BigCityLit - new York Edition

Poetry:

Global Poem Zones

"Imagine there's no countries." We can. We did. Reorder the planetary geography by longitude and New York finds common ground with Montreal, Caracas, and Tierra del Fuego such as Los Angeles will never offer: shared real-time experience. "Nothing to kill or die for." The pie's 24 pieces are all equal--theoretically at least. The hours of the day, however--theoretically of equal duration--are surely not.

Thus, we conclude the year 2000 and bridge to the January issue already as of midnight, December 31 inAuckland, New Zealand for a preview of poems and short essays from the world's 24 time zones. This month's selections include master traveler contributing editors, Patrick Henry, George Dickerson, and Margo Berdeshevsky, along with work by Robin Lim and Brant Lyon. ("Imagine" photo by George Kunze.)

Patrick Henry
London and Timbuktu TZ12
Indian Ocean TZ17
Mexico/Guatemala TZ5

George Dickerson
Beirut TZ15

Margo Berdeshevsky
Hawaii TZ2
Bali TZ20

Robin Lim
Philippines TZ21

Brant Lyon
Nepal TZ18

Patrick Henry
Scarborough-by-the-Sea, Yorkshire, England (TZ12)

TZ12
Clouds on Museum Street (London)

Bent iron crosses overshadow dusty archives,
Where Freud studied, wrote and ended his times,
Giving language so many of the terms
For the sense of doubt that ensnares lives;
Continued in the caring cautious tone
Speaking soft of terror in this darkened room,
Calm for out there where manic types will storm,
To face myself hard as an unstarted poem;
Shedding guilt and cash and hours at confession
Withheld from Catholics where I should belong;
On the road thinking as I reach the warmer South,
He never meant sex alone, but all our twisting path.

TZ12
Timbuktu (Mali)

The harsh desert wind blowing in today
But welcome after the heat of yesterday,
A cooling fan after that gong-beating fire
Now settles its dust to cover the grey city
That might disappear as if it has never been:
Only another dune lost in the vastness
To answer the question, Does it really exist?

If we need any city, then why not this
Straggle of mud, sand and timber adrift:
Dust threatening to roll up its name in legend
Like a magic carpet wiped clean of its pattern
Back to unprinted yarns blank as the desert,
Its trade, learning and character gone forever
Even now many think it has never been at all.

TZ12
Timbuktu (Mali)

It proved a vital oasis for me, not from the desert, but from the crooks of Africa, most of whom were in the police force. Throughout Senegal and Bamako, the hustlers and corrupt officials closed in on me, the most scaring time. I escaped their clutches in a small old local aeroplane, and prayed that my goal, Timbuktu, would be easier and safer.

It turned out fine. Even the cops were good. My young guides, Mohammed A and Mohammed B, one street-wise, one scholarly, showed me everywhere, from the 500-year-old mosques built of mud to the hippopotamus herd in the River Niger. Camel-drovers told me how they brought salt a thousand miles over the Sahara every month by night to avoid heat and also to navigate by the stars. Ships of the desert.

I became a friend and later a customer of the barber, the only guy in ‘Buktu to clip me. About my age, sixty, he spoke of hard times here, a civil war ending just three years ago, peace wonderful but poverty remaining. I tipped well, and we were blood brothers, though his skilful tools never cut me once.

TZ17
Diego García
British Indian Ocean Command

In 1958, I was sent on detachment by old Hastings aircraft from Cyprus via Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the Maldive Islands, thence by ex-torpedo boat to the atoll known as Diego García, Britain’s most remote military possession save Captain Scott’s tomb in Antarctica.

My companion was Flight Lieutenant Funnell, known throughout the RAF since before World War II as "Smokey", and renown for his comical panic response to ordinary events. To the amusement of us airmen on base in Cyprus, he treated the scheduled landing of a small mail transport as though it were Goering’s Luftwaffe attack on London.

Our brief on the far-flung atoll was unclear, and Smokey became anxious. I fiddled with our radio, no expert in air waves, just the payload and balance of aircraft--and sometimes failed on that, redoubling Smokey’s consternation. At length, I managed to get the BBC cricket score from Bombay. England was struggling, but Smokey relaxed at the mere contact, achieved from a location with no locals--at least none that we saw. Next day, we made the long-haul flight back to Cyprus HQ.

Thirty-five years later on holiday in Bombay, as I press with the crowd into the cricket ground, England is losing again, back to the wall. Fellows next to me, friendly, say they come from Diego García. Locals on the remove. Now there are none. The island was evacuated in 1966, its homes cleared for a NATO airbase, its people strewn like chaff on the waves of the Indian Ocean.

TZ17
Leaving Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean)

Thirty years gone means a time when all life turns
Around the world to set on its rightful place
In a way of being common but distinct
As a guide to species shows in tracing lines

Among small birds or large figures in a moving herd
Along great circles to complete their normal route,
As nomadic tribes expect to pursue their aims,
Though wary of crossing paths where big powers tread

To thunder their key mastery of the Earth
And seize the day to call orders sure as the tide
On the crest between subject’s ebb and power’s flow
Down that ocean flight path of just islanders swept aside

When steel squadrons spread huge wings, leaving them
Stranded as oil-smeared or wing-broken birds
Dispersed over a continent, yet longing for
Return to that bare rock they had called home.

TZ5
Mexico/Guatemala
San Pedro River at the Mexican-Guatemalan Frontier

Tikal is a Mayan city preserved in dense jungle. To stand atop the Temple of the Jaguar and see the sunrise red ascend the stones is unforgettable.

I was a guest at Giorgio’s ramshackle hotel on the Mexican-Guatemalan frontier marked by the San Pedro River. A European draught-horse would balk at the accommodations, but the patron has great heart and loads of cheek.

At dinner, he kept re-ordering beer for me, then drinking half of it himself, seated at my table, while I fork-tortured a fried chicken even scrawnier than the notorious Mexican slim-line kind. All bathroom facilities were conveniently situated in the river itself, into which my room leaned hospitably: en suite, therefore.

At breakfast over bread and jam and coffee, Giorgio claimed I owed a surcharge on the bill settled the night before as the currency exchange rate had since altered. How his financial advisors had penetrated into this remote jungle seemed a mystery, but I handed over all my remaining local coins (the equivalent of one U.S. dollar). When I threw in my ball-point pen and a picture postcard of the Tower of London, he was surprisingly content.

The daily ferry chugged upstream to the Mexican domain. Border patrol soldiers scutinized our papers on a desk littered with bullets, pistols, rifles, and nude playing cards from their poker hands. Our passports--British, French, Italian, Swiss, Canadian-- became face cards among the aces, the naked ladies, the ammunition, the lugers: We had been dealt into their game.

TZ5
Border of Rio San Pedro (Mexico/Guatemala)

A short-cut through history’s layers takes just three
Days and states of mind to balance on the way
Between troubles and jokes that make a story:
Calm, insight, humour, are summed up in irony.

From one cruel Maya city to the next they could not foresee
They would straddle two nations that is now the case;
Both empty now, but power and blood lingers in each place.

Tikal and Palenque sound like classic rulers or lovers,
But crossing backways between them turns out more banal;
In a crammed bus on rough roads menaced by armed robbers,
Then a night at a rip-off, rotten, riverfront hotel.

Morning away by small boat up dreamy Rio San Pedro,
Oblivious as Rimbaud leaving harsh worlds behind.
Past gambling rogue soldiers guarding Mexico;

To the bus station at Zapata named for the rebel chief,
And the word for shoe: useful here to move and kick
Over the traces. He told the poor never to leave
Go of their land: a resolve that now is still at work.

George Dickerson
Manhattan (TZ8)

Many years ago, I lived in the Middle East with my then wife and young son, before I had to evacuate them and eventually myself from the Lebanese Civil War. Everywhere we traveled, my boy would collect a stone, just as you and I have done -- a stone whose color has been enhanced by a pool of water, a stone as a fragment of time, a stone as artifact of a physical and emotional landscape -- to be saved, perhaps arranged with other stones in some mysterious evocation of parts of us left behind.

My son kept stones from the ruins of Byblos, from the seashore at Gaza . . . and arranged these stones on the ledge of our car’s back window, where they stayed even after he was gone.

One day, as I was crossing alone from Syria into Jordan, my car was stopped and searched by border guards -- suspicious men with ready guns. They pointed at the stones. "Small boy," I said, holding out my hand waist-high. They smiled and nodded.

When I contemplate a poem, I often think of the arrangement or the shape of stones, the implied music of the wind and water which have worked their will in them, scoring time.

(Reprinted with permission in abridged form from the author's Editorial Note to Rattapallax No. 2.)

TZ15
Perspectives on the Death of Poetry in Beirut

The commando cradled the poem in his arm.
When he made the poem speak, it spat stanzas
At pedestrians who fled from poetry.
From the rocket launcher a barrage of poems
Burst like roses in the street. The eloquent shards
Inscribed the houses with an elegy.
Fragments of the poem's petals were found
In the face and chest of a young girl
Overcome by the eternal aspect of poetry.
At night, when we fought with fitful sleep,
The deep guttural throat of poetry roared
Across the rooftops and devoured our dreams.
A wayward poem entered the boy's head
And left his eyes hollow with amazement.
A poem snatched hunger
From twenty people waiting for bread.
Two poems recklessly slit each other's bellies.
The head of a truncated poem
Was proudly impaled on a barricade.
From the cellar, where fifteen poems lay crushed,
Oozed the sweet odor of poetry.
When the plane lifted off over Beirut,
I could see poems shrouding the city
And I abandoned poetry.

TZ15
The Rug Beater

Come over to the window,
...Love...
See the Arab woman...
On the roof below?
...There!...
The one beating
Mercilessly
...Her rug...
With a ragged broom...
As if she could swat
...Away...
The dusty footprints
Of her oft-swept
...Dead...
Who’ve loitered there...
Watch her face
...Explode...
And the flowers of her blood
...Stipple...
Beirut’s crippled
...Streets...
As far as Sin-el-Fil....
You don’t see her?
...Oh!...
Well, now you know
What’s in my head...
...Why...
(When darkness
...Smacks...
Our room...your eyes
Not stars but bullet
...Holes...
Your mouth a
...Wound...)
I tremble
...So.

Margo Berdeshevsky
Maui and Paris TZ2/TZ13

TZ2
Pele's Dark Landing

Well, there are no leaves here either,
but I have imagined the garden.
So I'll tell my several hearts:

(And maybe we do not have only one, made to be
cracked like the sculpt of a woman's inner lips
on the floorwall of a cave we visit--inner, silverlong,
more giant than our life, and red with tarnish;

cracked again by the night's quake, feared of the dark
earth, famed,
now veined, and a little broken--

a sixty-three mile lava tube that skews from the moon-
scaped mount to the cooler sea--an imprint on the floor
of her hardened flow: ancient, raw, flying
vulva of the deity of all fires.)

Her legend smiles that she,
pursued by an overeager king and crouched in her innerworld,
hid, stooped there to plant love like a graffito.

There to leave her sign of womanhood and nothing else, there.
Walls of scrolled and jagged and sculpted flame-points, there.
Fervor or chase were not her whole desire, not from a king,
not from a fool, not from him, in fact, a conqueror.

So she left, to remember--
fictions of a passion to burst my hearts, darkness
to green a garden--a fact of myth, of woman.

We dozed above the molten and under star quilts there,
as the earth broke night and morning and I laughed a little--
errant for love, for the ash of old cries,
for the plow of tears, even for conquerors.
Dreaming, I hissed at demons, in the several names of God.

There are gardens and there are not.
There is love and there is not. There are leaves and
there are not. But there is/was/ever fire
and some god, some start and shape like a changed
autumnal blood black imprint
of a garden, of an endlessly mended
woman, of love. Pacem.

(Prior pub.: Rattapallax No. 4)

TZ20 Bali
Put A Rice Shoot In Your Hair For Protection

Banish the swivel necks, here.

All night, the long lizard moans, coos,
in two-four time, five times, in doubles.
All night, spun noises surprise the silence.
All night, ducks. All night, cricket-engines,
sometimes the snake, or several darks.

This is not Kansas, but the China Sea.
This is not city, but the everyone
knows everything about everyone village,

listen, how lilacs, and temple-bells
pelt by the hour here, cleanse the fearsome
dyings here, or the belly cramps, or the crying,

listen, obsessed, here,
he may be carved, or Christed here,
or masked, like a masturbating monkey,
enter the distance, mid-life woman,
so pleased, to bear wings.
The sin of being half angel. Bats that swag in the cave of several darks
know you, flying.

The mountain is too perfect.
The rose. Only these tragedies. Only these
little cells hugging their knees, children,
needing something, after dark.

The lover, too imperfect. The child.
Only this twilight-wind,
half an angel's hand, caressing the dark,
wrapped in any shadow, winking,
warning, like laughter.
Breath of God, sing, and disappear.

Burnished grin on the horizon
is it moonrise or the last smile of night.
Is the grey at a temple's columns terrifying
or that shapeless ear that knows
I whisper the name of Jesus on its
step I do so.

Still monkeys sleep still tiger or fireflies
illumine but that heartbeat between
branches, and I have a walk to make,
I have a swath to cut in this or any
shadow, have a fear to stand
in, the hour before any brightening.

Robin Lim
Baguio City, Philippines TZ21

What the Filipino Midwife Will Witness

The Spanish pony is thin.
She nurses her colt by a dust road.

Jethro plays with clothespins, his smile oozes
down his nose and scars my watching soul.
He's waiting
for Maria to give birth, hiding
in her faded skirt.
Now, and later now, she stops to let the pain pass. After
it has washed over her, Maria will stoop
to wipe his nose with a rag torn from her heart.

Purple varicosities run down her legs, reach
for the earth. They pull
her, rooting her to the garden,
where Chinese dragons fight to end the world --
inside her womb, like a tangle of bitter
melon and passion fruit vines.

Ah, but what I see here, outside . . .
only her breath, and she sips cold coffee,
asks her husband to turn down the radio.

I will walk down the ridge
and be taken to an Ibaloi home.
Here Maria's uncle lies three days dead. The cancer
surgery was successful, for a few whiles.
But in the bean fields, El Niño makes for hard life,
carrying water all the time, uphill. Hard death.
At fifty, this uncle was still seeking a wife.
Had he married, his burial would be seven
days of singing and roasted pigs.
And how many kilos of rice, called enapoi?
"An unmarried man is like a child," says one husband,
"so they mourn him three days only. Like a woman,
three days maximum."

Only the women run to bring the laundry
in from the rain. Tearing white angels
from the lines, which the men see as flour sacks, baby's rags.
A Hawaiian boy once told me, "A child born
on a rainy day brings his riches
from heaven." God knows how Tillo and Maria need.

Rain on this tin roof announces
a Filipino Jericho, a third baby borning.
Down the steep way a funeral in the storm.
A perfect day to breathe
her first, and cry with a small mouth
as loud as the rain.

Brant Lyon
Manhattan and Egypt TZ8/TZ15

Repainting the Stone Lions
Kathmandu, Nepal TZ18

Women in scintillating saris the color
of a Himalayan sunrise, goat's blood,
or marigolds, float through fumes of car exhaust
and the din of taxi horns, silently padding
past the rickshaw drivers and motor scooters
stalled by a sacred cow that nonchalantly
plops a pile of dung onto the pavement
as it stands in the middle of Asan Tole.
Nearby the square the spreading trunk
of a bodhi tree has rent the sides of a tiny shrine.
Two teen-aged boys with the patience
and conscientiousness of men stand in the dusklight
outside the entrance to the Annapurna Temple,
with brushes like offerings to Mahadevi held
in their hands, re-painting the stone lions.
A fresh coat of enamel applied for the harvest festival
of Dasain shines off these paired sentinels;
one boy fastidiously colors each claw
on the paws of the lioness, while the other--
reverently, and without shame--paints
the tip of the lion's erect lingam red.
A man and wife with toddler sandwiched
in between pull up on a motorcycle.
The woman looks on as her husband removes
the miniature helmet from his daughter's head,
stands with his arms folded across his chest
at the temple door as she, unescorted, toddles in.
The image nestled in this squat room
has been smeared with vermilion paste,
festooned with flowers, and showered with rice,
as thus homage to the goddess of abundance
always has been paid for centuries upon centuries
She picks out a butter lamp and places it below the idol.
A temple matron with lines deeper than the Kali Gandaki
river valley etched in her face smiles as she exits.
The father lifts his little girl above his shoulders.
She reaches up and tugs the clapper of the huge bronze bell
whose peal reverberates into eternity.

(Prior pub.: Lullwater Review, Emory U., Winter '99)