,
as the auburn itself fell like a curtain
over any other possibilities my life held;
she tilted her head and pulled, spilling
a ginger snakeskin over my face and forearms.

In winter, roasting chestnuts, I was caught
in the blaze, my dress became flames,
my maid grabbed the inferno and tried
to brush it out; a jigsaw of shapes held us firmly
in place while in one corner, just in the picture,
a dab of dappled pearl.

[Winner of the New Writer Prize, 1997]

SUR LE PONT DES ARTS

He’s looking at a painting of a river and trees,
houses roughly charcoaled in against a foggy smudge,
a foreground blob that could be a terrier’s shadow  

or a black hole of invisible light, dark matter
sucking viewers into the artist’s untidy mind,
showing them the dissatisfied wife left clearing plates 

after a silent Sunday lunch, the son who bores him,
the treasured daughter who ran off to the Pyrenees
with a specialist in sustainable energy 

who builds houses out of cartons and solar panels,
where rotas of guests are needed so that they can pee
frequently in order to keep the bathroom lights on.

He’s looking at a painting of a river and trees
and thinking about his mistress whom he hasn’t seen
for three weeks because she’s gone to stay with a sister

he knows she’s just invented; now he’s thinking about
his new hat, a smart homburg, and how superior
it is to the artist’s floppy hat which is hiding, 

probably, a mess of impasto passing for brains;
he’s thinking of the terrier, who has just caught up
and is now regarding him with small, adoring eyes.

He’s thinking it costs him more to feed the terrier
than buying the new homburgs he prefers to his wife.
He’s thinking his mistress is a liar, the artist

is an impostor, the artist’s wife and son should leave,
the artist’s daughter and her husband are complete fakes
and that his own wife is less attractive than a hat.

He’s thinking that his terrier is an expensive
excrescence; in fact, he’s wishing he was someone else.
He’s looking at a painting of a river and trees.

* * *

TWO POEMS FROM SANSKRITI

(first published Mascara Literary Review)

MAKER

this is the place where broken
things come to rest from their brokenness

they can’t get the taste of terracotta
out of their mouths

they know they came from mud,
only yesterday 

they were a substance
to be walked on

now their bridles, palms, trunks,
wings hold unexplained shadows

the moon
eyes the world from their jagged holes

above them, peacocks roost in the trees -
Neem, Arjuna and the Banyan

under which Krishna sat
scooping butter

the bark’s twisted textures
are ropes going into the earth

resting before the spring burst
of growth, green after green

reaching for the sky with its
shattering light.

SILVER OAK

instead of heat and light
grey shrouds

each morning a burial
we fight our way out of:

your sentinel stillness
seen through muslin 

would look at home
in snow-covered tundra, 

among the herds
and ice-lapped edges:

yet this is India too,
her private winter face

cleansed and secretive
in her dressing table mirror

with thoughts of spring
a world turned away from -

waiting for reflections
on a silver bark.

* * *

FIVE POEMS FROM TAKING MESOPOTAMIA

(First published in Ambit, 2011)

PROLOGUE

When I Join the Ranks: what to do and how to do it 

If you want some advice, don’t cling to the company
of untidy soldiers or soldiers of doubtful character,
if you do, you can’t expect officers or anyone else
to have a high opinion of you. Your living quarters

should speak of mathematical precision. Down each
side are arranged the beds, turned up during the day
to form a seat; and overhead is a shelf which contains
certain limited portions of your equipment with other

articles hung from below on little hooks. Make sure
these are kept always tidy and few. Down the centre
you will find the plain but well-scrubbed barrack tables
and these last complete the furnishing of the room.

When under canvas life is much the same except
at dawn you’ll hear the songs of robin and chaffinch
and see mist rising over distant hills. Now is the time
to practice folding and unfolding your army blanket.

In camp you will never want for company, the sight
of canvas soon brings in the inhabitants of the local
countryside who are only too glad to spend some time
with the lads. If you miss your girl stop reading here.

AUGUST

                1916

		The land and sky trick us with mirages of enemy
		troops becoming trestle tables which float over
		the ground towards us before turning into camels
		and disappearing into thin air. We can’t tell how
		many or how close they are – we dive for cover,
		frightened by bushes: red sunset behind a mound
		is the flare of shrapnel over shepherds watching
		their flocks under the first stars. These must be
		the rocks where Cain heard God’s voice thunder
		Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!

		2006

		Basra, ancient city of parks smelling of flowers
		and spices, renowned place of coffee-houses,
		mosques and the intricate facades of buildings
		of old Ashar: everywhere water mirrors sky -
		kingfishers and bee-eaters dart in the shadows
		of date palms. Sinbad’s ravaged city, now half
		populated by children, the young men dead in
		the wars. Hamid, eleven, gets up at five to collect
		scrap metal, building a new life from Pepsi cans.
		He says peace is the greatest treasure we could ask for.

THE CALL-UP

An age ago, spring turned early into ceanothus summer, skies
scoured by keening swifts, and our sons ran out of the pavilion

shining in their whiter than white whites, their bats held high:
we waited in the long grass, our shoes drowned in buttercups

as they faced over after over, the onlookers cheering: at least
it wasn’t France, we said, its boulevards cobbled with skulls:

there was a pair of goshawks nesting in the wood that year, fierce
birds hooked to the sky like medieval warriors, the female three

times the size of her mate who hardly dared to visit his chicks
with strips of flesh, knowing he came too close on pain of death.

BAPTISM

They could have been made from stone, the same
stone of country houses with private gardens, walls

spurting valerian: they were coatless, cold as slate
when marsh water flowed into the trenches carrying 

cholera and they went over the top in darkness to meet
darkness lit by enemy flares, stumbling and drowning 

with the bolting mules, too numb to know what they
were doing or which way they were supposed to go:

back home the font was wreathed with laurel: it stood
sunlit, under an angel leading a child away from harm

HOSPITAL BARGE ON THE TIGRIS 1915

In April the desert blooms, even in war:
flowering earlier than a Welsh spring, clustered
along the river bank, rain-scented on a bare, wind blown
canvas - mallow, shepherd’s purse, early-sown
green barley, yellow trefoil and wild mustard,
each day budding with promise of more:

And on the Tigris, a slow hospital ship
carries the wounded, so recently young boys
running home from school down weed-skirted lanes,
now tents of white skin hanging slack on frames
of bone: flies buzz in their mouths, the noise
drowned by the wheel’s revolving slap.

* * *

TWO POEMS FROM WHO CAN CLIMB THE SKY?

(First published in World Literature Today)

ENKIDU IN THE WILDERNESS

“Coated in hair like the god of animals With the gazelles he grazes on grasses.” -- The Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet I)

In a mountainous and wooded country with his doe eyed favourite
	   he’s far from the sheshgallu treading the thousand steps:
far from the incantations of the kalû in the shukkinna

the harp found in the death pit of the Royal Cemetery, the bearded
	   bull of solid gold at Ur, the headdress of lapis-lazuli and cornelian,
the woman made of squares, the scarab-swaddled baby:

he places his hand on her flank, her vellum hide
       hiding a shop of stories: on the stele
they press on up towards to the great breast of the sun

[Note: sheshgallu – priest; kalû – chorus; shukkinna – temple; stele – inscribed monument]

THE BARBER’S STORY: 1

Something for the weekend? I almost said, then stopped myself
my hairiest customer ever had also been the most taciturn.

I plastered on the unguents and perfumes: he seemed lost
in his thoughts, away in the desert perhaps with his antelopes.

This was the creature (or man) Lord Gilgamesh fought, defeated,
and bonded with for life. He knew better than to win at that game.

There he sat while I rubbed his face with attar of roses, tea tree oil
and myrrh. His body was lithe as a serpent’s under the pelt.

His pectorals caught the sun like a muscled river, his head hair
black as tar, his eyes dark as wine in the bottom of a pitcher.

In fact, he was beautiful, like one of those eunuchs who dance
at festivals, exotic and desultry, raising temperatures and desire.

As for the fur, it took me an hour to sweep up. My wife wanted it
to stuff pillows but it stank of animals, so we threw it in the Tigris.

Cai Tianxin, born in 1963, is a Chinese poet and a mathematician. He received his PhD in number theory from Shandong University in 1987. He has published twenty books of poetry, essays, travelogues and biographies. In 1995, he founded the poetry review, Apollinaire, which is considered among the important underground magazines in China. Cai has translated into Chinese the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Antonio Porchia, Elizabeth Bishop, Margaret Atwood, and others. His poems have been translated into more than twenty languages, with books published in English, French, Spanish, Korean, Croatian, and Turkish. He has participated in numerous poetry festivals and has travelled to more than ninety countries. A Chinese poet says of him, “Cai is a writer who is shaped by the distance he travels … His distances are metaphysical.” Cai Tianxin lives in Hangzhou where he is a professor of mathematics at Zhejiang University.

All poems translated from the Chinese by Sudeep Sen with the poet

SWISS & INDIAN POEMS

Translated from the Chinese by Sudeep Sen with the poet

LAKE GENEVA

deep blue in light blue —
an island lies on its side.
absolutely still, only sunshine
adjusts its proportion and size.

the Alps are high up
providing a cool source, and piercing
my rough verse and words
to swim in it, to absorb the surrounding view.

心灵SOUL

lighter than a leaf
like a song of a bird —
heavier than a village
like bell-rings in a church.

write on the cheek
with a bodyless pen —
and often, the invisible
hides in lake water.

雪崩AVALANCHE

they are tired of houses and streets,
tired of green and lake-water —
they enter into the dazzling white.

they want to stay here,
set down their own home —
there are no sofas, books or cars.

they ride on a black-blue sled
choosing a fine windless day,
and slip into this piece of white.

DIFFERENCE差异

the rivers are born
in high mountains and lofty hills,
the flat land
easy to nourish lakes.

also human’s thoughts
are enslaved in their own experiences —
some are deep,
some are wide.

THE HEART OF A POET诗人的心

a piece of flimsy light suddenly
appears in the clouded sky —
brings to the lake, a ray of blue.

the heart of a poet should be like this.
after pushing aside the sad fog,
it opens a window in the dark.

两层楼房 A BUILDING WITH TWO STOREYS

in my eyes
a building with two storeys
is the perfect building
on this planet.

if one says a flower
is the limit of the lawn,
then the lawn is
the shadow of the shutters.

the light always
starts from a point,
while dark clouds
always come out aplenty.

a building with two storeys
in my eyes
is like a binary-linear equation —
perfect without fault.

远和近 FAR AND NEAR

the lake water is too far away from me.
whether it is agitated or peaceful,
i cannot see its waves clearly.

just like the river in my body,
it is too close to me —
i cannot tell its direction or source.

THE BOOK OF TIME

like integers divide into odd and even,
the book has its obverse and reverse,
and time cuts day and night.

but when I turn the pages over,
between the first line and the last line
there is no obvious difference.

this is a wonderful point of twilight —
also morning — wisdom of
the book of time is there, subtle.

DISTANCE PLACE

always attracted by distance places —
always attracted by floating sceneries —
only when the bird circles round the rice-field,
i’m aware of the piece of gold.
only when the wind blows over
and shake-sounds the peach-tree by my side,
i find the shadow of its branches graceful.
only when the sun shines fiercely on my face,
i find that the vineyard is more green than the grass,
the colour in the distance dim,
but still appears very charming.

CEMETERY

compared with mansions and rooms,
it is more in need of flowers for decoration.
just like a bride to be soon married

without fence or barrier,
as if all family members
are sitting around the lawn in the yard.

as long as it is a fine and warm day,
there will be drummers beating the sky,
and a team for fetching the bride.

* * *

SOUTH INDIAN GARDEN

Squirrel-tail brushes the window-sill.
A plume falls from the sky.
Insects sing under the palm trees
drowning noise of nearby marketplace.

Blue peacock brings news from the North.
People bathe in the Ganges
washing away selfish motives and desires,
while the trunk of the elephants curl.

I have never been so close
to animals, living together —
I can see my heart more clearly now
than those times during long night-flights.

OCTAVE STRAIT

On the beautiful shores of Kerala
lies the old port town of Calicut.
The fleet of Zheng He once docked here.
Where is his buried bones lie, still unknown.

As he passed through the Octave Strait
enroute southwards to the Maldives,
he met the Portuguese by chance
in the sea strewn with rocks.

He heard the screams of ravens
as he continued along the boundary of
the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean,
slow sailing to Mogadishu.

MONK BARD

While a batsman from Orissa
won applause in Madurai,
we finished our afternoon tea
and entered the conference hall.

The bust of Mahatma Gandhi
stood under the West wall shade,
while on the two opposite sides
there were deer, elephants,

and the Royal Bengal Tiger. Forests
destroyed badly — just like
the beard and hair on his forehead
that make him a monk bard.

Irish Immigrant

Blown out of a tin whistle, I travelled
on a stranding tide which was pulling me back
to be sculpted alongside rocks, the messages
the same in all its washed-up bottles:
not to adapt to enemy territory.

From an eye corner, I saw long ships
and Spanish galleons adrift in formation
with booties which had left in exchange
the secrets of spirals to transfer to art,
dark waves of hair and olive complexions.

In my bag I had folded, for a quick escape,
a currach’s cured skin and a history book
spun from cauldrons and folk dyes
into Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Cúchullain,
fictions blended into fact to make untruth

a truth. With kick-marks of centuries
on my body from colonist robbers of chapels
and Georgian houses, I was dragged
through the stations of my own cross
over warpaths, my blank stares boarding up

eyes of Sassenachs who had blocked out
our windows, their sight removed,
not vision. Choppy waters rose in my arteries,
midstream, as I was dressed in caricature,
freckled by tacky lights from music halls,

and shown up – dancing mechanical jigs,
hands at my sides, then sniggered over
like some bad Irish joke. With my hair
corkscrewed by red-hot iron, I knew how
to kick up my heels with any navvy,

barrow-boy or drunk; and to dream of a land
where over-laden horses fell uphill, statues wept;
where there were too many First Fridays
and deaths from broken hearts. Yet the light
fell like grace over potato drills stretched

into piano-notes played with virtuosity
by the rains’ varying touches.
I had not expected a language, accustomed
though borrowed, to turn foreign. I wished
on my bones for familiar sagas to speak again

like friends; to hear stallion-stampedes
of my race bred from the whiteness of a swell
break themselves in to empower navies.
With the impossible passion of a first love,
I fell for the Ireland I had lost, chorusing,

with armies of my home-sick selves,
the refrains of deportees. Every immigrant
in one, I sat, packed in, on a cattle boat bound
for America from the Famine. Untouchable,
I lay in a TB sanatorium where tubes

stuffed with bigotries could not be swallowed.
Learning the million forms of decline,
I floated on an insular undertow, scarred by scum
from tides too contrary to be timetabled.
And I immigrated through different seas

under which everyone is cut from a single pelt,
forked tongues understand both their split sides,
and the light, however piecemeal, enlightens.
Old bottles smashed against ship-wrecked rocks
Christening death, with its the thud, the sole enemy.

Jilted Bride

This is her land: the swirling golds,
wild marjoram, the herons, kingfishers.
No wonder you fell for its contours
where climbers grapple and sandpipers skitter

towards the graceful courses of her rivers.
‘We remember her’, they say — the old-timers
in her local Tabac .‘The girl who married
the Irishman.’ In their faces, unused to straying,

I see the life she could have had: settled,
predictable, copper pans shone, floors polished,
alleys swept. Perhaps she as well as you wished
for other tongues to fashion italics

from the daily. In your own land, the skins,
even, of our souls could have merged, no risk
of custom’s erasures — had it not been
for fate’s choice of this French girl to be

your bride. Years on, I hold you in my breath,
at the corner of every experience, every idea.
Through the cowparsley patterning the near
with the far, I allow a flash of myself and you

innocently holidaying here. The velour shadows
falling from the sun, cut from the time
we never had, eclipse our atonement
on chestnut horsehair strings that swish away

impossibilities with flies. Through golds,
tarnished now, the café gossip insists you
remain that nameless Irishman, not the one I knew.
Unaware he is that I am the jilted bride

dressed, each summer, by the cowparsley,
in white. I wear, like a ring, the knowledge
of a divining through rivers whose sources
and mouths are one. Faithful, unfaithful, I dream on.

Yeats at Renvyle

The bells of fuschia, asphodel, bog-heather
swung their reds, oranges and purples in concert
as he drove up with his bride to the house
silvered by rain. The Twelve Bens stood by:

old hands at witnessing weddings of land, sky
and sea, the golden shore like a section
of some god’s own ring that could never wash
off the turf’s swollen finger. Everything here

was legible to him: the thorn trees bent
into humble cursives by the gales, lugworms
squiggling alphabets in thin casts; the tides,
high and low, writing their own tables

on rocks as they carved the coast into scriptures
stripped of denomination. Inside, hands shaken,
the papered walls started to speak of  flames,
ashes, re-buildings; and of the fists

of the starved hammering against them
for fish, a shiver of grain. His wife, picking up
a whisper of some Pirate queen married
into the Connaught clan who owned the site

before the settlers, heard her slam down
the notes of the tenor’s Steinway grand.
And a cold gust riffled his hair. Despite
the welcome, a boy made of air stood

over the self he had strangled by a pillar
in the North parlour. Worse, a face appeared
at the window, high cheek-boned: hers,
ghosting the infidelity in his head.

As the islands: Omey, Inisboffin, Achill,
Clare swapped places, did disappearing acts
under his gaze, the mountains wept his tears —
of lichen – down their marbled sides.

Convivial at dinner, he sank in secret
into his heart’s quicksands, the long room
in his mind filled with an Atlantic that lent him
the balance of its buoyancy on a salt tongue.

Note: Yeats and George Hyde Lees spent their honeymoon at Renvyle, Connemara.
           Renvyle was called ‘the silver-grey house’.
           The ‘pirate queen’ is Gráinne.

          Hers is Maud Gonne’s face

Dirty Old Men of Dublin

My childhood was full of them: dirty old men
charming snakes from opened flies. One
with a pledge badge on his lapel, grandchildren

like us, so he said; another hairy as an ape
in a beach hut. The regular always carried a gun.
If we passed him on our bikes, we hitched a lift back
in the bread van, in the wake of rabbits skinned.

Others hid in the grounds of derelict houses,
cultivating themselves in frames, under glass,
or creeping under creepers, silent as guards.

We glimpsed them from secret platforms in trees
or as we cut our wrists scaling walls of trespass.
We knew no more about men than cross-pollination
and, with cowparsley veils over our faces,

we dared each other approach their beckoning fingers.
Slimy and red-veined, they seemed mere mock-ups
from compendiums, necessary for our adventures

out of bounds. We saw one playing with long grass
as if making a bow for the fiddle of a malingerer.
On a slab of concrete he sat, watching us
seesawing over foundations of a new estate – 

on a plank and barrel, the child on top jumping off
to give the other a bump — into his arms. Rough
getting jolted hard enough to see stars and hear choirs

of angels pronounce a place without these odd men.
With the police-force of the Church behind us, we began
to fluff our lines in their defence before the Guardaí.
If the old men had repressed urges, then so did we.

They sit in our psyches now, the sad old men,
potential harm-doers, in subtle delineations often
of word or thought, not graphically translated

into action. We cannot disown their proclivities.
With masks instead of veils over our faces, we start
to creep under truths, under feelings, under whatever
is easiest not to confront – as if we are copying them

from some remove, under ivy and convolvulus creepers.
In our case, they stressed sex only as the undertone it is
at every age, in every life. Yet while the sirens wail —

who would drop the charges and believe us?

May Magnificat

Far off lady, our father named all the houses
in Ireland Stella Maris after you as your pull,
rivalling the moon’s, gave high spring tides
to his voyages and star-readings year round.

Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire, atá lán de ghrásta, Tá an Tiarna leat. Is beannaithe thú idir mná

Through Hail Marys in Gaelic he taught us
to honour you by heart,  reverently mumbling,
and to ignore the larger than life statue
of the Virgin presented by Dublin dockers

to him on North Wall for avoiding a strike.
We scuffed its plaster on the sill, rooted
from its base the snakes and looked instead
into your face for vision after vision, chanting

Agus is beannaithe toradh do bhroinne, Íosa. A Naomh-Mhuire, a Mháthair Dé...

It was you carpeting every month with bluebells,
stitching from their washes navy velvet cloaks
for us, your lap filled with treats baked
to compensate for what our part-lived histories lost.

Far off lady, bulbs from those long gone days
straggle over our gardens, their inland seas
dotted with our father’s rocking fleets,
your breath filling, still, their threadbare sails.

guigh orainn na peacaigh, anois, agus ar uair ár mbáis. Amen.

Close Watch

I sit beside you, observing, as if through a microscope,
your every blink, flicker, tic, and sigh as your noble face —
framed by the hospital pillow — changes to chalk, putty,
wax, alabaster and back to skin: too many metamorphoses

for a sculptor to handle let alone a concerned daughter.
Transparent to you here, I try only to keep vigil,
less practised than you who loomed like a moon
when, as a child, polio struck, and I was helped to festoon

with coloured crayons a diary of my delirium
wireless-tuned, by your guiding hand. I place a hand
now on your brow — not so calm as yours those years ago
full of medicines concocted, I believed, by you. Though

like your pre-war generation who called even close friends
mister and missus, you were never over-demonstrative —
you seem, today, to receive most naturally the kiss
I place, french-style, on your cheeks. As if you would not miss

familiarity and the chance to be pulled back into the life
you have been hanging onto by a thread. Difficult to know
what to want for you. I count your breaths, willing
the very counting to detain you, yet also half wanting —

in order to spare you any more — those very breaths to stop.
Safer wishes have me pretending the reversals amount to no more
than my stillness on a chair long since thrown out, beside you.
Instead of my girlish form, you play scherzos and impromptus

on the upright piano we learnt on. Fluent notes tumble,
technique exact, from your fingers without a lesson, your longing
to play fulfilled at last. But, while strange, chaotic words
blow like rainbow bubbles from your lips, I wonder what world

we both are in: you semi-comatose and me certainly not back
in the perfect partying childhood you sacrificed yourself to give me.
I sit beside you, my thoughts as random, fragmented,
surrealistic as yours. And I continue to observe each twist in the bed,

each shudder, gasp, kick, cry. The metamorphoses —
that not even Midas nor Circe would attempt to conjure — persist,
confounding science. Even centuries of sculptors would deny
that clay can ever be chiselled by more than a watchful eye.

Her Flat

The silver has been hidden away in case of burglars,
vases emptied of her favourite flowers, the toaster of crumbs.

Yet a scent of rosewater persists in rooms reflecting
all her graceful, dignified ages at once in mirrors 

that exclude the commode and zimmer frame. Echoes
of pill-shaking and washing recall visits by carers

who appeared like bookends for her life there for the reading
in albums, wardrobes, drawers, faded photos.

A stillness, almost holy, stops the bedroom turning
into an empty space without her. As if the naval Captain

in the picture, her husband, is guarding even her absence
with a timeless fidelity, parading decades of his yearnings

not to have widowed her beneath the arch of swords
sailors have held up ever since their wedding day pre-war.

Gone are the handwritten shopping lists left on the trolley.
With needs not defined as dependence, she was proud to afford 

advice, humour and stories for daughters who tried
to remain latitudes and longitudes in her threadbare world

after its gravity had gone. The extra banister on the stair attests
to a struggle. But the garden recalls her love of the outside,

spreading leaf mulch and peat on its beds, her green fingers
creating buds out of season on the azaleas and rose bushes

she planted. The tulip tree, half itself now like her,
under some preservation order, lingers longer

than she has managed in these precincts, its missing limbs
moving with her, maybe, to make new bowers in the home

where she is nursed. But the sun, through the bow window,
spotlights on the upright piano her favourite hymns,

refusing to let her go. Slanting through dust motes, its beams
offer her life-lines to hang onto, golden crutches to fold up 

and keep after darkness falls, weightless scaffolding that angels
dance on, evicting burglars with steps that resurrect and redeem.

A Silent Valediction

(from the Pyrenées where Camille Claudel was taken by Rodin and another time by
Paul, her brother, including to Lourdes, addressed to Rodin)

Go, go into the morning, deaf to drums.
There are crows enough to send you off
and clouds to leave behind faint bruises.

Sweep through mists, shaving your face
on mountain edges. Know that — for you —
this woman would have slapped her life

against a wall to dry into kindling
and offered up her lengths of hair. Go —
regret not the valley’s floral show,

its rainbows. Laugh off intensities
in new clearings, borrowing the armour
of rocks usually her dice when heights

penetrate you with music. There’s work
for the asking beyond those mountains
which stand like noblemen, shirking contests,

backs turned on your courses. Go.
Leave her washing herds of wild horses
with songs that would only make you poor —

before her river grows into a sea
and she words you into tallstories.
Consider simply the ravines at your feet:

never a heart’s dichotomies. Go.
Chosen before the sun, you cannot backtrack.
Perish, with her, from reality.

Requiescat in Pace

I am painting your name in loud colours
on the gravestones in every churchyard in Paris,
outraged at having to practise death like this —

with no requiem except the unaccompanied silence
of each moment without you; no saining ritual,
myself the sole mourner, a black band

constricting my heart. Were it not so messy:
our Love in the heads of flowers unfastening
from memorials on the right and left bank, 

I would order plumed ebony horses and a carriage
to transport the emptiness, my life dragging down
the remains of time, its cortège without a wake.

As it is, I reject the hands of those angels
meant to guard me, and ignore the ghosts
of the grandest couple we could have been

who wander into distances down boulevards,
through parks, creaking gravel paths. Only
the screech-owl holds my pain in its midnight cry.

The Seine knows I still know you in my bones
as it slinks along, holding in its span the mirage
I was for you. Devils dance in its currents,

laughing at the years that have come and gone
and will come and go without us, while scaffolders
pull you off the points of steeples and stars.

In case of regrets, you might find a vestige of me
pressed between the parchment of musty hymnals,
or in the tuning whistle for Gregorian chant

where I forbid muffled vespers from aisles to hint
that you were not worthy. Requiescat in pace.
Candles flicker at the desecration of my offertory.

Letters Unsent

[from a sequence, Rodin’s Shadow. The voice of Camille Claudel]

i
Woman flying out of a window
from the Château de l’Islette, near Azay, 1890 where Camille was sent by Rodin to recover from a possible abortion

In the record heat meant to be ours,
I have been seen as a woman flying
out of a window with a red umbrella
to set fire to forests which cannot  

burn out. Holocausts of sunflowers
are mourning, in black bonnets,
their own martyrdoms, attesting
to a sun that crackles as it sets

all day, red, over your absence.
You would only have had to be
in my midst to embrace me. Unlike
the sky which needs to study

its own image in water in order to
court the charred land, we would need
no reflection. We could have made up
beds of rivers never before stripped,

have composed on the mesh
of mossed tidemarks a new gush of music
for our lineage, giving — to receive
in the river’s tempo our own currents.

Yet the crime of our pact to deny life
by your not being here cannot be
covered up by the greenest slime.
Too much time has elapsed and no time

for me to give each singed sunflower,
each smoking tree, my dream of you
on which to thrive. Without you, I am
a pyromaniac, at the bottom of each ravine.

I fly back in through the window
with the red umbrella, pacing up and down
as I count the hearts I have torn from stones.
I let them cry out to you.

ii
Letter Unwritten
from the Château at Asnay-le Rideau where Camille was staying alone – to Rodin

I cannot write to you.
Stylish sentences tear from me
ghostwritten to swank confidently
as impostors in a foreign tongue.
Posing to their best advantage
they shun the guidance of my hand,
forbidding me a cue.
Worse than all the drafts
of silence is their final copy.

I cannot write to you.
Your skin should be the notepaper,
my fingers the words. The unwritten
alone is meant to be read and you
are looking over my shoulder, author
of my world’s night-long dawns.
Only to the unsent do you
regularly reply. Your express mail
my mind to itself delivers.

iii
Another Language
from the Château d’Islette where Camille went alone

If it could, my body would speak to you
of its own fields surveyed by the woman
inside myself — who trusses the tinders
of range and vale for the passion,

still, of a high fire. Not resigned
to weeds growing up makeshift fences,
to parched rivers losing their sources
in lunar months forbidden any menses,

she coats stones with gilt to pave
plains shaved by tongues of traitors.
Then claps at the desires disowned by me
which writhe into a cabaret in my craters.

She doesn’t notice shadows of telltale lines
from the overgrown plough, under which I
purposefully inter myself, refusing
your reflection in her glad eye.

Nor know how, though resigned to loss,
like her I dream of you returning
to spread parklands over my geography,
uniting the three of us in one burning.