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I lay the suitcase on Father’s bed and unzip it slowly, gently. Inside, packed in cloth strait-jackets lie forty live hummingbirds tied down in rows, each tiny head cushioned on a swaddled body. I feed them from a flask of sugar water, inserting every bill into the pipette, then unwind their bindings so Father can see their changing colours as they dart around his room. They hover inches from his face as if he’s a flower, their humming just audible above the oxygen recycler. For the first time since I’ve arrived he’s breathing easily, the cannula attached to his nostrils almost slips out. I don’t know how long we sit there but when I next glance at his face he’s asleep, lights from their feathers still playing on his eyelids and cheeks. It takes me hours to catch them all and wrap them in their strait-jackets. I work quietly, he’s in such a deep sleep he doesn’t wake once.
The Larzac, a country of 'story solitude' – Paul Marres I like to start before dawn, when the bark is still coursing with star-sap, when I can see filaments of oxygen pour through glass leaves of the ghost-canopy, before the sun evaporates them.
My carved creatures talk with root tongues. They tell me their story solitudes, and I try to be true to them, I who have not spent my life at the heart of this huge plateau,
but who can draw from the well of my soul, as from tree rings, the concentric solitudes. I release them with my mallet, in the fading moon's balm.
I draw up the toad, the cops owl, the ram, the giant carline thistle opening at first light like a supernova.
I summon the bison beetle, the wild boar, the royal eagle. They pass through the conduits of my arms and out through my fingers.
The chisel's nose smells their fears as it strokes their skins.
I work fast, before noise taints the day, attending to the silences streaming in from the Grand Larzac Causse, that gather around this elm like an axis.
My armoire, ormeau mort, engraved with an acorn from the pubescent white oak, a hornets' nest, a horn of plenty, an ear of wheat – all wood-quiet.
These are the forms I can name. Others my chisel shapes when I'm tired. Then it's as if the Larzac is working through me, carving the mistral's masks, the night's pageant.
And the shepherd who has seen these things. As the sun rises, the lamb he is carrying across his shoulders, grows heavy as a dead tree.
He whispers this to me, from his place in the lower trunk, when I am too exhausted to go on. My body lightens then. I climb to the top of the main branch
and carve a pilot hanging naked, his feet caught by snakes, his arms raised as if trailing an invisible parachute, its silks tangled in boughs of the Milky Way.
Whenever we make love, you say it’s like making love to a crash – I bring the bus with me into the bedroom. There’s a lull, like before the fire brigade arrives, flames licking the soles of our feet. Neither of us knows when the petrol tank will explode. You say I’ve decorated my house to recreate the accident – my skeleton wired with fireworks, my menagerie flinging air about. You look at me in my gold underwear – a crone of sixteen, who lost her virginity to a lightning bolt. It’s time to pull the handrail out. I didn’t expect love to feel like this – you holding me down with your knee, wrenching the steel rod from my charred body quickly, kindly, setting me free.
Dear Father, after Mother’s death, after I’d read all your letters to her and her letters to you
and finally understood that I was the fruit of her rape, I walked into the forest.
The tribe I met there helped me write this letter preparing me as they would prepare a boy
who wanted to become a man. The elders raided nests of giant hunting ants
for three hundred shining black workers which they wove into the palm fibres of a glove,
their stinging abdomens pointing inwards. They blew on them to enrage them.
They painted my writing hand with black dye from the genipap fruit and thrust it into the glove.
I had to remain silent while the ants attacked. Can you smell the lemony scent of formic acid?
These words are dancing the Tocandeiro. I hope you’re dancing as you hold my letter,
as I had to dance wearing the ant glove stomping my soles hard on the ground.
Afterwards I cut the stones from my feet. Afterwards I celebrated with a feast
biting off ant-heads to suck blood from their bodies until my lips and tongue were numb.
I hope you’ve sucked the blood from the words that stung you. My hand is still swollen.
Are your fingers swelling as they stroke my signature? Are your lips and tongue numb from kissing my kisses?
My hand is always in the glove, writing goodbye, red and blue feathers flutter from my wrist.
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