An excerpt from Wo/man
At Least
Immediately driven into a wilderness, the speaker finds the land and its cultures equally harsh yet at least enough to inspire a market that excludes no-one as it wants to sell anything imaginable to survive devastation by the laws of God, governments and taxonomy.
Imagine nothing, wait, thirst,
Don't move, wait for the water.
Glue your lips to the hairy skin.
Its cat storm and stream of goat
Make mud at the bottom of your throat,
Helping you wait with less need
Than before when the stream overflowed
Down your arms upraised to the sun
That allows the little more of mint,
Charcoal fire, and dented tin to hold
Tea long enough for death, escape
From death, truth and lies or fiction.
It knows where the wind comes first,
Free of desert, rain, heat and sea;
Digs a well of light and pictures a sheep
Before the grassland and gulf disappear
And a coast of fish skeletons
Must feed the palm tree of fear.
Caught between desert and phosphate,
The least of a tree, its shade,
Sustains enough flesh for a soul,
Daughter of night or son of shadow,
To press and share its oil for food
And light, for washing the body upright,
For easing the bent-double back
And feet bandaged in mosquito nets
As they lug brushwood down hill tracks
Timeless as the generations
Yet also worn as flat—no numbered
Day of birth or death and no recall
Or care of genealogies
And graves beyond a wet and cold
Palm plank lining a well
Seventy meters yet still not deep
Enough to save half our children;
And all their innocence imagines
Nothing of the guilt and hate
In the elder brother's bitter,
Lonely and thick oleander,
In the open-mouthed vulture's hood
Full of flies, and in the bleached skulls
Of themselves become desert
Tombs and cooking ovens where a saint
Of sunburned eyelids, cults of dates
And rags of the most intimate
Can multiply the cube and dome
With an interior of dark green paint
So that each barren place provides a home
For a helplessly glistening sky
To be buried without human hurt.
Without its code simply discontinued,
The surrounding land would have succumbed
Long ago because it lives upon
Its own unknowns and needs no rape
By gods that dreams of death have made
Into mountains of defense and penance.
Rock like Saturn's rings, black glaze,
Yellow, red and milky sands and clays
Open gashes for the hot breath
Of the horizon's abyss
To thrust in its tongue with a kiss
Of cactus, laurel, palm and fig
So hot that every secret must
Evaporate unless it's sealed
With wax of desert rose and lust
Blue as a fissure of moonlit rain.
These mountains of Atlas nude,
Slabs of river feet, eyes filled with cranes,
Scorpion nerves, muscles like snakes,
And beetle wheezing pores will yield
Whatever the sky wants to make
From hopes of carcasses after death
For more than larvae ropes and clouds of flies
Because it's never too steep or too high
In the noon or snowy nebulae
For voices to break solitude.
They come over vague, near-parallel trails,
Gullies with the pebbles kicked away
By years of claws, bones, and feet.
Passing donkeys dreaming in ditches,
They come over walls half decayed
And half built, broken and fused
Yet equally needed and used
By flesh and clay, cactus and snail,
Red lichen and stone, mud and light.
Lazy and discipline rich,
They come with lizards from the gardens
Of circle and line but no face,
Not even your own in the cypress and ilex-
Channeled rills, the feather canes,
Camomile, mimosa, jasmine,
Hollyhock, papyrus,
Citrus, olives and golden green,
Violet grapes transparent yet opaque,
Hard, sticky and explosive
To overcome the dry leaf's fall
Into a plan of rose petals.
Fortified with drinking oleander ash,
Dead fathers' bones and burnt fish scales,
You eat grilled corn to the right
Of a room of salt behind
A door of flattened sardine cans.
Ripe almonds crack like your walls
Of earth, straw, rain and windows slit small,
But the impermanence is no more
And no less than your dirt floor
Fire among three stones and a fountain
Enclosed and constant in the core
Of your home's simple lines and open space
Within earth's curves—still a façade
But plain as trusting the sand and rain
With your cemeteries, one desert man
With your goats going out to graze
In the desert from dawn to midnight,
And trusting that God is God.
At least such a trust lets you live
For something more than the market's
Chance lurching to the jug drum
Of donkey skin but paying your ransom
To cinema based on a diet
Of urine, stone, bronze and dry sweat.
Half-asleep on top of a van,
You ride into the mouth smeared red,
The face laid waste by sexless sex,
The knee long breasts, steel spike teats,
Vagina stuffed with date pits,
Voyeurs and yanked out tongues,
Penis of diesel exhaust dung
Sucked by gold toothed goat heads
Artificially made sweet.
You'll worry about devils tomorrow.
For now the child with a sheep fleece wig,
Magnesium deformed, wanting a kiss
And selling hard amber curd
Must also appear to you unseen
Before the lizard in the incense finds
Prayers to protect your life of bread
From long knives of the evil and dead,
Though they'll weigh you with feathers on
And full of blood before they pack your eggs
In straw and let you see the blade
While quieter types sell cocks
To storytellers prohibited
To wear shoes or ride a horse
Yet who dress in inky velvet
As they please their hero's gaze
Like a blank video screen
And confect their maker's name
Through alms giving with no intention,
No secret want except to beg
Themselves, lost as the blind
Saints of repetition
Catching their flesh on the thorn
Bracelets slipping the closed fist.
The private sold in open air,
Value like nothing in the world,
Necessities for the unborn,
Conscience telling you what to wish
Buying a box of broken locks
From mountains of the moon and spice
Colored from the black and white,
And all that remains to trade
After cracking open the dice
Of sympathy and blame
Continue an old game of fetish
Powered by a new resource:
Gods still jealous of what you desire
Flowing freely out of the east
Let you eat, drink and admire
The fish and wine in the fountain
Behind a low door of no trust
In fast and purification
Or their rationalized behaviors
Bleeding buyers and sellers blue
Until they no longer exist.
But these gods will sell you too
Or barter for something else at least,
Unless you can provide better
And more than foreign letters
Written on a chemicals box,
Useless cloth and videotapes
Of your orphaned, sucking mouth
Full of blood and milk from the south,
Henna in your nails and beard
For no other love than uncooked, smeared
Sheep fat, tea, sugar chunks and mint booze
Puffing your eyes, dripping down your chin
And loosening the rope of goat hair,
All that holds back the guts of your brain
From bursting the basket of some whim
Claimed as your identity.
Let it like all incantations
Hemorrhage, and people
Will use dripping clay, tar,
Whitewash, sharp tin, Renault parts,
Spent cartridge coppers and old tires
To make utensils and dishes
For whatever comes into the dim
Space beneath canvas, planks, reeds
And rusty metal forming a town
Under one roof with openings unplanned
But effectively letting in
The sun, rain, moon, stars
And anyone else who will wait
For tea and heaps of dates,
Yellow, black, red and brown.
Page(s) 2-6
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- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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