john fitzgerald - cape poetry manuscript august 2015
Post on 23-Jul-2016
222 Views
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
Poems By John FitzGerald
A Manuscript for Review by Cape Poetry 27th August 2015
2
Poems from this selection have appeared in: Burning Bush 2, Here and Now, Irish Examiner, Irish Independent -‐ New Writing, Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Touchstone Anthology, Windharp Anthology. More poems have been accepted for publication in other titles in the near future. Some Biographical Information: I started to write poetry a few years ago in my mid-‐forties. Winner, Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Prize, 2014 Shortlisted, Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, 2015 Recipient, Key West Literary Bursary, 2015 Member, Judging Panel, Poem for Ireland, 2014/15 Recent readings: Cork; Bantry (West Cork Literary Festival); Key West, Florida; Deia, Mallorca; Epidaurus, Greece; Dromana. Recent interviews: Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Irish national TV and radio (RTE). I work as the University Librarian at University College, Cork. I live with my family in rural County Cork.
3
‘The fishnets we spread / Sometimes take a goose.’
-‐ from The Shih Ching
4
Contents
Lost Adventure 5 Pond Field Pond 6 Mid-‐Morning, Hotel Magda 7 Unsettled 8 Una Leaving 9 1 WTC 10 Rebus 11 What Harmony 12 Light Itinerary 13 The Collectors 14 Wild Geese 15 Xuhui Moment 16 Seeing Clear 17 Sisters 18 Resonance 19 La Tramuntana 20 Fota with Jerry 21 Full Coverage 22 Augury 23 Holiday in Youghal 24 Equal and Opposite 25 Fields 26 Legend 27 Couple in a Car Park 28 Creeping Jesus 30 Blueprint 31 Conception to Birth 32 All That 33 Abature 34 Summer, Summer 35 Somewhere Between Orsk and Orenberg 36 A Week in Hours: 12 Sonnets 37 Lost Heritage 38 First Cut 39 Lullaby 40 Two Portraits 41 Reminder 42 East 41st 43 While Walking in the Armstrong Woods 44 McAllister Street Revisited 45 Brooding 46 Mirror in Dublin 47 Down Under 48 Hen Boy 49
5
Lost Adventure No matter how long we tried, or how often, we never managed to perfect that perfect AGHEYEYAYAYAAGH. The woods were never high or thick enough, the ivy no substitute for fig or vine. And the rumble of stampeding herds never amounted to more than a panting wet sheepdog emerging from the ferns quizzical — and a bit afraid. Not to mention, no fair Jane ever found in easy mortal danger.
6
Pond Field Pond Meanwhile surely there must be something to say for the Pond Field pond. An oval discarded shield sitting in a fringe of reeds. Visited by the occasional mallard or teal. By-‐passed by heron and swan. It’s shallow but never runs dry. It is there always but never at the centre or the end of anything. Not worth the bother of rod or sail or makeshift raft, or the curious naturalist. Perfectly obscured from the road by the hedgerow, few must know it exists at all. Even the sheep and cattle pay no heed, grazing their lives away.
7
Mid-‐Morning, Hotel Magda Two cock blackbirds scrap in the patchy grass under the orange trees. Each rises to meet the other’s beak-‐tip in a dusty flutter that borders on delicacy — a male courtship perhaps? Now they are perched on opposite trees: jet black orange-‐opposites, eyes fixed, glouting in the moody heat. One sounds a shrill retreat. Leaves. In the distance a cockerel erupts, trying too late in the day to call the day off. A big fruit rustles its way through foliage and drops to a dull, squat full-‐stop.
8
Unsettled Flat nosed, gap-‐toothed, face flayed by rain, leathered from sun, a matted fleece over cut lips and chin, breath on fire like burning paraffin as I pass close by, his booming Who the fuck’re you? reviving the forgotten nightmare of coming upon two all squared up bare chested, bare knuckling in the middle of the road under a raw moon, sinister glints from the ruptured crowd glaring in at my snug containment then turned to squirming terror at suddenly becoming intruder, unwanted, outsider.
9
Una Leaving Heavy summer showers with their winds must have shaken elder blossom over your car where you parked in the yard, because as you drove out along the mud track a host of petals rose behind unknown to you, flaring in wide white drapes — a visible tail-‐wind leading me to think: there goes the proper exit of a golden sister, as if newly wed, or off to become a chocolatière, such being the flourish of your going, from whom I learned how to love well my daughters, and that age will always preserve the young in relative youth, keeping their presence in our lives — like yours in mine — clear and hopeful and star-‐bright.
10
1 WTC A schoolyard in Tribeca, mid-‐morning, mid-‐winter, brittle sunshine, sharp inland wind, the yard ringing with swarming cries that gather like gulls around a tall black figure in a dark leather jacket consenting with a kind smile to take each coloured rubber football and punch it with the top of his big clenched piston fist up high up into the air up where the grinning children’s faces follow their eyes rising beyond fist, beyond head, beyond steel school roof to their own each small ball reaching its exhilarating but dependable point of fall, and indifferent to the still continuing unreal upward going of the vast glimmering glass backdrop to it all; this one thing that will one day become for some of them their everything that is impossible and beyond reasonable reach, like the first unexpected sight of the rest of their lives.
11
Rebus She is enigma out there on the sill: invisible in black against the back of the night, but for two moons, lime-‐green, lunule-‐incised, and when she meows– a genital pink that tongues and is remouthed.
12
What Harmony When Michael goes away we feed his dog Jago. Where he goes to we don’t know, and what Jago (and probably Michael) doesn’t realise is that this house and yard were off-‐limits to me as a child, because of old enmity. I like the way I can sweep in through the gates and swing around to shine my lights against the barn door where the feed is, then enter there authorised to see the set-‐up of mowers and settle and tools hanging. And how I glimpse the lit inside of the house when I back back around again to face the narrow pillared gate, pausing always for the time I never told of she invited me in to see the portraits on the stairwell wall and say haltingly, in her ridiculed stammer for being a single woman farmer at the creamery asking after fat content and cattle prices, how she always admired my grandfather and what harmony he caused and, despite, how like him I was.
13
Light Itinerary The backside bulb of the pale grey walking man is flashing as though his phone’s on silent in his back pocket ringing, or he’s left the flashlight app set to strobe. Slightly stooped, his workmanlike right arm makes him seem a backpacker, hiking city crossings, pavements, parks — elusive, sketchy, faceless, like the haggard trolley-‐hauling homeless who are everywhere here, their eyes avoiding yours avoiding theirs as if to say: go, don’t go, go, don’t go, go.
14
The Collectors While she slept on, he would gather up the bursts of birdsong around her window, the whipbird’s hiss-‐cracks at the edge of the rainforest, a morning star as one by one they all pulled out to follow the bright space-‐station of their dreams. During the day, there’d be eucalypts standing like beasts of burden in the solid heat, the tremor he felt when she’d say the word creek, lorikeets rocketing through street trees, and once, the draw and sigh of evening sea as she pressed close to him, whispering her dream of the leaf-‐thin tail of an eel tonguing its way through the rocks of the waterfall pool. Later, he’d empty his pockets, adding to the prize shells, seed-‐pods, found stones in her basket on the bookstand, and wait for when she might take it down, carry it out to the veranda, tip everything across the sandy table-‐top and examine each piece carefully, her face glowing in amber candlelight, then replace them all slowly, one by one, her own particular way.
15
Wild Geese After Du Fu For so great is the strain of their lineage and strength that they must exclaim even between themselves the agony of being corporeal and here among those who can only look up and dream.
16
Xuhui Moment Down here in the Bundocks the sparrows seem lighter, livelier. The plane trees are newly planted, well braced by fresh rope and bamboo, the river chamfered by a smooth wind, the sky more expansive. A kite frantically figures-‐of-‐eight over low coloured turbines. A tug, its shoulder to the keel, nudges steadily another steel hulk upstream.
17
Seeing Clear for Nicholas This sunny spring morning the full throttle of a passing tractor will draw one of them running out to stare down at the gap between the piers, wait for the flash revelation: whose tractor it is and what they’re up to on a Sunday. And sure enough, I see him standing small on the big mown lawn in his favourite white-‐hooped jumper, hand raised to shade his eyes, brown curls catching at the tips a glint of auburn from the sunlight. He turns and waves to me, and I wonder if my real purpose in returning here has been to make good the past, ensure that someone gets it right this time so that, if only for an instant, even this much can be clear.
18
Sisters Her elopement hadn’t lasted long — seven days, and when she returned she was amazed nothing had changed, nobody would mention it; it was as though they too had been illicit in their ways and had agreed not to tell how someone had turned in the gate, strolled up the avenue, didn’t hail or call or knock, but came straight through the hall and sang and danced and acted as they had never known, making his bed among them too, each one succumbing to his cunning lures, until they realised he shouldn’t stay: this artful lover couldn’t match their love for one another.
19
Resonance How do you still remember Dutton Hewtson, my mother asked, with — was it surprise or accusation? His downturned felt hat, cinder eyes, cropped beard, sweep of blue moustaches. His what I now know to be antique Devonian way — waistcoated, corduroyed, sat outside the tin cabin that he must have lived in in what must have been his dotage, the lingering genius of their private orchard at Belmount. Rows of fruit trees and berried bushes I can barely recall running through. But I do remember him, and most of all, his name: unlike anything I had heard, or will ever hear again.
20
La Tramuntana for Juan Graves The sheep look up as I pass — surprised elect, tinny bells spared the busy ringing that lends their forage in the allium an edge of gluttony. They’ll clear the ground along the terraces to make way to the olive trees for harvest. Sunlight, grainy, sieved through the groves, suspends life here in old ways: I wait for the brown-‐skinned boy-‐Christ to saunter around a corner, a half-‐loaf in one hand, three white fishes dangling from the other.
21
Fota with Jerry Egrets hunching drains, the broken walls of Belvelly Bridge, its toppled sandstone blocks bruising the dun shallows, and so many years now since we circumambulated the island, followed the railway line in search of Townsend’s couch-‐grass when we should have been in lecture hall or library. But we weren’t made for that. And this was all before the by-‐pass, wildlife park, hotel, chalets, golf academy. Back then, it was just the shut house and unkempt arboretum, neglected farmland — somewhere entire set aside for our diversion, the belt of holm oak and our own awkward bravura useless holds against all that was to come undone.
22
Full Coverage Do I really need to know this bright steel arrowhead passing over now is the TC-‐X36PW Thomas Cook from Tenerife to Glasgow? I’m looking at the map my smartphone app has magicked up: an orange model plane traces its blue route through familiar names — Killumney, Rylane, Mashanaglass. What do they, half-‐sober, half-‐awake, think when they consult their inflight TV screens, and see this bland green bolt of field and lake? Does anybody care? Up there, down here, anywhere? Do we expect to know more now that we’ve geo-‐tagged the deep heart’s core?
23
Augury i.m. Brendan and halfway out we came across a length of thin close-‐woven rope, floating like a frond of dried Norfolk pine, perfectly tubular and as smooth from use as the one some years later you would loop around your mother’s tree then feed through itself to hold you at full swing until as good as could never be undone
24
Holiday in Youghal Not the waves, or the sand, or the expanse — different enough from what you were used to for sure, and a town too — but nothing compared to this: the pipe that protruded from under the dune and ran like an exposed throat down the strand. Bunkered in concrete and buttressed by salt-‐marbled spars, barnacle-‐marked and lime-‐grey, half-‐sarcophagus, half-‐cast, the black O darkening the water all the more as it came. You could walk into it, but where to? And most of all, the variable point where tide and current collided, sometimes colluding with wind: here was where you would stand and watch. What, your father asked, what aunt Mary would ask, what Uncle Micheál would say. There, there, you would say, pointing, there, the beach empty now and your mother almost crying.
25
Equal and Opposite My late cousin Mai never worried about termites, though her floors were thin, thin enough to hear the banter from the bar below which she would open up and tend until I or my father would arrive to free her up to up and watch the snooker on her small white black–and-‐white TV. She wasn’t colour-‐blind, just didn’t mind not having the full picture. For her, the pleasure — though never spoken — must have been in seeing the shaft impact and then propel a slowly rolling ball into a pocket, snug as the half-‐crown she would slip down through her fingers into the till, for the roiling ball of malt that would hit the right spot in return.
26
Fields There’s a place on the Dublin-‐Cork line where woodland opens out to fields within the wood — two or three, irregular in shape and secretive in their deep surround, unperturbed by the sudden pulsing passing-‐through of trains. And then they’re gone. I always seem to lift my eyes at just this point in the journey, signalled by some animus of field and its possession of me since a child, for all the fields I have traversed and loved and lost.
27
Legend New York insinuates its sharp proboscis into the nose-‐rub of The Narrows, nudging Long Island out to sea, so it can snaffle the crispy tip of Sandy Hook, suck up Staten Island before Jersey City closes in on Kill Van Kull.
28
Couple in a Car Park As I wait in the car park outside the DIY Superstore to listen to the end of my poetry podcast about the Essential American Poets, I’m distracted by two people who emerge from the store each with large items in their arms, one following closely the other. Something about the space between them makes me need to classify their relationship until I discover there is none — just that their cars have parked alongside each other. Yet they both fall into an exchange as they load their goods into their car boots, prompted perhaps by earlier sightings across the aisles, a flicker of recognition of something to bring them each to want to delay the moment of departure, car boots remaining open as they speak, keys not yet retrieved, sometimes approaching minutely, sometimes retreating, all of the time calculating, recalculating the depth of the other, both hoping to get some sounding back, until it becomes no longer tenable without something more than tentative, and one, or the other — it’s not clear which — loses their nerve or interest, and signals retreat or defeat, with a glance to the distance, wrist or phone, as they both do in almost unison, sealed by open smiles of relief, as though it were a drink of hope and disappointment mixed and raised and clinked and taken on such occasions. And now it’s all about the leaving well alone: car doors, keys, seat belts,
29
rear-‐mirror manoeuvring, the detestable safety of the drivers’ seat, the wondering by whom and how the brief and final locking of eyes will precisely be arranged, to say: of course we would… I could have…and maybe some day…
30
Creeping Jesus A festschrift adverts to The Monk of St Gall, Notker the Stammerer, his writings on Charles the Fat and Pepin the Hunchback; and to Walahfrid the Cross-‐eyed who so glowingly wrote of the Irish of the time, putting me in mind of Jerry Leary, and his whispery praying at the back seat of the side aisle: his missal tied with scapular string and gorged with the mortuary cards he recited over and over again, shut eyes — or were they averted — hidden behind the smudged glass of his horn-‐rimmed dispensary specs. I saw him once bury — or unearth — a box in the soil between his low tin-‐roofed house and the lane to Kilmurry; I didn’t wait to watch for fear I’d be seen, or that he would somehow divine the equally cruel cognomen by and for which he was locally known.
31
Blueprint Even the constellations are versative. Tonight I mistook the twin heads of Gemini, peeping over the western horizon, for The Crab. And then I saw crabs’ eyes everywhere: aslant, at right angle, once even asquint, until I realised it was a satellite crawling past. I saw the moon beneath the sea, elemental, moving unseen but still there, light fading in slow pulses, as though rehearsing its next appearance. Hercules, rangy and elusive to the south. Stripping the wallpaper from an upstairs room some time ago, I was surprised to reveal the signet of my childhood; and that it was still there. I had lived eye-‐to-‐eye with this pastel miniature from my earliest memory: a gaily clad infant troupe set against pale blue air playing their way along an invisible route — umpteen knots, all arranged in a regular stencilled pattern across the walls. The group on the wall by my bed-‐head, where I would usually wake turned in, though identical to all the others, their tiny faces, and the larger one they made, still uniquely familiar and strange.
32
Conception to Birth (from the Old English, BL Cotton MS Tiberius A. iii, fols 40v-‐41r) Here begins an account of the origin of people, how one is made in its mother’s womb, becomes person. The brain made first, then veiled in membrane the sixth week. In the second month the vessels come, dividing innumerable shorter & longer & blood runs in to feet & up to hands, the branches dividing together supplying. The third month it is person without soul. The fourth month it is steadfast in limbs. The fifth month it is living & growing & the mother falls dizzy & then ribs form and her body suffers much as the young one moves in the womb. The sixth month skin covers it & bones are growing. The seventh month toes & fingers are growing. The eighth month chest is growing & heart & blood and everything is set fast in place within. The ninth month it is known for certain to women if they can give birth. The tenth month the wife will not escape with her life if the bairn isn’t born: it becomes a disease in the womb that will kill — most likely on a Monday night.
33
All That That was the night Robert Graves took over my playlist, and I woke suffocating in the small mosquito net to Iarla Ó Lionáird in a pitiful state of despair, as though he was trapped in my portable speaker — his only means of escape to sing badly in unintelligible Mallorquín. Monika’s laptop too suffered some kind of stroke, forgetting itself and wanting to hibernate incognito. Even Noodle, normally joyous at the prospect of a walk — as promised by my appearance — showed no signs of life at all. Two long tremors rolled along the base of the valley keeping the downpour going over breakfast. And all that day, the dark clouds, low mist, his pernickety voice insistent, his trail of havoc moiling above the hills as if lifted and spun there by something read or said innocently the previous evening, still spinning like a circuit of witches all through the night, the whole invisible town and its past — and every last thing he touched and thought and injured — swarming in black uncontrollable storm.
34
Abature Outside Youghal we pulled over to a kind of public/private lay-‐bye of old blinding, large shallow potholes — more like dust-‐bowls after the dry spell, and a low limestone block wall indicating some former civic maritime role. A run-‐down, grilled, and boarded slate shack faced the sea, too small to ever have been a habitation. I slept badly, too tired to continue driving safely but neither wanting to be late arriving. When I woke, the world was made of rubber and over-‐lit. I wanted to fall back to sleep where things were more solid, but forced myself to open the car door and step out, now regretting my whole life — every minute of it that had brought me to this pass — and walked around the shack to find a couple with a great dane, the man fishing from a short pier. I walked to the edge, keeping my distance from the beast, and saw the battered debris of what looked like cabin furniture washed up and lodged in the crook of sea wall and wharf. In high grass as I walked back to the car, I noticed a flimsy suitcase flat on its back, catches sprung like surprised eyelids. I flipped the lid with my foot and found it empty but for an adult magazine exhibiting a lewd diptych that tarted the sleep-‐spittle in my cheeks. I returned to the car and we resumed our journey eastward. I really didn’t want to have to relate any of this.
35
Summer, Summer After the Irish Summer, summer, we brought the summer in: summer gold in the setting sun, summer warmth in milk for the calves, summer green — we brought the bough. Summer, summer, we brought the summer in, the May-‐doll maiden of every summer, up every hill and down every glen beautiful girls dressed in white. Summer, summer, yellow summer of clear bright daisies, larksong spiraling to the skies, flowers on the trees and joy in the days, golden summer to the setting sun. Summer, summer, we brought this summer in, holly and hazel and elder and rowan, ash-‐tree bright at the mouth of the ford, we brought it all with us — who can withsay?
36
Somewhere Between Orsk and Orenberg For Irina Some nights I dream I am walking the postglacial tundra with you, somewhere between Orsk and Orenberg. We are waiting there, but not wanting to be met too soon. Your bony hand in mine is ceramic and precious as a found egg. We consider the willows, gentling their catkins in our free hands; regard the majesty of the moraines with proprietorial calm; you, in your navy school uniform, me in my late-‐teenage sheepskin, long hair. I already know that when they take you from me, smile their goodbyes, I will have to cross the ice-‐cap again to find you here. But I am serene and sure, because your hair is the same colour as our foot-‐prints in the snow, your eyes the same pale unflinching blue of my determination to return for you.
37
A Week in Hours: 12 Sonnets
38
Lost Heritage The slate that lay on the lawn all month grew slowly ingrown, half-‐hidden in weed — clover, buttercup, plantain, the long grass fringing it evenly. I hoped no-‐one would step on it to savour the dull flat snap, and its subsidence into two or three half-‐sunken shards, no longer clean slate but given-‐in to splinters for re-‐use on the path, far removed from the snug slot it once slid to, flattened on the rafters of the loft now gone, like the men that built and kept it stocked, the oats they spilled from the hefted sacks, the invisible grain-‐rustling rats, the mill that winnowed my life into its this existence.
39
First Cut Nothing more heroic for a boy than a working chainsaw. The smoky up-‐throttling roar, spray of dust ejecting, strain and strength and fixed eye of the holder, the what-‐if sweet whiff of danger in exchange for raw power: it was like cutting into pure fear to sunder it in two, then smaller bits so that it could never grow in the same place again. And when he’d fill the empty tank straight from the refill can, ears still hearing a distant growl, you would stand and watch that old riddle of capacity and bore play out; as if this was what you had waited all day for: the glup glup glup become pour.
40
Lullaby Something, still, about milk arriving in labelled containers — plastic or glass, it doesn’t matter, just feels unnatural ever since the enamel pail stopped coming down from the yard for one of us to tip through the steel strainer in the kitchen sink, a flimsy tissue filter all there was to protect us from those unpronounceable conditions we pictured old bachelor farmers shuffling through, but worth the risk as soon as we would taste its stall-‐warm comfort, the squirted bubbles winking still, and how it would swell in the stomach, quieting the baby, cradle and all.
41
Two Portraits Orion seems always to be astride Clearach when I get to see him, pissing from height into the wide Cummer valley, giving the river its vigorous flow and audible rush eastwards — for the time being; but also always recalling two such other stately epaulettes, the heaving knotted belt and sequined tunic of Holbein’s Henry, dangling dagger so deliberately prick, the emotionless less-‐than-‐enamoured stare; one leaving everything to it, the other, sparing nothing there.
42
Reminder I came across our pine kitchen table in a weighbridge hut in Dunboyne, County Meath, two or three years before the turn of the century, before children (BC), before knowing that it would end up here. It had just half a top then, but all four legs and stretchers were in perfect nick to make me want to have it, as I did, and fix for it to be delivered down for Brendan’s friend to dip in his acid bath and fuse a freshly sawn half-‐board to the riven original — making of it our flat continual reminder that sometimes you must substitute to renew.
43
East 41st From where you wake, three thin strips of white light press through the top of the blind, the only slivers of sky visible from down here — even though you are up on the tenth floor. Saturday affords a view of vacant offices across the way, a sense of the city abated, lives lived away for a brief while from the high excitement of humanity at full tilt that is this place. And how do they fare, each trying to deny for as long they can bear the deep insistent resurfacing need to be down town again, blood pulsing quick, unquenchable fire igniting the mind?
44
While Walking in the Armstrong Woods Mischief in the branches high above — no, worse than mischief: the fell scream of a marauder, strangled cries of the victims in a life & death struggle we both stop to imagine from below. I take in your singlet-‐flattened chest, tanned neck, golden hair, the earnest angle of your head...and a small grey chick’s feather float past to land unnoticed on your shoulder. I wait for you to act — itch, shake, brush off the burden, until I realise that this is, after all, after all the waiting, the real world, the here and now, the unexceptional quiddling it.
45
McAllister Street Revisited Didn’t tell me that the room had not been entered or the bed slept in for years but I could feel it in the sheets, marble cold underneath, cold resistance of the pillows. And in the sleep that came and left during the night, tireless questioning until a young light leaked through the blinds with promise of forgetfulness and all will be revealed to the waiting portraits on the dressing-‐table, walls. Irish, Jewish faces where only the children smile. How strange a bride alone, bouquet held aside as though a parchment, and she is dark and radiant like you, her train gathered around her feet like frozen snow.
46
Brooding The cropped hawthorn hedges of Kildare slip past. Neat fields, clear ditches, houses well-‐sealed and appointed, and every now and then a substantial residence of the residents of substance whose clipped bloodstock graze framed well against their good investment plantations. All is in order at this high order of magnitude and plenty. In carriage C, a woman makes hurried calls in a lowered midlands accent to relay the results of her scan, and cadge a lift home from the station. The child inside her is growing impatient for the world to come and claim it; but she’s staying mum awhile, counting her options and her blessings and her change.
47
Mirror in Dublin The mullioned mirror at the back of the bar attracts light and action from the street outside: a live stream mash-‐up of the city in motion on an ordinary Wednesday morning. Shoppers stride into yellow and blue bus-‐sides, lorries in collision with themselves, frantic cyclists cleave through flying cars; all within the stasis of the silver bevelled edges. From time to time, the waiting staff walk past, illumed when they do. And now a stillness settles in as the city and the mirrors rest unexpectedly and there is something amber and attentive at play, as we wait in the lull of a held moment for our small inner worlds to spin again.
48
Down Under Bushfire smoke trails in a loosening grey helix from Springbrook down over the city and out to sea. Light of evening fading, mauve horizon over a graphite sea — fading fast as I bowl along Hedges. A jolly roger winks from a shady balcony. The Hi Ho! Sold sign flashes back as I pass. Two mynahs scrap noisily in the casuarinas. The lights of Q1 flicker, twinkle and fix on blue. The rhythm of the speed-‐ramps rocks and settles. I am so far down now and away from it all that I mustn’t lose sight of the sky, keep my bearings, be sure to come back up carefully — so it isn’t all blown in one go.
49
Hen Boy It’s how he handles animals that matters most to him: needing to be firm and sure and gentle. Only yesterday, we found a racing pigeon in a drain, its raw neck craning from the voided body, pink ringed legs surprisingly strong, and still he poked at it with intent precision, deaf to our disgust; the two escaping frogs I stopped the mower to point out to him, and how he deftly tracked down each one among the docks, homing them both into his half-‐clenched old man’s fists — just as all the hens ran amok when Whitey No-‐name speared a third and paddled off, jelly limbs limply flapping from her beak, the others bearing down in hot pursuit, and he whooping at all creation, like the circus-‐master’s son.
50
top related