| Mark McMorris USA Flowers 1. it is daylight, common day the laborers out in the fields "the simple fate of it" amply beyond the next rise nothing: in the tactile stillness not even rain, not even a gust a blending more than borders with ruled fences, and a gradual respect for the way it is sealed how can we bend into history the valley's eye not our eye a landscape without argument to study this land is madness just as the books are with deeds of another century mad in the webs of the very letters my own small piece of the time however it is spelt and in what speech the name of an old controversy this one, at least, will survive the passage of several under the earth and a logic careening to death which let us wait for it to pass so that the fields recover their mirth give up the effort fought for and you give up the evenings the right to be in them oneself troubles left by systems of exchange no dissembling or false murders only the forthright tactics of a butcher and in this place the fudge man the calypso man, the tinker with pans dangling from an old truck a push-cart of discarded boards one man leaning into the weight --the stoplight--loaded with bottles city traders, mementos of trans- sahara but on asphalt not sand and fetching back no manufactures mementos of trans-sahara, memento mori as the slogan in other words for this work where are the laborers the fields hold only the crop some burnt and wrecked in profit, the sign of rebellion fire which they have in common the land diminishes with each light 2. and if land diminishes the eye refuses anything more solid than the visible the simple pure of it the voluptuous landscape Ipswich, Ginger Hill: names and I took out my eye and dealt it for visionary power to subdue the cascade to make thought out of it as rum comes out of sugar my one eye, my only circuitry the phallus on a rampage all over the parish, the eye is a virgin of the guillotine and myth is the loverboy come here, as wind talks the usual gibberish "as if" outline of an embrace a bon-fire of bibles stuck in hot pavement I would crawl on the bones of my elbows . . . I know what I'm owed from land, from rock stone but the eye is a nipple the eye is simplicity so the water leads me among grassy aqueducts and beneath their legs a builder's will and testament things to be aware of the same things in a place that is not the same things become flat small coves that survive drought, election years murder walking out of the sea things in a frame the snail, the fantail palm peacocks by the ocean the blood slows to the pace of a dray or roadwork mountains dominate the city an archipelago of mind pouring over the edge a waterfall in the offing sea travel and a retreat to the bush of mental space indices of geological drift the green names shut up in blood of ephemera going to a mass interment 3. one eye coaxing an idea out of the green casing of field and mountain pass manifest undulations of earth being pushed up blood soaking the text where sand meets water the fishing boats, the restless light of the day's work who will remember them changing rope of elements when anarchy smashes the boats? and the sibyl is long dead who spoke the (m)other tongue I've seen pieces of the heart --from Conjunctions 33 (1999) Being at Loose Ends The general calls for a retreat back into the bush of mental space where we cook without smoke water drips from citrus and ask fewer questions of big-foot hedges lining the day with propaganda the comparisons belong to the rhetoric of our poets silence trails an exhaust to where they bivouac at the secluded cow-pond, expecting stars to erupt and blot out the error and the wild pig's rampage at the home for athletes, more statues than love at the speed of light, birds fly out of reach and the last buccaneer is dead from liver disease a bamboo complication, that crushes the heart the road swept with petals, enter a green country buoyed up on nudges from a reactor, how it hums songs of the murderous climate to my two-step dirge with weapons in a pile like so much useless rope we were at loose ends in Babylon and made things up while genocide flowered in the breeze, it was lovely to be on the patio with the hills like a comfortable shoulder it was a morning's work to send off the beggar a day's to study the red roofs, to hack out a path from alphabet to harbor where a body drifts and build a constabulary for the village estates when prophets are abundant, mania always wins buying at one end of the coast what sells in Kingston-- things that move around like a love-pain, from groin to nightmare, heaped up like tumuli, a sea-conch's girth which announces the victim, hand over the accounts I was at loose ends and therefore level with the grass without call from the sky to believe in a blue width how to persuade the bougainvillea to suspend its drift? some say that innocence foundered at the foundry the ships forever wander the Antilles, like the mist the basin of mind's archipelago crossed and dredged till wires snap and whir emptily at the dominant mountains, this is a rumor of war it's not easy to dismiss, the sky-plants are sinking before the car of the sun, which turns on the cracked jalousies, and heats up the plumes of birds that walk freely, as others of us walked bewildered by losses--the general in his hammock-- love-stricken, faltering, at the rocky shelf --from Conjunctions 33 (1999) Aphrodite of Economy Landscape, as the events of a prior discontinuity, will never know what we make of it, although telegrams come, and breath hurries, at the top of a rise to survey the orderly valleys, the young cane and the mixed shoots, some as tall as a man, and miles of them going back into another century of uniform labor the color of earth. Anyone can break the code to take out the truth because it is there, so long as there is an eye. Language is different. History chokes on a rag of kerosene the fuse is lit down a corridor of echoing images and one cannot shuffle the fulgurating words to nominate as aesthetics what time calls blood-- though once, it was thought, once--and a woman doubled over and coughing must signal the scar of cutlasses, diseases of the womb that maim the adult. What do the fields represent, the harvest? ratios, roads, drainage--the plucked flower of science-- these words are fuel to tinder, they promise extremes of hatred if not boredom with the text we were born to desecrate, and that's the paradox of being from an off-shore rig: how to put out the wide savagery when you're inside the beast that in other legends, as wolf, swallows the community in this one has left prints in the form of sugar cane that actually broaches a goddess of slave economy. --from Conjunctions 33 (1999) © All Copyright, Mark
McMorris. |
