INTRODUCTION
AVERIL BONES
COUNTING REPTILES
CONTENTS
HEATHER FERGUSON
THE SHIP OF FLOWERS
WHEN FLOWERS HURT ME
GENESIS
LAMENT FOR TOM
AUTUMN CAT
HOW THE MOON GREW UP
TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY
LOOKING FOR SIGNS
Credits
KAREN ALKALEY-GUT
TOWERS
MOSHE BENARROH
A world without me
The black man from the back room
The new Bukowski
My promised land of unfulfilled promises
I have seen your black eye
POST SCRIPTUM
HEATHER FERGUSON
Credits
AVERIL BONES
COUNTING REPTILES
I
I was out in the Australian bush,
burned bronze, blackened a deep
carciginess colour, blistering
the deep chocolate brown of a
bandy bandy's snakescale skin
all-sort striped Lindt dark and
creamy like a winter thigh.
Caught in a dark rustle
of undergrowth, humus slippery
with the highways of slugs
and sticking with a fruity
fairy smell to the palms
of my hands, a bandy bandy
in the glare of an Eveready beam.
II
There are places in Australia
like Wagga Wagga, where
you can tell the locals by
what they call the town,
"Yeah mate, Wagga's that way,"
so holding the torch I wasn't sure
if I should say just bandy
into the leprechaun ear
of this smokey dreamtime spectre,
whose humus hands held up a serpent.
Or meet the quick bright smile
showing white through the
ginger of his beard. See,
we were out counting reptiles.
HEATHER FERGUSON
THE SHIP OF FLOWERS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
for Jim and Darlene
Alone in the drizzle,
a farmer surveys the newly-ploughed field
behind the house where his wife is.
You are the sea,
furrows of earth white with gulls.
I plot my course over you by the stars.
The smell of coffee and wet hair. Lilacs spilling out
from a glass jar. The children leave.
You are a ship of flowers,
stays and mast rich with clematis,
your hold full of smooth white eggs.
In all my delighted plunder, I broke not one.
She hangs out the dripping sheets,
fighting sudden gusts of wind.
You are the well-trimmed sail,
perfect curves under the bedclothes.
The thin white surface that moves the vessel.
A knock at the door. A neighbour.
You are port and harbour, reckoning and shelter.
I give my all and receive.
Your ropes hold me to the shore.
HEATHER FERGUSON
WHEN FLOWERS HURT ME
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a day when flowers hurt me
when birds fall to earth transfixed with song
when the moon ploughs serenely backwards
through the sky.
Clouds cross the sun
The moon lights your face
The wind whispers tales of love
Across the land.
This is a day when beasts converse
when lemmings fling themselves in seas of wine
when the famished lion retracts its claws
and frees its prey.
Deer browse in the alders
Cats come to my door
The wind whispers tales of love
Across the land.
This is a day when deserts bloom
When fire-swept lands flood with green
When evening sets the harbour all aflame.
The brook follows its course
The sea receives its own
The wind whispers tales of love
Across the land.
Your unwritten letter rests in my hands like a Chinese scroll
unfathomable brushstrokes, yet beautiful...
the sweetest rose has fewer secrets than this.
HEATHER FERGUSON
GENESIS
~~~~~~~
1.
I was sleeping profoundly as you passed.
You left your footprints on the void.
Cedar and cinnamon,
rosewood and clove
announced another world.
Your heel bore down
and compressed my darkness,
leaving an imprint of light;
your sleeve brushed my face.
A whisper of song filled my room.
Echoes perfumed the night.
The house swaddled me close about;
the hours swirled around me.
Before you came
darkness covered the earth.
2.
The mists cleared.
In the moonless night I lost my way.
The ground gave underfoot
and I fell through the void.
3.
Let tears be my witness:
your melodies swept me away.
I tumbled into the night
as a diver leaves the boat.
The sultry air grew heavy;
I plunged into tidal waters.
The delta spread its fingers out
towards me.
Here currents
found their balance, warm and cold.
Salt water and sweet water
left their taste on my lips.
Then a rock appeared in the stream
and an island rose from the sea.
My blind fingers explored the rock,
played in sand,
I clumped loam in my fist.
Most fortunate castaway!
In a dream you stroked my thighs
and the earth ran rampant with vines.
Pear and cardamom, apple and allspice,
your saffron smile kissed my eyes.
I dreamed of grasses and rushes,
where water and earth join.
4.
You emptied your pockets
and sun, moon and stars spilled out!
You scorned these riches;
you tossed them into the air like doves
and they found their place.
I curled into the crook of your arm.
Light filled my heart.
Warmth flowed in my veins.
I opened my eyes.
At last I knew my age
and could speak.
5.
We were rich in angelfish and eels.
Shoals of sardine
brightened our slow-moving days.
The corals blossomed and grew.
Amid these leisurely gardens
we loved.
Gulls stitched heaven and sea together.
Great rookeries whitened the isles
and cliffs.
We clambered over the rocks
and reckoned our wealth.
6.
Wherever I turned, placid beasts
came to my side.
Antelope cropped the grass;
horses rolled in the dust.
Lions slept in the dry savanna shade.
We took names.
7.
Now at dusk
night is welcome;
dreams bless its course.
Day inhabits the night
like a friend
and our daily works
borrow freely from dream.
The dark is shot through with light.
We sleep and wake fulfilled.
HEATHER FERGUSON
LAMENT FOR TOM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You curl up on your hospital bed
and struggle with nightmares.
Laboured breath and heaving ribs
are your whole world.
You cry out in fear
at the sound of your name.
You wake to face a strange woman
across a no man's land. Subtle speaker
deprived of language, you eye me coldly.
I turn my head and walk away ashamed.
You have planted your mind's seed in my heart.
My womb grows heavy with black flowers.
Patches of night form within
and I am filled with stars.
But see how they slip out of my body
in hot tears.
HEATHER FERGUSON
AUTUMN CAT
~~~~~~~~~~
A cat slides across open lawn, belly low,
shorn of shadow, glancing sideways
naked under enemy fire.
The dizzying space yawns and rolls;
distant shrubs loom like banks of fog
snipers, perhaps ...
No fish here and certainly no mice,
none daring the antiseptic, frost-white stage;
a ruler rules but briefly in this tiny realm.
This chessboard,
with space dissected into quarters, into eighths, into hundreds
hundredths stretching into quarters ...
The cat clears one mark, slowing clears another...
yet another... freezes
Ah death, you have such clean hands!
HEATHER FERGUSON
HOW THE MOON GREW UP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When the moon came crashing out of the sky
it was not yet ripe;
indeed, was very young.
So a peasant woman piled her wash on the shore
and rocked the wailing crescent just like a child.
It cried for blood
so she used its cutting edge on wheat, on straw,
and her man scythed his enemies in the moonless night.
A winged thing now, a boomerang
to kill birds, to test the thickness of the wind,
to cut lethal tracks across the fenceless sky.
Till a careless throw returned it to the stars,
a moon half-grown and slightly red.
HEATHER FERGUSON
TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A full moon rises at sunset.
Floats between walls of fire,
perfectly contained.
Its face strangely magnified
in the mauve sky.
A woman stands on the broad steps
of a stone church.
Open me, she cries, and gathers light
to her breast like roses.
The moon pauses over a spire.
The photographer adjusts his lens.
The woman parts heavy doors,
and enters into perpetual dusk.
She lights a candle.
The photographer reaches into her chest.
He is not surprised by the pomegranates,
the startled song of sleepy birds under her ribs,
the blood of waiting seeds.
Open me, she cries.
The candle flickers.
The moon rises fast.
A full breast brushing past clouds.
A harvest belly praising autumn fields.
HEATHER FERGUSON
LOOKING FOR SIGNS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We stopped the car to observe and wonder.
The sky had turned on its side.
The solid and steady plateaux of clouds
had jack-knifed, nose-dived
and rested on the nearby hills.
The banks of clouds were stacked up
like torn papers, obscure standards -
heaven laying a hand on distant earth.
When the sky no longer covers us,
where shall we turn? The stars
will flood us every night,
a battery of beauty
deadly and insistent.
In the gathering twilight we looked for signs:
lightning or a roar of rain.
Then left unsatisfied,
unsafe for home.
KAREN ALKALEY-GUT
TOWERS
~~~~~~
10-2001
I
Too soon after
the terrible disaster
we flee from Israel to Ireland
when nobody is in the air
except those more fearful on earth
looking for
atmosphere
Men are dying hot and coldly
give every man a flask my boy
and a farlock on his shoulder
II
The airport isn't empty.
I thought every one would be home
far from the ongoing terrors of last week
watching the sifting of remains,
the self-stimulation for the sacrifice of war.
I thought everyone would be there,
or at the beach casting the sins of the year
into the waters of oblivion.
But everyone here seems to behave
as if
nothing had happened.
Here at Duty-Free
in Ben Gurion
only the Arabs are absent.
from the usual bustle.
I miss the sound and sight
of people part of my life
but am sadly relieved.
And instead of a holiday
I am hunkering
for an argument.
Like the exiled Syrian poet,
Mohammed Al Maghut,
I hear the horses of war
thundering towards me
and am looking
for someone
anyone
to punch in the nose.
Once on emerald soil
the rage within me dies.
Between the rocks on the Burren,
crowded fern grow with milkwort and moss
excitedly but in peace.
III
The ruined towers
peeking everywhere
from the magical verdure
call out to us
of the news we flee,
the vain need for a safe place.
Again and again I see
the second plane
circling into
the World Trade Center.
Yeats knew how to do it,
restored his tower and wrote
on its stone of it transience:
may these characters remain
when all is ruin once again
IV
OUR LADY OF KNOCK
We drive to Sligo looking for the supernatural,
letting our spirit guide the way.
Toward night, with no place to stay,
the dim neon of the Belmont Hotel
invites us to shelter - its cozy lobby
with a group of ancient ladies
sitting out the evening, rousing
at the arrival of two scruffy strangers.
Vaguely I note the door signs in the hall
to our room - Shihatsu, Clay Baths, Yoga -
what kind of place is this - the cross on the wall,
the elegant dinner in an empty dining hall.
The brochure makes it all clear - we are near
a shrine where Mary appeared over a hundred
years ago - and now there are holy, healing waters
and prayer for healing.
In the morning we visit the shrine, fill the plastic bottles
we bought that say "I prayed for you at Knock," close our eyes
and entreat for sanity to be restored to the world.
V
Why do I rage
at being erased
from history?
Why should an Irish museum
trace the Holy Book
to a Hebrew source?
Yet tears stream from me
at a whole exhibit devoted
to books of great religions
that has not even one letter
in Hebrew
to a timeline of civilization
that does not mention
the Holocaust
VI
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.
In this remote Glebe House
Ben Ladin will never find me
or Saddam or Hamas-
even the fairies do not come near.
We close the heavy shutters
before the walled garden
that borders the deep forest
and sleep at last the sleep
of the protected.
In the morning Irish dew
glistens over the vegetables,
the wall, the forest. And our radio
picks up only music.
VII
When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
Dingle
in the rain -
We all look down
or hide in a scarf.
Sure the aquarium
will be dingy and sad
we are tired
of the wind
weary of the damp
that pervades
like the obscenities of the news
And we elect to visit the fish.
There in the Touch Tank
are forms I recognize
from various dinners.
On the floor,
covered with sand,
round shapes with eyes
regard my motion, my silence.
I lean over and watch
the mackerel circle
obsessively
in their round space
as if their schoolmaster
had punished them with endless parades-
But I am projecting humanity
out of loneliness
onto fish furcrissake
Until a bream reaches out to me
at first tentatively, swimming up
for a look. Next he calls his friends
I swear, and I am the object
of gossip I am sure.
One by one they come
and raise their heads
from the water
and speak with me.
Please believe me, we really spoke.
I think they even changed my life.
It does me no good
to tell this to people
in the city. Even
the Irish look at me
as if I was a poet.
VIII
The friends that have I do it wrong
Whenever I remake a song
Should know what issue is at stake:
it is myself that I remake
-- Yeats
Now here's a bard who remade
a whole nation, gave it
myth, meaning.
All we need
is to see
beyond
the falling roofs.
MOSHE BENARROH
A world without me
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I imagine a world without me
but I can't
A world without me is a world
where people read my poems
my books
I can't imagine a world where people
don't read my poems.
In my absence people read more of me.
Maybe I should learn.
MOSHE BENARROH
The black man from the back room
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No one had the the time to see the face
of the black man in the black suite from the back room.
He handed an envelope to the clerk
and disappeared before he was seen.
Later people said his eyes were black
his skin was black "and not brown" said
the little child.
In the envelope his request:
100,000 dead children.
His merchandise:
two more years of oxygen.
MOSHE BENARROH
The new Bukowski
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
browsing through the poems
it all makes sense
the rejections, my wife's screams
my children driving me crazy
in a few lines
he makes sense of it all
7 years after Buk's dead
John Martin promises more volumes of poetry
this is his fourth posthumous
352 pages, for many poets
this is the collected poems book
I have this idea that Buk
was not only a great poet
he was the greatest computer man on earth
and set up a program that when pushing enter
gives you a complete poetry book
we have the Fante poems, the races poems
the women, and the flies, the 3 A.M. poems
the father the mother poems
all his books like a novel
from childhood till death
I read a review of Bukowski in which the reviewer
attacked the readers, I read it twice to be sure
I hadn't got it wrong. Her thesis was
that since Buk was in a fascist group in college
(and yes he was for a few months
just, as he says, because he hated the left)
everyone who likes his poetry should ask himself
why he likes it
(meaning he may be a hidden fascist too).
You fooled them all, you mad bastard
you are still fooling them
they are angry that people, real people
read your poems
instead of reading their university stuff
and there will be more and more books
after your death to keep them mad
at you, they will say these are recycled poems
you like a Cezanne painting again and again the same mountain
but some of us know you were and you are
poetry's only hope, poetry's only way
of not being lies in beautiful words
in complex lines and in frozen books.
MOSHE BENARROH
My promised land of unfulfilled promises
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First there was God
a deceiver of human beings
he should have
saved my brother
who died one year after we came to Jerusalem.
I was young then, I didn't know, that's
what god does best.
Then the people they deceive me every day
they promise, they propose
and they never deliver
and I
almost 30 years later
still don't understand what
they want.
The land of milk and honey
is hot in the summer
so hot my kidneys can't handle it
and 3 months a year I am a
desperate man
unable to do anything.
I was a man of mild weather.
The sea is too hot all summer long
I can only dream of my cold water
and there are the wars, the killings
the discrimination in every step I swallow
and behind it always
people screaming, cars and buses
making too much noise
just way too much noise.
MOSHE BENARROH
I have seen your black eyes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't know your name
it scares me
but I know you woman
you are the birth of the worst killers
and you have a name
I don't know your name but your are after me
you look for me in desert streets
and in crowded buildings
you haunt me in my sleep
and when I wake up you follow me
I don't know your name
but I have seen your face
calm as the sea in its calmest day
before the storm
always before the storm
I have seen your hands full of little dead children
I have seen your nose smelling dead human meat
you never have enough of it, don't you?
I know you are there hiding
behind universities explaining
why you don't exist
I know you were once a child
as innocent as the moon
in a romantic poem
just before it causes the big storm
I know you, I have seen your eyes
and you don't scare me
if I die in your hands
there will still be my poems
to follow you wherever you go
to haunt you and destroy you
day by day
as you do to us
yes, my poems, my little poems
said to be useless
my poems will follow you
you unnamed destiny of our souls
for we will not be slaves in our poems anymore
even if it is for a second in thousands of years
you will know that we were not slaves
if only for a second
and you know
don't you
you know and how you know
that sooner or later
that little poem
will be your end.
I don't know your name
but I have see your eyes
lady I have seen your black eyes
and you
you couldn't really look straight
into my green eyes.
Could you?!
HEATHER FERGUSON
Credits:
The Ship of Flowers - Symbiosis (anthology), Girol Books, ed. Luciano Diaz,
1992; Carpe Diem, 2000
When Flowers Hurt Me - Remembered Earth (chapbook anthology), Bywords, eds.
M. , Scala and G. Guth, 1997; Carpe Diem, 2000
Genesis - Remembered Earth (chapbook anthology), Bywords, eds. M. , Scala
and G. Guth, 1997
Lament for Tom - unpublished
Autumn Cat - Sounds New (anthology), The Muses Co., ed. Peter van Toorn,
1990; A Mouse in a Top Hat (chapbook), Rideau Review Press, 1987
How the Moon Grew Up - Twenty Ooems for Twenty years: A Tribute to Juan
O'Neill, 2001
Trick Photography - unpublished
Looking for Signs - Bywords magazine, date unknown
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