Emporium (4 page)
Authors: Ian Pindar
are bodies in disguise
mixing sighs and
tears in a lost garden.
An air of importance
permeates these
cosmonauts of
compost,
which the pomp of sky and stars
ignores.
Foolish men
inhabit their bodies like
metaphors.
From whorehouse to hospital morgue
They carried his bier
And questions were asked in the Senate
Of an old bawd.
They carried his bier
Talking of plans for a statue
Of an old bawd
Following his coffin.
Talking of plans for a statue
On the Statehouse lawn
Following his coffin
From funeral to family plot.
On the Statehouse lawn
His widow was led
From funeral to family plot
To waltz with a mystery man.
His widow was led
From palm lounge to dance floor
To waltz with a mystery man
Suffused with exotic suspense.
From palm lounge to dance floor
From war zone to uninhabited citadel
Suffused with exotic suspense
Watched by the patient sniper.
From war zone to uninhabited citadel
Her son ran in terror
Watched by the patient sniper
Surrounded by drifting sands.
Her son ran in terror
From whorehouse to hospital morgue
Surrounded by drifting sands
And questions were asked in the Senate.
They are shooting birds in Russia
to prevent the spread of
infection. The State Hygiene
Agency’s instructions are
to shoot birds
in population centres
and in their nesting places.
‘The shooting of birds is
pointless,’ said one expert.
‘Birds are very mobile
and there are so many
you can never exterminate
them all even if you give
every idiot a gun.’
Evenings were longer then, a winter chill
turned in the headlamps of returning care.
Street lighting and a confounding moon make pale
the carried and reluctant carrier.
Words sink like stones in the air.
So the weather drops another degree.
Pestered by their bodies, woken from dreams,
impatient invalids stoke the fire.
Something like this illustrated evenings ignore.
Difficult breathing, the worry of drums
and that season’s native mystery.
… it did not want to love yet wanted to live on love.
T
HUS
S
POKE
Z
ARATHUSTRA
They breed on the branches of trees,
colonise the land, seek safety in numbers
and keep moist by drinking sugary soft drinks.
Vulnerable to the vagaries of the global economy,
they come upon white shores, ignorant of the inhabitants,
utter brief words, build bridges and sing of ages past.
Their children are small and brown well into adulthood,
when they are bought and sold, dropped from great heights
into enemy territory to become
bleached bones and souvenirs, perhaps
a television documentary, if they are lucky.
The unlucky are soon forgotten.
. . .
After a decade of treading water
he recalls his optimistic youth,
broods on abandoned loves, lost friends, dead-end jobs …
A line of boulders at the front door cannot be shifted.
He must find a new home, dashes out on to the moors,
follows predators and slams doors.
At midnight he sings the blues.
He is continually searching for her on long journeys.
She haunts him everywhere and communicates by shrill,
high-pitched shrieks.
A turd like a curious
cobra or pagan idol, inwardly
trembling, knows this man and woman
of old. It is watching and waiting to see
if they are going to worship it or
destroy it. It would like to assume an air of
insouciance.
We should worship it,
she says.
Worship a turd?
Preposterous!
says he, waving a tiny
pick-axe hand, his red snake fixing
its one eye on her fingers, aching to be
stroked and choked but
she is too busy holding up the sky.
It takes a man in all he might be
heavy twisted rope of consequence
of no consequence
weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Not a man but a twister.
Outside the mob demanding: ‘Who comes?
Who is it now dares speak for us,
for our lives?’
The virtues work
through us. They do not
indwell. They do not
inhere. They are not
in here. There are no
virtuous people
only good acts,
always virtue and its opposite –
the virtues working through us.
It takes a man to unmake
his masculinity, to unmake
the man they made him.
We are come to this. Coming
here in all innocence, willing to hear,
willing to be made and unmade
and taught the virtue of checking
our facts, consistency, avoidance of error,
making a life appear reliable,
a narrative, a story we tell others:
My name is … I live at … I am …
I have … I want to … with you
that they may understand who it is
speaks to them today,
and who they are every day of their lives
until there are no more days.
Someone will come after me and say:
‘This poem was said once, as I am saying it
now,
as others will say of me:
“He breathed – he spoke – he stood
in the garden at midnight and wondered
at the wonder of a mortal brain
coming to consciousness, the cruelty of a mortal brain
coming to consciousness,
the birth and death
of individual consciousness.”’
Living appeals, as you appeal
to me, as I appeal to the gods – those crazy imaginary gods –
as I appeal to the soldiers
beating on my door
The great Emathian conqueror did spare
The house of Pindarus …
But in wartime
Husbands dragged from wives
Sons from mothers.
At Rodez once
the Nazis in retreat
shot thirty maquisards,
smashed in their skulls with stones
to finish it. At Rodez in August 1944
the day before the town was liberated.
At Rodez, the wind out of Rodez,
whipping the hill, whipping the old asylum
carrying the cries of the mad
to the townsfolk, the benighted townsfolk,
the cries of Antonin Artaud,
still awaiting liberation
at the psychiatric hospital
with its garden and little chapel,
the asylum where he grew his hair
and was visited nightly there
by his daughters of the heart.
Everywhere I go
       People are talking about Antonin Artaud.
Turn on the radio
       Radio 2
              And it's
Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu.
Everywhere I go
       People are talking about Antonin Artaud.
Turn on the theatre of cruelty
       (I mean the TV)
              And the housemates are in the garden discussing Van Gogh,
                      the man suicided by society.
And there's nothing the man in the street doesn't know
       About
Artaud le Momô
Because everywhere I go
       People are talking about
              People are delirious about Antonin Artaud.
… and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid …
A T
HOUSAND
P
LATEAUS
Hiding its one
terrible testicle
underground it rises
Venus-like, immodest
bloom, complete with eyes,
antennae and wings,
its prominent labellum
(‘covered in long dense,
lustrous reddish hairs’)
‘similar in colour and structure
to the female wasp’s
abdomen’. It even
smells the same: ‘a floral
scent that imitates
the sex pheromone’.
Suckered by this
counterfeit come-on, it
attempts copulation
(properly ‘pseudo-
copulation’) – mounting
the labellum ‘with
vigorous waving of
wings and abdominal
probing’, ‘the genital
claspers at the tip of
the abdomen partially
open’. The wasp becomes
a part of the orchid’s
reproductive apparatus.
A becoming-wasp of the orchid.
A becoming-orchid of the wasp.
. . .
Having plucked
its rose it rests, horns of pollinia
on its head, before flying
on to the next false female.
The boy in the white nightgown
has escaped again. These woods
are damp. I am invisible.
Sincerely I believe in
the Society of Blood,
the Sick People and
the Mountain. I am still
listening to the sea,
still repeating myself. Something
has happened to my right hand.
It won’t be polite to
the authorities, it won’t
make a fist in the air.
Women always make
an impression. You
were tender beyond
compare. The memory
of the two of us does not
console. Your face, a
glowing coal.
I am weary of being
examined. I prophesy:
a wilderness is essential
to humankind, an indifferent
wildness, full of varied
shapes and colours, loves and
sympathies, and incapable
of guilt. Perhaps a violent
storm overnight could transform
this mute material,
shape it, as I never could.
Without the strictures of
a plot the results are
as we find them:
the crash of a statue
in the dark. I tried to
remember where I was going
and what it was you wanted
me to do. You always told me
I would die alone,
My Night Apple,
my little former friend.
‘…
and there is no reason to demand
that immigrants should renounce
their nationalitarian belonging
or the cultural traits that cling
to their very being,’
says Guattari in
The Three Ecologies,
but don’t try explaining this
to your friends down
the pub late one
evening after
work over
a few pints or
first the one will
denounce you:
RACIST!
Then the other
(closer to your heart):
RACIST!
white faces of anger and indignation.
Racist, they’ll call you
racist and you’ll try to
explain but they’ll
call you racist
and storm out
into the night, and you’ll sit
there many eyes upon
you and smoke another
cigarette with trembling
hand, then walk
home alone to your crappy
flat and wonder
what all that was about.
And the next day your
friends will send you
an email calling you
Enoch Powell
but lunchtime will bring
a bag of jelly babies by way of
a peace offering
and you’ll take
one and one of them
will say: ‘It’s a black
one! It’s a black one!’
and you’re not sure if
you should eat a black
baby but you
eat it and they are
happy and you
chew the jelly baby
chew it all
up
and swallow it.