4 Poems
Little ghost
grief can be milk
or it can be two boys standing at a window
looking out at baby clothes
left hanging on the washing line for weeks
can be a kind of fraying in the breeze
can be little blankets
muslin sheets and little boots
hanging in the air
like little ghosts
At the truck-stop on the edge of town
we pull in with the gauge a line above empty
out of fuel and out of money
but Hercules gets out and fills the tank anyway.
The pump churns like a bad heart,
pulling blood from somewhere underneath our feet
and through the screen I watch
a thousand moths all hurl themselves
against the god-lights, fall away in rapture
then hurl themselves again.
Inside, a TV plays a rerun of The Green Berets.
Old John Wayne appears on screen, rifle in hand,
as Herc walks in like an empire of blood,
nods to the counter man,
counter-man nods back, Herc goes outside and sits and waits
for someone. And so we wait, long enough for old John Wayne
to press his mouth against a landscape,
to resurrect a myth then watch it burn again.
to become a gun, then a father,
then a mean drunk, then a gun again.
Long enough for old John Wayne
to swallow it and call it history,
to bleed a nation white,
Outside, a trucker pulls in and eyeballs Herc
who looks clean through the world
and sees a howling dark beneath it.
Or perhaps he sees himself.
Either way he nods to the trucker
and they disappear around the corner.
On screen, old John Wayne gets cancer,
reaches his big hands down his big neck,
pulls out a sick lung, part of his stomach,
four white ribs, three sets of divorces papers,
the gun his second wife tried to shoot him with,
reaches further, pulls out more guns, a playboy interview,
the confederate flag,
white supremacy, a lynch mob, pulls out empire,
pulls out more guns,
reaches further in, pulls out genocide,
pulls out the trail of tears,
Wounded Knee, reaches further and further
til he can only pull himself from himself
and from himself he pulls the final scene from The Green Berets,
which is to say inside of John Wayne there is a small boy
who is always running out onto a greying beach.
The boy always calls for someone, finds no one calling back.
Old John Wayne always follows, takes the hand of the boy
says "you're what this is all about."
Herc comes back then, fist full of bills and hard blank.
He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t look at anything,
just unfolds a bill and slides it to the counter-man.
His whole body says it’s time for us to go
as the air swells up like blood.
Outside the morning breaks like a bad heart
bleeding red across the sky
while old John Wayne and the boy -
they walk into horizon.
John Wayne and the boy -
they are walking into nothing.
At the coast, Hercules, least mortal of us all, tells the sea what it means to die.
Do you know the problem
with all language?
How to speak of the dead.
“And so he died,
went down into the ground
or up into the air etc.”
But dying’s not a disappearing trick.
There’s no trapdoor out the body.
Death is the world under erasure.
Proof that there was never anyone inside.
You want a metaphor for dying?
Take everything you ever wrote
and burn it.
Then gather up and burn the ash.
Then burn the space that’s left behind.
Interlude (2) / notes from an incomplete drama / 3rd person omniscient
ACT 1
Iphicles and the boy called C are imagined here as field and presence which is to say they are two shapes unfolding from a single plane which is to say something like the ‘immanence of one within its other’ which is to say that C already holds the whole of Iphicles inside his mouth. In any case, the scene is ext and the sky is blue, blue, blue.
C: What’s it like living with all those bones?
Iphicles: (question mark)
C: Over the fence I mean. In the cemetery.
Iphicles: (small sound)
C: You ever wonder what people look like after they go into the ground? I think they probably look like roots. Or water.
Iphicles: (smaller sound)
C: I wonder sometimes what my daddy would look like in the ground. Or maybe just his hands.
Iphicles: (the colour red) (a kind of static)
ACT 2
SCENE 1
In the afternoon, C shows Iphicles a trick at the river. C lays belly down on the jetty, holds his hands beneath the water and starts to sing a gentle silverness. Within a minute a catfish has risen up and set its belly in his hands. C looks up. Smiles like a waking sky. Like an answer to the one big question. Iphicles thinks this is the most amazing thing he’s ever seen.
SCENE 2
Later, as the sun sets and the empty of the house grows, Iphicles stands at the doorway looking out as C trip-traps his littleway away, away, we’re sad to say, and up the hill and as he goes everything becomes little and his little hands are the little thing that Iphicles will set his gaze on as he goes.
SCENE 3
When C is gone from sight, the world comes back into a heaviness. Iphicles feels night falling over everything. He turns and climbs the stairs. In his room, he falls face down on his bed. Hugs nothing. The red noise in him swells. The house braces.
ACT 3
Iphicles: (unpunctuated howl)