1.

‎

The trouble is, I want to dance at parties

or burglarize some other way out of myself – that's why

in the crepuscule as behind me the catherine-wheels

spumed like the noise of waterfalls.

I pushed the limbus, damp lampyrid zone

punctuated by the blink of lightning-bugs

accelerated moons, lampadephores

indecipherable semaphores

I feel there is a message tapping out –

a ghostly finger on the Ouija board.

I feel there is a breach in certitude

and I, stranded in hypnopompic blue

anomalous with blinks and undulations

ungoverned by any knowable algorithm –

I feel I am walking along a shore

and on the other side, a sea of grass

called Tannu Touva, called the freakish vast

novaya zembla, terra incognita, oblast...

Moment 1:

I am holding a globe like a fruit

ripe with synaesthesias, I am linking synaptic webs

between Russia and the scent of apricots, between

China and cadmium yellow. I am in the library

and I am leafing through a guide

to the flora and fauna of Brazil. The number of birds I find

becomes a metaphor for infinity. But I am sad

because l'atlas de pays disparus

has filled me already with epistemological despair – –

Moment 2:

I am biting into a cucumber. These are good words:

cucumber, salamander, summer

and in the green silence of the pond I relinquish my human body.

Moment 3:

I am somewhere unidentifiable. It reminds me of an abandoned power station,

I think there is a canal and a rickety dam, and leafmeal in the water. I don't know where I am

but it seems to be a sort of touchstone in my dreams, I brush my hand up against it absentminded.

There is a boy there with me, he has brown hair. I am a different person.

Moment Lemniscate:

I am looking out the car window as I realise time is not continuous.

I am looking at the river when I see that time's clock-hand jerks erratic and widdershins,

and its watercourse jumps uphill without location, like a subatomic dust-mote unobserved.

I'm not sure if I'm getting anywhere. I just know this, like a water spider

who alights on any lentic, dimpled surface and poises there, stretching its silken

meniscus – like a drop of dew that hangs

lacunary on a telephone wire, reflecting the entire

consequence of the rain.

I stand here, never really moving.

I am a glass bead, all chronology contained

in the limpid shiny eye of me, gazing at itself.

Like a rustling in autumn leaves, the play of images

flickers film-real and obsolescent as the scribblings

of dreams upon my eyelid's blank chalkboard:

prickling gold as pollen, microscopic

sea anemones and radiolarians – a hypnogogic

creaking of doors and floorboards in the house

as girlhood ghosts upset the rosebushes

and long clamourous freight trains pass and stall in the winter night

waiting for the insomniac dead to board and disembark.

Moment: 'a violin yielded itself to my hearing'

and I lay down, almost in uncomplaining despair

where the dandelions nod their hoary heads

like phosphoric streetlamps in a drunkard's eyes – you see, it is the fireflies again

similarly luminous, spherical

similarly seeming to make music

as I walk among them, I hear it, plinking pentatonic and strange

and I would call it gong or gamelan – I'd call it a half-forgotten music-box,

I'd call it the star-mimicry of plankton in the sea

if I were sure it's mimicry at all

(if I thought the music-box wasn't just a dream)

for I read scrawled in a train tunnel (not really) that thought and reality

are images ping-ponged between two mirrors

are indistinguishable bell and echo.

What are you supposed to do when you go walking

and hear the morse code of the fireflies? What can I say, how can I translate

the alphabet of dandelions on the wind? I cannot read the wishes scribed on them

only the vague, pervasive sadness, speaking death

which is the sadness of candles gone floating down a river

the sadness of the first autumn leaf.

Why is it that we so often hitch our wishes

to such transitory things? As if they can go forth from us, and float into the hinterland of god

like brave hot-air-balloonists without ballast, pushing into the horizonline

into the sunrise green as the rind of cantaloupes

pushing into the asymptote

where we invert the compass rose and turn the page. Walk on

towards the oxygenless

border with That Which Does Not Exist.

I caught a glimpse of this

when I had been kidnapped by a bullet train

descendant to the dragon. I saw watertowers crouched like octopi

or alien spacecraft, knew that I was nowhere now and would soon be further...

Moments, moments, dust-motes, all the shape

of plankton, pollen teeming on the blank

palpebral projectionless screen.

Look out over the border and you will see

corpuscles of white noise, blizzards of moths – Moment:

faintness,

blindness, and I abscond,

dissolving amidst the goldenrod, in the pond

where there is a dancer who is incinerated in her dance,

and a violin unstrings itself leaving only music

and the reel of film comes to an end

          (Hiroshima, cannibalised by fire: epilepsy

                     of eyelids convulsed like lepidoptera.)

I see

the shapes of all projected things erased

in nirvanic apocalyptic

fire.

It is the feeling I have when I melt into you

tremolo and the slow

faltering of the bow

(as a procession of strange lights mounts heavenward.)

and this is as close as I come. This

is the customs office.

I have too much luggage – long hair and leather shoes

and worst of all the maniacal heart, pacing his ribbed zoo.

My passport expired months ago.

I cannot cross, I cannot cross

to Serendib or Timbuktu. I can only

let

my head

down     on     your    shoulder . . .

 Notes to Poem 1:

crepuscule: twilight

lampyrid:relating to fireflies or glow-worms

lampadephore: lantern bearer

hypnopompic: a state of consciousness leading out of sleep

Tannu Touva: a 'vanished country' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan_People%27s_Republic

l'atlas de pays disparus: the atlas of vanished countries

lemniscate: an infinity sign

palpebral: pertaining to eyelids

'a violin yielded itself...' - courtesy of Rilke

ps. If you have anything you're curious about, feel free to ask me questions! :) Comments/analysis/opinions all appreciated.