Ragged Claws

For Dan Simmons. Thanks for ‘Songs of Kali’)
One dead body of a child,
hung from a bridge
under construction:
the oldest of gifts
to an uncaring God.
Bodies floating by;
open sewers,
spilling out into the river,
where the pilgrims bathe
and pray.
Along the shores
the Babel spears,
with wheels on top:
decaying bodies
feed the vultures.
Ganghes,
mother of all clogged-up veins;
sluggish cancer snake.
Holy and monstrous:
nightmare’s wake.
Mother of all [...]

I tiptoe through you
like some tourist lost in wonder in the Hermitage:
shy, in awe and undeserving
of this wealth of beauty and appraisal.
My worlds enfolded in your hair,
that drapes my thoughts like curtains;
the way your eyes, now closed, still find me,
like the rainbow binds the flood.
I tiptoe through you,
like a shadow lost in prayer to the [...]

It was ten o’ clock in the morning and I was sitting in my local, at the bar, a bottle of beer in front of me. Next to me sat a man who was drinking coffee and cognac. I had just finished another night’s work and was not in the mood for conversation. So, when [...]

We move. We move, almost as fast as light, faster than anything manmade ever went before. We move; we move
[...]

They do not look at you - not really.
You know their eyes won’t stop
for signs of skin and bone
and we are lost.
We love that soft skin mystery:
the purring alien and the delicate stranger within
We do not question that they live forever.
Their paws of baby skin and razor-blades
tell us they will live forever.
But they do not [...]

Head perched, like a little bird:
her shoulders slightly up.
If she could have taken to the sky,
she would be gone by now.
What is it she is waiting for?
What is her part in this machine,
she plays, unwittingly, so well?
Does she dream?
(She rubs her hands in glue
and even looks surprised
at how she slowly gets confused:
she rubs it in [...]

Part one: Tell me
Tell me more, you whisper, tell me more.
My love, what can I say?
I am that village that Chagall once drew,
dreaming its strange old dreams.
I am that violin, that sings this one old tune;
the violinist himself, that perfect stranger:
strange of colour, strange of form,
faithfully guarding his midnight town,
looking down into that [...]

It ill behoves a gentleman
to speak of love and need -
but gentlemen make lousy poets.
Me, I have no grammar and I have no shame.
I howl to the moon,
ill-groomed and loud and happy.
So, burn me at the stake.
Bar me from your cosy clubs.
I’ll sing the hungry cubs the rowdy facts of life.

Through the pale and trembling shadows,
the hunger and the loss,
through the love songs on these dying pages
that Garcia Lorca left,
I see night’s ministers and ghosts
have come to take me back:

(Noche de cuatro lunas
y un solo árbol,
con una sola sombra
y un solo pájaro. )
I open my veins like a window,
like all who lived and got [...]

First the dolphins arrive: vague grey shapes that can hardly be distinguished from the waves. The foot of my bed changes into a far dune. The ceiling dissolves. Above me, sea-gulls fly through the mist. I can hear the creaking of the ship that slowly moves away, leaving me behind. The headache is almost unbearable [...]

The sea moves slowly, like a muscle
under skin of pearl.
The sun is near invisible,
a perfect burning pinpoint that transforms the sky
from singularity towards
a bruise of fading colours.
The trees stand without tremor, without whisper.
Even the tallest grass looks sculpted, still
and far removed from the unruly sweat of dawn.
Now, from beyond the woods, beyond the hills
the sounds [...]

I want these words to move,
like fingernail and tongue,
across the deepest blue
of patient, Southern skies,
onto the darkest spaces
in between the furnace stars:
to write your name and holy flesh
and all your glory there,
like I would move your fingertips and
close the soft rims of your lips,
your teeth and tongue and drawn-out
breathing down upon my fire-fed skin.

Going up, one more time,
by means of sheer imagination,
modern marvels of ignition
and old midnight oil:
noisy contraptions, coming apart
step, by step, by step
and going up: all systems going,
there’s time for some last words,
some thought, some prayer -
and then at last, at last we’re on our way
but somehow still suspended:
earth-tied, soul-bound,
so much that brought us here is [...]

(For Dan Simmons)
The dead lie still.
The ghosts are silent.
This bone-dry land is not
the land of arrows carved,
of sacred stone.
The plains are dead and silent.
In cities, ghosts of those
who never lived now dwell.
Their works are not the work of man.
Their tongues are pitiful and weak:
a noise far worse than graves, or silence.
Not worthy of [...]