New and Selected Poems (23 page)

Pain was pulled down over his eyes like a fool’s hat.

They pressed electrodes of pain through the parietals.

He was helpless as a lamb

Which cannot be born

Whose head hangs under its mother’s anus.

Pain was stabbed through his palm, at the crutch of the M,

Made of iron, from earth’s core.

From that pain he hung,

As if he were being weighed.

The cleverness of his fingers availed him

As the bullock’s hooves, in the offal bin,

Avail the severed head

Hanging from its galvanized hook.

Pain was hooked through his foot.

From that pain, too, he hung

As on display.

His patience had meaning only for him

Like the sanguine upside-down grin

Of a hanging half-pig.

There, hanging,

He accepted the pain beneath his ribs

Because he could no more escape it

Than the poulterer’s hanging hare,

Hidden behind eyes growing concave,

Can escape

What has replaced its belly.

He could not understand what had happened.

Or what he had become.

How it hung

In the electrical loom

Of the Himalayas – I remember

The spectre of a rose.

All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.

In the Shah’s Evin Motel

The Manageress – a thunderhead Atossa –

Wept on her bed

Or struck awe. Tragic Persian

Quaked her bosom – precarious balloons of water –

But still nothing worked.

Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust.

With a splash of keys

She ripped through the lock, filled my room, sulphurous,

With plumbers –

Twelve-year-olds, kneeling to fathom

A pipeless tap sunk in a blank block wall.

I had a funny moment

Beside the dried-up river of boulders. A huddle of families

Were piling mulberries into wide bowls, under limp, dusty trees.

All the big males, in their white shirts,

Drifted out towards me, hands hanging –

I could see the bad connections sparking inside their heads

As I picked my way among thistles

Between dead-drop wells – open man-holes

Parched as snake-dens –

Later, three stoned-looking Mercedes,

Splitting with arms and faces, surfed past me

Warily over a bumpy sea of talc,

The uncials on their number-plates like fragments of scorpions.

I imagined all Persia

As a sacred scroll, humbled to powder

By the God-conducting script on it –

The lightning serifs of Zoroaster –

The primal cursive.

Goats, in charred rags,

Eyes and skulls

Adapted to sunstroke, woke me

Sunbathing among the moon-clinker.

When one of them slowly straightened into a goat-herd

I knew I was in the wrong century

And wrongly dressed.

All around me stood

The tense, abnormal thistles, desert fanatics;

Politicos, in their zinc-blue combat issue;

Three-dimensional crystal theorems

For an optimum impaling of the given air;

Arsenals of pragmatic ideas –

I retreated to the motel terrace, to loll there

And watch the officers half a mile away, exercising their obsolete horses.

A bleaching sun, cobalt-cored,

Played with the magnetic field of the mountains.

And prehistoric giant ants, outriders, long-shadowed,

Cast in radiation-proof metals,

Galloped through the land, lightly and unhindered,

Stormed my coffee-saucer, drinking the stain –

At sunset

The army flag rested for a few minutes

Then began to flow North.

I found a living thread of water

Dangling from a pipe. A snake-tongue flicker.

An incognito whisper.

It must have leaked and smuggled itself, somehow,

From the high Mother of Snows, halfway up the sky.

It wriggled these last inches to ease

A garden of pot-pourri, in a tindery shade of peach-boughs,

And played there, a fuse crackling softly –

As the whole city

Sank in the muffled drumming

Of a subterranean furnace.

And over it

The desert’s bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion

Thickened a pinky-purple thunderlight.

The pollen of the thousands of years of voices

Murmurous, radio-active, rubbing to flash-point –

Scintillating through the migraine

The world-authority on Islamic Art

Sipped at a spoonful of yoghurt

And smiling at our smiles described his dancing

Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads

(But only God, he said, can create a language).

Journalists proffered, on platters of silence,

Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –

Chastened, I listened. Then for the belly-dancer

(Who would not dance on my table, would not kiss me

Through her veil, spoke to me only

Through the mouth

Of her demon-mask

Warrior drummer)

I composed a bouquet – a tropic, effulgent

Puff of publicity, in the style of Attar,

And saw myself translated by the drummer

Into her liquid

Lashing shadow, those arabesques of God,

That thorny fount.

Bones is a crazy pony.

Moon-white – star-mad.

All skull and skeleton.

Her hooves pound. The sleeper awakes with a cry.

Who has broken her in?

Who has mounted her and come back

Or kept her?

She lifts under them, the snaking crest of a bullwhip.

Hero by hero they go –

Grimly get astride

And their hair lifts.

She laughs, smelling the battle – their cry comes back.

Who can live her life?

Every effort to hold her or turn her falls off her

Like rotten harness.

Their smashed faces come back, the wallets and the watches.

And this is the stunted foal of the earth –

She that kicks the cot

To flinders and is off.

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

Before the soft words with their spores

The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death

Do not worship the telephone

It drags its worshippers into actual graves

With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone

Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone

Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone

Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone

Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone

Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

The secret police of the telephone

O phone get out of my house

You are a bad god

Go and whisper on some other pillow

Do not lift your snake head in my house

Do not bite any more beautiful people

You plastic crab

Why is your oracle always the same in the end?

What rake-off for you from the cemeteries?

Your silences are as bad

When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane

The stars whisper together in your breathing

World’s emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece

Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses

Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters

And you cannot utter

Lies or truth, only the evil one

Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections

To where death bleaches its crystals

You swell and you writhe

You open your Buddha gape

You screech at the root of the house

Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone

A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone

A dead body will fell out of the telephone

Do not pick up the telephone

When it comes down to it

Hair is afraid. Words from within are afraid.

They sheer off, like a garment,

Cool, treacherous, no part of you.

Hands the same, feet, and all blood

Till nothing is left. Nothing stays

But what your gaze can carry.

And maybe you vomit even that, like a too-much poison.

Then it is

That the brave hunger of your skull

Supplants you. It stands where you stood

And shouts, with a voice you can’t hear,

For what you can’t take.