McKendrick - Selected Poems

A born rebel, at ease in your outrage you refuse the armchairs invitation to slump in a heap or sleep in a hump. Im by contrast on a hardbacked chair sitting prim and tightarsed as Britannia with a shield of books and a chewed biro. The argument were having is unravelling the ends that look so odd now theyre asunder, we can only wonder how they ever did get joined together. It seems weve unwound an ampersand and pulled it like a cracker. On the third chair the black-and-white cat and the white-and-black, love-locked in a tricky double helix, keep licking each others necks.

Heaven is the country of the exiles.

Heaven is the country of the exiles.

They travelled here for refuge or for rest, To learn the language or to taste the fruit. Years pass. A cloud occludes the mountains foot And the road home is overgrown with mist, The white edges of a virgin forest Neither daytrip nor exodus defiles. The bread is good and bitter but still leaves The palate aching for an absent flavour. The shopping malls have windows where you find Instead of your own face, a heedful neighbour Whose joy to find you may be just as feigned. Is your face too so transfigured and tanned? Less old each day, less coarsened by beliefs? Perhaps this isnt heaven after all.

The walls are veined with rose and polished beryl An ichor that you dont know how to tap. New arrivals are treated with such awe, Robed in colours, in light, as if each step They take will help us trace some lost Before Which if it ever was we cant recall.

It was the time of day when the soul speaks Latin with a Gothic slur, and sees in every direction an evening made of basil and magenta. There was no breeze, and we were walking by the canals and office-blocks of Carthage. You were in a sour mood and foresaw only war and burning, widows and orphans. I suggested we stop at a bar for sherbet the latest thing, sprinkled with ginger.

From there, we could see the queen on her terrace sporting her would-be wedding gown, its train of damask roses twined with ears of corn. The light took on a green tinge and a drunk ex-mercenary kept muttering about drift-lines where banded kraits would coil to clean their scales diamonds glittering in the sea-junk. It made no sense to me, but sense was not what I was after. I wanted dreams. As dusk drew in its final flecks of gold I felt the black north couching in my bones.

Some played volleyball using fishing nets; some drank cans of Peroni; others searched inland for flints and sources of clear water.

I wandered by the shore towards the harbour and the blind lighthouse of Palinurus, and found a dolphin turning at the tides hem bluntly, its skin fraying on the sharp stones; then the stringy, knifed wheeze of the helmsman came back from the shadows and a light struck fire through the mute larynx of the rock at Cumae the mad woman humming just to calm him: That cruel place will always bear your name.

I woke drenched in sweat and homesick for nowhere I could think of, a feeling scuffed and quaint as farthings or furlongs. Then I remembered the room of the sirocco in a Sicilian palace made of pink volcanic sugar. There was a scent of waxed oak and pistachios. Two maids were making up our nuptial bed, smoothing the white linen with their dark hands. Youd never have finished finding fault in their work if I hadnt intervened, so that you turned on me saying Their family were turnip doctorsat the time of the Bourbons an old enmity then, and more imperious even than pleasure. How to get out of that windowless room, with not one of its walls adjoining the air was all I could think of, from that point on.

Your voice pursued me down the marble stairway: Dont think youll ever find a home again!

The staff are picketing the pleasure gardens of the Baia Hotel with placards. The sun is trying to melt the rocks. The Hohenzollerns and the Hohenstaufens are having their annual conference inside while their saffron-tinted, air-conditioned coaches loaf in the parking lot above the cliff and their drivers try to read the placards something about the bay being soiled, a filter, and embezzled public funds. Ive got to know each curve of this coast road as the car hairpins like a cardiograph. (From a distance, it is gently bow-shaped.) I know where a barn owl nests and where the agaves leap from their rootstock toeholds and could tell of the netted lemon groves that hesitate on parapets so narrow you want to talk them back to safety; and of the watchtowers underwater, the window where a moray eel is curled but I wont this need to depict is just a weakening of the hold I have on that rockface, a fatal stepping-backwards onto glazed blue tiles that are tiles of air.

I lurk like a stowaway in the dark threshold of your block of flats and wait for a sign.

I park my wreck beside the lorries that slouch at the curb till dawn, laden to the tusks with mahogany logs from Senegal. At the docks, just a cabers toss away, where row after row of raw pink Fiats are waiting for Legion to possess them, they season in heaps and no sooner move than they come to a halt, as if obeying some natural imperative. Your balcony gives on timber seeping resin in the moonlight; the mountains bracketing the bays black waves as they fret the sea-front and the frail hull of the unfrequented Nave-Ristorante moored under the cement factorys toxic plume. Its all crammed in like a tourists map. Nightshifts, headlamps and the desultory tide. The palm fronds shrugging on the promenade.

Loosed from the shaggy leggings of those logs I expect a windfall of tree snakes and insects to seep through the holes of my peel-back roof. Only last week a scorpion stung you. Starting as a fire on the side of your thigh it came to a head in a charred violet point You became irascible and superstitious and dreamed of a horrible martyrdom. You felt my star-sign made me somehow to blame as if Id hired a familiar for the crime. My car fell under suspicion. You began to call it The Touring Insect House, checking the seats and shadows on entering, where before youd merely likened it to the bin-skips with their beds of decomposing ash-blue mulch.

Ive my doubts too. Do lovers use it by night? Its suspension is not what it used to be. Beer bottles, cigarette packets with odd brand-names, chewed gum-wads: all add up to something nocturnal depredations! Anything could live there biodegrading, unobserved, while the rear-view mirror makes headlights flare like stars snapped out of fixity and the hewn trunks seem lengths of a broken axle around which once the leaf-green planet turned.

Rust and dry rot and the small-jawed moth are our best friends and they wish us well, undoing the fabric of our heaven. They correspond to something inside us that doesnt love the works our hands have made wire-cutters, pick-locks, saboteurs. Are you building a good memory to have of me? you once asked as though Id just begun a papier-mch Taj Mahal.

I keep a cardboard box of newspapers in the cupboard so everything thats happened is safe from pulp mills and the record-shredders but all the while in the dark the silverfish and woodlice are at work on the word, its dot matrix. Living on what seems to us dust, they profit directly from our negligence and attention in general only provokes their swerving, averting or curling-up manoeuvres. Meaning? They roll it away and break it down into unrecombinable fragments like fatigue in our metal or cancer in concrete.