Dionne Brand - Ossuaries

POETRY BY DIONNE BRAND

Fore Day Morning (1978)

Earth Magic (for children 1980/1993/2006) Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia (1983) Primitive O ensive (1983) Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984) No Language Is Neutral (1990)

Land to Light On (1997)

thirsty (2002)

Inventory (2006)

Ossuaries (2010)

For Constance Rooke

you could emerge from car wrecks

as elegantly as from weddings

ossuary I

I lived and loved, some might say,

in momentous times,

looking back, my dreams were full of prisons

in our narcotic drifting slumbers,

so many dreams of course were full of prisons, mine were without relief

in our induced days and our wingless days, my every waking was incarcerated,

each square metre of air so toxic with violence the atmospheres were breathless there,

the bronchial trees were ligatured

with carbons

some damage I had expected, but no one

expects the violence of glances, of o ces, of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors especially, the vicious telephones, the coarseness of daylight, the brusque decisions of air, the casual homicides of dresses what brutal hours, what brutal days,

do not say, oh nd the good in it, do not say, there was virtue; there was no virtue, not even in me let us begin from there, restraining metals covered my heart, rivulets of some unknown substance transfused my veins

at night, especially at night, it is always at night, a wall of concrete enclosed me, it was impossible to open my eyes

I lived like this as I said without care, tanks rolled into my life, grenades took root in my uterus, I was sickly each morning, so dearly what to say, life went on around me,

I laughed, I had drinks, I gathered with friends we grinned our aluminum teeth,

we exhaled our venomous breaths,

we tried to be calm in the invisible architecture we incubated, like cluster bombs,

whole lives waiting, whole stellar regions, discoveries of nebulae, and compassion

from the cities the electric rains pierced us, the ceaseless bitter days folded like good linen, the phosphorous streets gave o their harmful lights we bit our ngernails to blue buttons, we staggered at the high approach of doorways, plunged repeatedly to our deaths only to be revived by zoos, parades, experiments, exhibits, television sets, oh we wanted to leave, we wanted to leave the aspirated syllables and villages, the skeletal dance oors, the vacant, vacant moons that tortured us, when the jailers went home and the spectators drifted away and the scientists nished their work like a bad dog chained to an empty gas station, for blue blue nights, I got worse and worse, so troubling

I would fall dead like a specimen,

at the anthropometric spectacles

on the Champ de Mars, the Jardin dAcclimatation the mobile addresses of the autopsy elds, though I could see no roads, I was paid for losing everything, even eyesight I lived in the eternal villages, I lived like a doll, a shaggy doll with a beak, a bell, a red mouth, I thought, this was the way people lived, I lived I had nights of insentient adjectives, shale nights, pebbled nights, stone nights, igneous nights, of these nights, the speechlessness I recall, the right ribs of the lit moon, the left hip of the lit moon, what is your name they asked, I said nothing I heard the conspiratorial water,

I heard the only stone, I ate her shoulder, I could not hear myself, you are mistaken I said to no one the chain-link fences glittered like jewellery, expensive jewellery, portable jewellery, I lost verbs, whole, like the hull of almonds after consideration you will discover, as I, that verbs are a tragedy, a bleeding cli side, explosions, Im better o without, with vermillion, candles this bedding, this mercy, this stretcher, this solitary perfectable strangeness, and edge, such cloth this compass of mine, of earth, of mourners of these reasons, of which fairgrounds, of which theories of plurals, of specimens of least and most, and most of expeditions, then travels and wonders then journeys, then photographs and photographs of course the multiplications of which, the enormity of this, and drill-bits and hammers and again handcu s, and again rope, coarse business but there some investigations, then again the calculations, such hours, such expansions, the mind dizzy with leaps, such handles, of wood, of thought and then science, all science, all murder, melancholic skulls, pliant to each ngertip, these chromatic scales, these calipers the needle in the tongue, the eyes eye, so whole diameters, circumferences, locutions, an orgy of measurements, a festival of inches gardens and paraphernalia of measurements, uni catory data, curious data, beautiful and sensuous data, oh yes beautiful now, of attractions and spectacles of other sheer forces, and types in the universe, the necessary exotic measurements, rarest, rarest measuring tapes a sudden uni catory nakedness, bi catory nakedness, of numbers, of violent fantasms at exhibitions again, of walks, of promenades at fairs with products, new widgets, human widgets, with music, oh wonders, the implications

then early in this life, like mountains, already pictures and pictures, before pictures, after pictures and cameras their sickness, eye sickness, eye murder, murder sickness, hunger sickness,

this serendipity of calculators, of footprints with fossils, their wingspan of all time, at crepuscules rare peace time, if only, like water, in daytime, no solace, so, so di erent from solitude, all solitude, all madness, so furious, so numerous, the head, the markets, the soles of the feet, so burnt, so thin and the taste, so meagre, so light-headed, the cloud ashes, the lightning geometry, the core of re ectivity so vastly, vastly vast the wait now, lumens of aches, such aches, the horizontal and the vertical aches of lightning, its acoustics, loud pianos, percussive yet strings and quartets, multicellular runnels yet and yet, the altitude of the passageway, its precipitation and grand arithmetic, the segments the latitudes of where, where and here, its contours, its eccentric curvatures, so presently, angular and nautical, all presently just ne my lungs, just ne, hypothesis absolutely, but just ne,

why lungs, strange theory

oh yes and the magnitude of jaundice, trenches, like war, continuous areas and registers, logarithms so unexplainable, rapid scales, high notes besides, anyway so thermal, atmospheric, wondrous aggressions, approximately here, elaborate like radiation and seismic, yes all over the bodies symptoms of algebraic oods, tiredness for one, weariness actually, weary with magnetic embryos

petals, yes petals of sick balm please, now yes, for my esophagus, analgesics of indigo, of wires, of electric shocks, why eucalyptus leaves of course lemon grass, labernum, please, lions claw, remedies of cloves, bitter bark, still birdless though, worldless

asthma with blueness, then music,

gardens truthfully, truthfully nauseous with tonsured numbers, volumes of bres, embroidery and hair nets of violence, blue, like machine guns, of course knives, extensions of blueness, all right then wherever

same radiations, lines in the forehead, tapers, electrodes, invisible to the eyes, o cial hammers and corkscrews, o cial grass o cial cities now for appearances after all this, all these appearances, generous, for certain scraggly, wan, and robust appearances assignments and hidden schedules of attendance, a promise of blindness, a lovers clasp of violent syntax and the beginning syllabi of verblessness