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In that country the animals have the faces of people: the ceremonial cats possessing the streets the fox run politely to earth, the huntsmen standing around him, fixed in their tapestry of manners the bull, embroidered with blood and given an elegant death, trumpets, his name stamped on him, heraldic brand because (when he rolled on the sand, sword in his heart, the teeth in his blue mouth were human) he is really a man even the wolves, holding resonant conversations in their forests thickened with legend. In this country the animals have the faces of animals. Their eyes flash once in car headlights and are gone. Their deaths are not elegant. They have the faces of no-one.

Something so light almost nothing Not a list of violences nor reports from beauty One person looks up & then another after another looking up in the same direction Who took this picture of Fight ghost town this is Palestine

After Stevens It was when he said expansively There is no such thing as the truth

Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks the wrong way from time to time, and misses the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really my close friend, just my necessary neighbor on a bicycle going by like a whistle from the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture. We were as they say “of an age” and so inter- twine somehow, though I wanted to work when he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life and in my writing and so is the Okanagan River. I sometimes get to the river when I am at work, the sun on my back not the ink in my pen. There was, when I was last in the Okanagan Valley, a cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told, fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.

who line the corridors and sit silent in wheelchairs before the television with the volume off, whose cares are small and gray and infinite, time as ever to be faced    ... Methuselahs the nurses wash and dress without haste — none needed    ... this one has drunk from the poppy-cup and drowses in her world of  dream    ... Heliotrope, carnations, wakeful violets, and lilies in vases — masses of  flowers — wrap the urine-and-antiseptic air in lace    ... Please wake up; it is morning; robins whistle; the bees dance. Isn't this other one listening from her shell of  silence, and shouldn't she smile at the green return and dappled light through windows? As earth orbits the corridor clocks are wound    ... The last hour is a song or wound    ... Except in this corridor — mother's — where finity's brainless wind blows ash, and ash again blows through their cells: So much silence, so little to say in the end.)

Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983. I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? They said you shot the London Ambassador and when that wasn’t true they said so what They said you shelled their northern villages and when U.N. forces reported that was not true because your side of the cease-fire was holding since more than a year before they said so what They said they wanted simply to carve a 25 mile buffer zone and then they ravaged your water supplies your electricity your hospitals your schools your highways and byways all the way north to Beirut because they said this was their quest for peace They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys whose bodies swelled purple and black into twice the original size and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby and then they said this was brilliant military accomplishment and this was done they said in the name of self-defense they said that is the noblest concept of mankind isn’t that obvious? They said something about never again and then they made close to one million human beings homeless in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed 40,000 of your men and your women and your children But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? They said they were victims. They said you were Arabs. They called      your apartments and gardens      guerrilla strongholds. They called      the screaming devastation that they created       the rubble. Then they told you to leave, didn’t they? Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped from their hotshot fighter jets? They told you to go. One hundred and thirty-five thousand Palestinians in Beirut and why didn’t you take the hint? Go! There was the Mediterranean: You could walk into the water and stay there. What was the problem? I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family But I am not an evil person The people of my country aren't so bad You can expect but so much from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch American TV You see my point; I’m sorry. I really am sorry.

I can’t go up because I don’t know how. Nobody has shown me. So many names, my mother, I’m never sure what to call you. So many names for all your predators and crushes and suitors. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m here and I’m sorry I’m not here. Would you have made it on your own without the comorbid condition of motherhood and the slowness and consistency of time? I’m sorry for the slowness and consistency of time; years like zombies dawdling toward a cliff edge holding back the child’s writhing body, itching to grow, packed around the same mind I have now. I’m sorry the concept of promise outgrew the concept of child and that systemic contradiction and wizardry left only a dim sense of suspicion; a crescendoing breeze, accumulating clouds amidst bewildering dichotomies. I’m sorry for resembling your relatives and captors and the man who penetrated you, who’s still there, communicating boldly via intersections of others’ thought waves and memories, blatant into the long nights, haunting, for my inferiority in the face of nuclear family culture, feeding on detritus of white goods, leisure sports, laminate floors, a real home and fake recycling, for creeping by night into a tight void, blinds down, brain blown glass-thin, electric impulses and bloated thoughts bolted in. For this life being the only one my quiet mind knows, its many versions and phases, I’m sorry. I wasn’t your daughter — or anyone — when you were the blue-water navy, or the beheaded, or the baby boy. Or was I? I’m sorry I was not yet born and could not yet hear you when you were over there, listening carefully for the rain and small movements of animals, for sounds of life, through a green, five-fingered haze. I’m sorry I consider sentiment, fact; authenticity, originality, when they are irrelevant. So many choices in supermarkets, the natural habitat of panic attacks, it’s enough to make anyone sorry and I am. I’m sorry it’s taking over half a century to link your purple-patched brain scan to the basic biology of stress. The piano thunders on, sustain pedal wired to the facial muscles of all your neglecters, aching like hell behind their stamina and machinery. I’m sorry I had, logically, to think of my own self first / simultaneously, navigating through the fire and acid of Trust and her sycophant Love before returning. All the powerful were women; the power of penises and facial hair originated there, cajoled by matriarchs. As if skin and breath were insignificant! I’m so sorry. Where are you now, to take into my arms and resuscitate? Is it too late, given you’re fifty and no longer a child? It’s always mothers and mind control which is why I thank you for breaking the cycle, withstanding the enormity of generations, magnetic as water, to let us go. You weren’t to know about other outrageous families and sadistic counterparts. A nugget of my limbic system remembered choosing my own lemon-yellow baby clothes so thank you. I squeezed that into the thumb-sized space in the palm of my hand knowing all along they were wrong and imploding with it. I’m sorry I wept in the shower for your canceled wedding, letting the violet dress down the plughole, unsure what it all meant except things staying the same,future aggravating my brain, a baby brother gone again. I’m sorry you were out there, alone, defined by the worst of others and defined by your children’s prisms of hope and survival mechanisms. In one version, you did marry and lived in a house with green walls and extravagant furniture. I’m sorry that consensus reality had you set fire to your bed as you lay in it; arrested, put in a cell, let off the next day because the lawyer believed it was a genuine attempt and convinced the police. I’m sorry you’ve had to withstand such torrents of  knowledgeless advice and legal toxification, clinging to reality by a sinew of tooth, remembering yourself, through the rough and the smooth. I’m sorry I was absent, memorizing books of the Bible for a bar of Dairy Milk, owning up to things I’d never done, getting confirmed as an antidote to the evil core of me. I’m sorry it was exotic to think of kids like me ending up in prison, coincidentally, inevitably or prevented (which is the same), salvaged, peristalsized through society, brain safely contained, doused daily in cold water or electricity or disgrace, temptations kept consistently far enough away as to appear illusory like you, my brave mother, fantastic prodigy in flowing white caftan, knotted long brown hair, a beautiful gaze of solemnity, rare stone, emotionless (defined by others). I’m sorry I was ill-prepared for your soiled mattress and comatose body, under a wave of advocaat and transistor radios oozing with cheap Scotch. Even I developed feelings for them amidst adults acting like it’s okay to leave you this way, the blue bottle flies in on it, inflated with dog shit and red hot egos, resting on your cheek, your lip, too cunning to get rid of. I’m sorry that laughing off a difficult childhood didn’t make it never happen. Even a basic calculator recognizes an infinite loop as a malfunction; don’t they see cutting off my privates every night

the spiritual, Platonic old England … S. T. COLERIDGE, Anima Poetae ‘Your situation’, said Coningsby, looking up the green and silent valley, ‘is absolutely poetic.’ ‘I try sometimes to fancy’, said Mr Millbank, with a rather fierce smile, ‘that I am in the New World.’ BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Coningsby 1 QUAINT MAZES And, after all, it is to them we return. Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts: lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn, those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts. On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts put their pronged light; the chilly fountains burn. Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests and pangs of consolation, its hawk’s hood twitched off for sweet carnality, again rejoices in old hymns of servitude, haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine. It is the ravage of the heron wood; it is the rood blazing upon the green. 2 DAMON’S LAMENT FOR HIS CLORINDA, YORKSHIRE 1654 November rips gold foil from the oak ridges. Dour folk huddle in High Hoyland, Penistone. The tributaries of the Sheaf and Don bulge their dull spate, cramming the poor bridges. The North Sea batters our shepherds’ cottages from sixty miles. No sooner has the sun swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone. We live like gleaners of its vestiges knowing we flourish, though each year a child with the set face of a tomb-weeper is put down for ever and ever. Why does the air grow cold in the region of mirrors? And who is this clown doffing his mask at the masked threshold to selfless raptures that are all his own? 3 WHO ARE THESE COMING TO THE SACRIFICE? High voices in domestic chapels; praise; praise-worthy feuds; new-burgeoned spires that sprung crisp-leaved as though from dropping-wells. The young ferns root among our vitrified tears. What an elopement that was: the hired chaise tore through the fir-grove, scattered kinsmen flung buckshot and bridles, and the tocsin swung from the tarred bellcote dappled with dove-smears. Wires tarnish in gilt corridors, in each room stiff with the bric-a-brac of loss and gain. Love fled, truly outwitted, through a swirl of long-laid dust. Today you sip and smile though still not quite yourself. Guarding its pane the spider looms against another storm. 4 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (I) Make miniatures of the once-monstrous theme: the red-coat devotees, melees of wheels, Jagannath’s lovers. With indifferent aim unleash the rutting cannon at the walls of forts and palaces; pollute the wells. Impound the memoirs for their bankrupt shame, fantasies of true destiny that kills ‘under the sanction of the English name’. Be moved by faith, obedience without fault, the flawless hubris of heroic guilt, the grace of visitation; and be stirred by all her god-quests, her idolatries, in conclave of abiding injuries, sated upon the stillness of the bride. 5 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (II) Suppose they sweltered here three thousand years patient for our destruction. There is a greeting beyond the act. Destiny is the great thing, true lord of annexation and arrears. Our law-books overrule the emperors. The mango is the bride-bed of light. Spring jostles the flame-tree. But new mandates bring new images of faith, good subahdars! The flittering candles of the wayside shrines melt into dawn. The sun surmounts the dust. Krishna from Radha lovingly untwines. Lugging the earth, the oxen bow their heads. The alien conscience of our days is lost among the ruins and on endless roads. 6 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (III) Malcolm and Frere, Colebrooke and Elphinstone, the life of empire like the life of the mind ‘simple, sensuous, passionate’, attuned to the clear theme of justice and order, gone. Gone the ascetic pastimes, the Persian scholarship, the wild boar run to ground, the watercolours of the sun and wind. Names rise like outcrops on the rich terrain, like carapaces of the Mughal tombs lop-sided in the rice-fields, boarded-up near railway-crossings and small aerodromes. ‘India’s a peacock-shrine next to a shop selling mangola, sitars, lucky charms, heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep.’ 7 LOSS AND GAIN Pitched high above the shallows of the sea lone bells in gritty belfries do not ring but coil a far and inward echoing out of the air that thrums. Enduringly, fuchsia-hedges fend between cliff and sky; brown stumps of headstones tamp into the ling the ruined and the ruinously strong. Platonic England grasps its tenantry where wild-eyed poppies raddle tawny farms and wild swans root in lily-clouded lakes. Vulnerable to each other the twin forms of sleep and waking touch the man who wakes to sudden light, who thinks that this becalms even the phantoms of untold mistakes. 8 VOCATIONS While friends defected, you stayed and were sure, fervent in reason, watchful of each name: a signet-seal’s unostentatious gem gleams against walnut on the escritoire, focus of reckoning and judicious prayer. This is the durable covenant, a room quietly furnished with stuff of martyrdom, lit by the flowers and moths from your own shire, by silvery vistas frothed with convolvulus; radiance of dreams hardly to be denied. The twittering pipistrelle, so strange and close, plucks its curt flight through the moist eventide; the children thread among old avenues of snowberries, clear-calling as they fade. 9 THE LAUREL AXE Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green; the avenues are spread with brittle floods. Platonic England, house of solitudes, rests in its laurels and its injured stone, replete with complex fortunes that are gone, beset by dynasties of moods and clouds. It stands, as though at ease with its own world, the mannerly extortions, languid praise, all that devotion long since bought and sold, the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize, tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed in cabinets of amethyst and frost. 10 FIDELITIES Remember how, at seven years, the decrees were brought home: child-soul must register for Christ’s dole, be allotted its first Easter, blanch-white and empty, chilled by the lilies, betrothed among the well-wishers and spies. Reverend Mother, breakfastless, could feast her constraint on terracotta and alabaster and brimstone and the sweets of paradise. Theology makes good bedside reading. Some who are lost covet scholastic proof, subsistence of probation, modest balm. The wooden wings of justice borne aloof, we close our eyes to Anselm and lie calm. All night the cisterns whisper in the roof. 11 IDYLLS OF THE KING The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone; dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust, and the marsh-orchids and the heron’s nest, goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun. Weightless magnificence upholds the past. Cement recesses smell of fur and bone and berries wrinkle in the badger-run and wiry heath-fern scatters its fresh rust. ‘O clap your hands’ so that the dove takes flight, bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound, plunges its wings into the green twilight above this long-sought and forsaken ground, the half-built ruins of the new estate, warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond. 12 THE EVE OF ST MARK Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands, godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom; broochlight intermittent between the fronds, the owl immortal in its crystal dome. Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill, the clock discounts us with a telling chime. Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal, burnish upon the threshold of the dream: churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied. Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king preserve in sepia waterglass the souls of distant cousins, virgin till they died, and the lost delicate suitors who could sing. 13 THE HEREFORDSHIRE CAROL So to celebrate that kingdom: it grows greener in winter, essence of the year; the apple-branches musty with green fur. In the viridian darkness of its yews it is an enclave of perpetual vows broken in time. Its truth shows disrepair, disfigured shrines, their stones of gossamer, Old Moore’s astrology, all hallows, the squire’s effigy bewigged with frost, and hobnails cracking puddles before dawn. In grange and cottage girls rise from their beds by candlelight and mend their ruined braids. Touched by the cry of the iconoclast, how the rose-window blossoms with the sun!

Clamber out of the morning river with water beads like fish eggs clung to your pubis the calluses on your buttocks from sitting, writing on flat rocks, your goose-pimpled thighs—the bumpy tongues of two dogs licking each other—and river-slather and slather at the edge of my mouth. You are smiling, straining out your hair, flicking your hands, and then see me watching you with the cloth and pots I was taking to wash. Before I have time to be embarrassed, the smile lifts into your eyes. Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

Blushing in a manner out of keeping with my age (my graying hair, my falling face) I entered Greyfriar’s Inn. I was blushing, and out of keeping with my age. In I went, making my foolish entrance, folding down my umbrella self-consciously — aware of the locals at the bar with their gin and their small talk — and walked right up to the barmaid, somewhat brazenly, I thought. One glass of beer, I said to her, and she, smiling kindly, pulled it. I stood and waited. I waited for them all to stop their fond, drunken reminiscences, for them to stop putting forth their opinions, and to turn to me and say — in an accusatory way — What are you doing here? On a Wednesday night? Unaccompanied? With an accent we can’t quite identify? I waited ready: Why am I here? I would say. I am here as an imposter, an outsider, a reluctant admirer of your lovely daughter Jane — I am here for my Lecture in the Picturesque, to learn of sidescreens and perspectives, to learn of window tax and syntax — and “ha-has” — for harmless gambling in the parlor, wearing mittens and handworked collars and a pretty amber cross — I am here to steal a pistol and a spoon found underground, to rob the peacock feathers streaming from the silly boy’s crown — I am here, I would say, for sensation— For sensation? they would say, and I would say: Yes!Painful sensation of restraint or alarm! Oh ye patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, I would exclaim, I am here to meet your high-waisted Jane, to embrace her as my comrade; as my brother-in-arms! I stood and waited. But the good patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, they never said a thing; just continued talking amongst themselves, quietly reminiscing. I paid the barmaid and turned my head. I looked out at the wet; I looked out at the southwest rain, and the redbrick houses. I watched the famous silhouette, gently swinging back and forth above the gate. I raised the glass to her impassive, sideways face. Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.