Crawling up Your Toes
You start the year with a checklist that includes better ways of scrambling for bread and of swearing off it. There is a sunrise crawling up your toes, a sunrise you trust to hold you close, to whisper with you, I still live, you still live, we still live, like Hamlet writing textbooks for children who can say, with a matter-of-factness more haunting than all the screams, Brian is in the kitchen, Brian is not yet in the grave. You trust the sunrise to save you from the game of drones, you and your whole generation that never learnt to look for peace, only for pauses. One day that trust will break, because you will break it, or the sun will; but probably you, and in that knowledge there is a curious pain and an even more curious peace. Puisque nous ne sommes pas encore morts, let us recommence the merry business of dying piecemeal, one breath at a time, while intoning sententiously, ‘look upon every leaf with fresh, devouring eyes, until, untinged by uncertainty, it loses its lustre’. No será un año de paz, pero será un año. Sí, whispers the soft breeze in your hair, the first of the year, si tienes suerte… Armed with fragments of sound advice and the noblest of resolutions, you scroll feed after feed on the phone cradled in your palm, shooting up at every pop and bang like the firework itself, wishing in one breath for something, anything to happen to end this agony, mumbling frantic prayers in the next lest your petulant words come true. But already your eyes are starting to glaze over the latest catastrophe. The doom may come next week, or a year from now; the deadline is tonight, and inside, on a computer long asleep, there is an open file, going tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, like a remote pacemaker for your quaking heart.
Kalopsia
Apples sliced up and abandoned turn
Brown, like grilled fish, like sun-toasted skin:
Can cold, hard soil learn to love the seeds
Discarded with the fruit’s rotting pulp,
Extricate the life dormant within?
Fire that cannot boil milk can still burn
Great forests down. The flaming scythe that weeds
Houses out, cackling, then sows their ash
Instead, dies, and buries itself too,
Just beneath the surface, and feigns sleep,
Knowing the summer sun will raise blue
Liquid skies for it to shine. The deep
Matching grudges of man and tree scar
Nothing but the long-suffering earth
Opening its arms to both. Fire, war,
Plague or pesticide, it assigns worth
Quite at will, oft saving the blighted,
Rooting out the blossoming rose. Few
Secret gardens can flourish inside
This first non-nightmare in a decade:
Umbrellas dance the tango for you,
Veering, capering, a fey brigade
Wandering the roads with a lint roll:
Xerox-copies all, they only know
Yearning for uniqueness, and fall
Zinnia-like, into neat red rows.
Sisyphus, You Have a Sister
Washing down bitterness with imaginary
Chocolate, the doctorante watches the moon
Grow lustreless, reaching for that melancholy,
Maudlin cliché, but a flat ‘cake plate’ shoves its way in,
And the douceur of wallowing is denied her.
Lovely and laughing, then hoarse and grim, a spectre
Hovers on both sides of sleep: Mathilde Loisel,
Crushed beneath the weight of her own choices, to pay
Debts that need never have existed. Who shall say
If her destiny is mine? Like a rapier,
Like cold water trickling down the spine in winter,
Envy guts her. I didn’t even get one dance.