Sand fire
by Tony Beyer
1 Rumi in one of his tavern verses enumerates the many wines men drink hashish they take to mitigate consciousness & the myriad ecstasies of love of sleep & even religion the woman whose name said aloud resuscitated her fallen lover the disciple so steeped in God he thought he was God having sampled a number of these & the disillusion that follows after let me pray I may become a good enough man to taste the wine of truth that neither intoxicates nor mars but fills up all space with radiance 2 poetry is a language anyone can speak in droplets like rain off the edge of a roof or the brusque gush of a waterfall in Rue des Archives the doctor’s waiting room equipped with a piano & African masks a shelf of literary books in English Eliot Joyce Auden leaning shoulder to shoulder — currency used to be fixed to the gold standard so the folding stuff in your pocket had genuine if notional weight and heft times change & fashions replace each other or unconsciously or consciously repeat themselves but in poetry there is still the Greek & Roman standard the Li Bai & Du Fu standard the Shakespeare & Tranströmer standard & the standard set by Bashō — so many of my heroes came to me in translation Rimbaudelaire Apollinaire their garlicky breath rendered first as poetry then English Rumi too & Du Fu transcending not only tongues but time of course only one kind of poem is made of words in any language sometimes the incoherent heart might have to have a say 3 tea poured from up high so it froths in the glass sound as well as fragrance in the room a satisfied dog’s growl a long-furred cat purring the quiet companionable level of voices to follow distinct from the pitch of a thorn fire on the sand men squat around & talk in bursts like gunshots helicopters & Kalashnikovs woven into the pattern of the rug suited to the warp & weft of the desert loom motifs perpetual as date palms camels birds of paradise 4 a blast as loud as an answered prayer wherever the ordinary might gather market place or place of worship polling booth wedding feast or funeral the future returns to the ground in shreds so few words needed assonance of bomb & God hard enough to swallow even in times of silence 5 bring the sander round to Sanders Ave one of those phone calls complete with directions resulting in atomised dust of ten thousand meals circling minutely in the kitchen as if our conversations reduced to vowels consonants diphthongs were all to begin again same sounds between different silences but in our case the blast radius swallows itself our normal is restored 6 try painting a ceiling without getting any on the floor the consequence merchants will bring up omelettes & eggs acceptable losses collateral damage yet there must be a way of neither losing nor winning of engaging in full the finite acuity of being report on a scrap of paper in the dirt our intentions were good like our training & equipment but we just lost it went blood-drunk as so often before 7 the idea was to find a place close to the sea then sprawl inland like ink from the edge of a blotter stopping only for impassable acclivities until they could be dynamited & road or rail slick as Meccano channelled through softer obstructions flora fauna indigenous settlements required no such forceful decision-making the earth & under earth gave up their riches anything else a few place-names & an apology 8 in the bathroom of the ghost hotel an ancient inhabitant advised me on the minute particulars of the shower taps installed long ago never inspected since so hot was cold cold hot like a man in two minds about everything whose moment of decision approaches without remorse a finger pointing from heaven or a side road acquaintances wait in for their share of the contents of the vehicle expertly assembled salads geometrically accurate sandwiches vacuum flasks of milkless sugary tea 9 just as there are no rhymes in English for orange or silver there’s no colour to match the colour of plumbago blossoms at dusk blue is a feeble classification of the cold glare they emit in contrast to the dark setting of leaves more stringent than Lawrence’s gentians more compelling than the distant snow-coated facets of the mountain these soft sticky nothings haloed like us all by growing night are the secretive lamps customarily lit when a conspiracy begins or ends 10 smell of protective tar from a black net on the jetty boats going out thread ripples through the teetering piles a blue ship on a sailor’s arm sets sail for Drunken Ness unoiled gulls’ voices hang still in the air & cry curved silver bellies in the crates handed up from the hold rain slow enough to count each drop as it touches the sea there is the dangerous edge between light & water where siren-seals stand in the waves & watch with molten eyes our going out & our coming in our tarred nets swollen with silver the floating bones of ancient ships dismasted & aground 11 walnut shells resemble the human scrotum & contain a dry skinned oily fleshed kernel not dissimilar in configuration to the human brain they were thus deemed appropriate to be thrown at the nuptial couple at Roman weddings symbols of both the conception & education of the ensuing line 12 the combined secular café & religious bookshop might have done better to exchange the two categories wafers & wine in one bestselling tripe in the other or would the usual dearth of customers continue uncertain whether a daily fix or crucifix was to be the go 13 what with restorations transitions & strengthenings going on up & down the country lately largely the result of earthquakes or their likelihood (surely in itself a sign of God’s hand) I’ve been thinking a lot about church architecture & what blasphemy it is given the promise of resurrection to build places of Christian worship out of any sort at all of so-called permanent material after all the Second Coming could happen at any time & for the first a cattle shed sufficed 14 following the wrong gods inevitably leads to trouble of one sort or another sprigs of mistletoe corybantic antics likely to endanger both the acolyte & celebrant in some dull cave where echoes too easily become voices of ancestors or the Minotaur’s bawl appealing to his human mother to save him from the murderer sent from Athens to conclude things 15 if you think about it reticulation seems to be the scheme of things blood through vessels food & its waste through the body’s soft tubes then there are waterways of all depths & widths branches & leaf veins sheen of a braided river from the air like veins on a woman’s wrist formations of mountains & valleys rearranged to deliver melted snow even human imitations plumbing gas-fitting electric wiring follow the same course & our concept of the vast invisible connection is expressed as a web or net so whoever’s idea this was good on him he was on to something 16 how little has changed since you died as if life moved as slowly as death which stays the same confirmed by a date on a stone & in all references to your name even our anecdotes recalling you with affection begin to congeal as letters or diary entries might but never poems those deliberate survivors at their best outlast us all & are never still remaking themselves in the eye & ear of each new reader or re-read for the first or third or thirtieth time change & remain the same 17 the rose displays its secret yellow heart & dies firm petals drooping softly to the ground the colour & shape of drops that follow the gored matador borne in the arms of two clowns to the barrier while a third distracts the bull with somersaults cartwheels & flips unencountered in the flower-strewn meadows of Andalusia 18 living in one of Calvino’s invisible cities one is exposed to all manner of affronts to privacy porous borders transparent curtains blunt snouts of CCTV & who is that man I’ve just noticed on the corner pretending to read a newspaper which in turn pretends to contain anything any of us would call news 19 thinking about the atom remember school science the proton & neutron clinging together inseparably because if they are separated all hell breaks loose & how this nucleus is orbited by electrons tirelessly circling busily invisible in the human form made up of billions of such configurations a pattern representative of desire in its restless questing & inescapable path except that desire is requited or expires while faith is indelible wretched at times susceptible to ridicule as long as life lasts & may even be what desire truly is 20 desire & not its fulfilment the engine that drives the world we would be as nothing with nothing to hunger for when the Three Kings found Jesus he could neither speak nor pray but he could make a star move in the firmament to lead them to him & shepherds kneel & oxen pause the turning of their cud to gaze religion like politics everybody talking it no one doing it the poor stay poor the hungry stay hungry the church just says be meek those whose God is a burning bush the flames neither wither nor destroy underestimate those who say their God is love 21 a wrist-thick rattan steeped in buffalo urine correction & cure for all misdemeanours neither conscience nor remorse needs to enter into it wrongdoers always make their punishers feel better unless instead of a renegade the firing squad’s target’s perceived as a man in spite of the mask not unlike the twitchy comrades who fondle their triggers & dug up & pardoned years later the bones have nothing to say 22 purple gladioli the sword lily named for their attentive curve seemingly towards evening in our part of the hybrid world resulting from colonisation acclimatisation miscegenation & miles of bad road in between history is simply the compilation of what can no longer be suppressed changing as governments & hairdos change succour for the unemployable who are appointed to chairs to argue its integrity or disinterest is to identify another partiality 23 the medals are always handed out after a balls-up Rork’s Drift after Isandlwana Zeebrugge (eleven before breakfast) heroic failure so much more the myth than ruthlessly efficient victory so we are left with the sour & sandy taste of Anzac Cove to define us achievers of the impossible who die in the attempt rotting beside their rusting equipment up & down the gullies our ghost ancestors who never lived to become fathers & grandfathers 24 T E Lawrence’s lesser known The Mint treats of the fascism inherent in military life barking sergeants officers anything but gentlemen who without a war to fight fought each other & their hapless subordinates learning nothing from the past their traditions fetishised 25 party politics are inimical to democracy sniping into the next trench instead of confronting the real foes of the people which are inequality poverty race hatred despair not all crimes in themselves but harbingers of crime especially for those on whom they are inflicted all men are brothers all women their sisters every child belongs to the same family if only they’d look in each other’s eyes & acknowledge this 26 red flag black flag red & black flag dystopia requires very little organisation you’re in it if you sleep in the street in one of the world’s ten most desirable cities or the house of a man whose voice & fists you can’t escape & the only flag is black & blue 27 from the beginning to the end of time the lover speaks to the beloved if I could I would choose to die not with words on my lips but your lips not with silence in my ears but the lasting song of your breath no one should seek to deny the truth behind this 28 like the princess whose face may not be revealed the poem does not announce itself as one form or another one matter or another it is instead many things made one by the persistent pouring of the voice 29 the small florets at the centre holding together the four-petalled hydrangea flowers are themselves miniatures of the larger bloom intriguingly this year (& possibly all years) always blue whether or not the main colour of the cluster is pink or white or blue a memory full of less important things has neglected this like a small bird’s song forgotten but heard again & immediately known as in a poem the shaft of sense rises through descending words 30 never believe what you read in a poem the facts that is not the integument because poetry has one subject awake & breathing in the face of extinction the heart preoccupied with blood & continuance the spirit uncertain about its future & the solace of others being likewise 31 in those days killing something made a man of you skinning it out beside the cook pot wearing the hide against winter cold all quite useful attributes of the tribe from the inedible you took the pelt only from the scalp from the groin the latter an invisible trophy 32 at the beginning of force replaced by strategy the man of many toils & travails one to whom all are strangers rides his broken spar towards the shore hides naked in the dunes while girls peg out their wash & is discovered by the chief among them in beauty & inscrutable guile his equal whose apparent likeness snares him 33 swallows mate on the wing with the swiftest of kissing sounds their cry like the cry of Odysseus’ bow string when strung full of sorrow at leaving exultant upon return a touch & then gone — Rumi also reminds us that our yearning for an answer is itself the answer as a dog asks & asks with its eyes & tail we do not know what we want except for wanting to cease
Sand fire [printable version]
Tony Beyer operates out of Taranaki, New Zealand. His work appears frequently online in Otoliths and his most recent collection, Anchor Stone (Cold Hub Press), was a finalist in the poetry category of the 2018 New Zealand Book Awards.
Copyright © Mudlark 2019
Mudlark | Home Page