Moritz - The sentinel : poems

THE SENTINEL

A. F. MORITZ Poems Copyright 2008 A. F. Moritz All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in 2008 by House of Anansi Press Inc. 110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801 Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4 Tel. 416-363-4343 Fax 416-363-1017 www.anansi.ca Distributed in Canada by HarperCollins Canada Ltd. 1995 Markham Road Scarborough, ON, M1B 5M8 Toll free tel. 1-800-387-0117 Distributed in the United States by Publishers Group West 1700 Fourth Street Berkeley, CA, 94710 Toll free tel. F. F.

The sentinel / A.F. Moritz. Poems. ISBN 978-0-88784-790-5 I. Title. PS8576.O724S46 2008 C811.54 C2007-907082-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2007940447 Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang Text design and typesetting: Ingrid Paulson We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Councilfor the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada throughthe Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Printed and bound in Canada

That day I remember when the butterfly was expected, the whole city flooded down to the harbour to wait and welcome, crowding everywhere on the burnt, blackened wharves, the crumbled docks and piers, climbing and fighting to find a place from which the ocean, spread like a bat wing, and the horizon could be seen.

Toward noon it appeared, a watered pink at first, a fleck as of blood in saliva, fluttering crazily, seeming not even to make toward us and yet it came on swiftly, spreading and rising up all at once, a roaring orange veined with black, and blotted out the sun. Between those fiery curtains, each a hemisphere, the tube of worm was like some cylindrical ship of living metal where beings who had travelled from the stars for centuries would peer out through ports of black crystal... except that they were dead inside and the sweet rot smell of carelessly preserved entomological specimens filled the light. Soon, though, it changed again, to Mourning Cloak, to Tiger Swallowtail, to a humble yellow thing that brought its own garden roiling under it to replace the coal-tar waves. The sea was all spiked flowers, goldenrod, lupin, loosestrife, delphinium, and the butterfly stopped its anabasis our way and got lost in the colours. We saw it hovering, going on, nearer, farther, so frantic mad with always more delight it could not pause on any single crown.

And then its female came to it out of nowhere and the two tied a knot in the air, and he stabbed his body into hers clinging to a green translucent stem. A sparrow next, a bird larger than an Africa of cloud and yet demonically light and agile, when they took flight, ate one of them after a brief arabesque of dogfight. Was it our fly that still lived ? Then the hurricane a little breeze that rose when a spot darkened the sun drove it tumbling into the leaves. Torn petals crowded the atmosphere, and whether its wings of taut anile skin had been shattered and blown with the flower fragments, or it had survived, we couldnt see. It had dived like a fighter jet going down into the jungle, hit, behind a hill from which a moment later comes up a plume of flame, but not a flame, a burst of quiet came.

Remember that you once lived, that you were, that you were someplace here ( I almost added with us in our world but that might not be so ). Remember that you once lived, that you were, that you were someplace here ( I almost added with us in our world but that might not be so ).

Remember you had a story, even if you never knew. Someone saw or felt you and had to decide, had to make up a history of you, even if it was a lie: that you were nothing and easily forgotten. And so you were, and it was too, he forgot, we all forgot you, and now nobody knows that story that is always being rewritten: just as it meant to do, it vanished with you. Even if the perfect police erased you, knocked at your navel or sex or the space between with ceramic knuckle and wooden stock and slammed through your flimsy door and scraped you from your bed, and took you and so you were warehoused small change of bones with crawfish claws and mouse teeth nowhere but in my charnel would-be carnal words, nevertheless remember. Even as I command you this, I know you dont.

A place belongs to the one who has most deeply loved it, they said, has hoped in it beyond its self-corruption. A place belongs to the one who has most deeply loved it, they said, has hoped in it beyond its self-corruption.

The land, people, the city is his if his nights are for recalling it, calling it in tears of aloneness and amazed thanksgiving: that luck let him kiss it in his childhood, that it grew into him, is him, that he still wants to have it, save it, he wonders what it knows tonight, right now, how it is with that place, if its happy, dying, dead. So he went back carrying his book of that city: a great book, yet only a dim sketch of his memory, though in its pages, closed and dark, the alleys of cracked windows and lintels, and childrens paths through towering weeds behind the empty stores and under sycamores down to the river, burn with bright emptiness that in the city were full of dust, discarded bottles, concrete crumbs, and rusted shavings in broken light. He did not have a dollar in that place. He could not find a door to open. He did not know a soul.

Look at this place again: vast, splendid, even lush, a forest city, with refreshing green softening the human materials and angles, with wind in the leaves a constant washing of clean water, dark or bright.

And its true, the little city we came from long ago was a squalid failure: every part of it half-used and spoiled, tumbled on itself, blocking up its own nostrils, pores, and bowels, crushing its own hands and head. As if, after furious but moronic labour for a century, it had managed only to make its own body a smoky, narrow warren where it hid three-quarters dead in the vomit and filth it emitted. But we were smart and shining and we came here. What are we, who have lain inside that den and through a mossy hole have glimpsed this moon we see now float free over silver towers ? And the people that we found here: do they purr like the best engines and glint all of the time like the sun off chrome because within them they dont have any black dirty burrow or any space where one once was ?

Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water.

All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each nights one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered a tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with ? And wheres he gone ? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

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