Sophia
I live in a house
of pictures.
A woman smokes -
she is wrinkled,
chiseled darkly
and reeks of history.
I stand on grass
in the rain.
She watches from behind
the lighted finger of a hand.
She’s deep in the gold prism
of her frame. We
are both guilty of
committing crimes in the dark.
I walk through rooms,
through pictures,
walls knock and
doors slam. Whose
focus will last
the longest,
who will have the privilege
of dragging in the moon
and lying it flat
on the table.
Dangerously Close
The grass gives softly. I
doze
listening to lorikeets, to girls
videoing Sunday offcuts. A
woman uncurls her body
in a slow rhythmical dance
around a tall stone. I
sleep with a cloud
squatting on my chest. The
hill above me is coloured in
history. Cattle tear at the earth,
at fences. They chew at scenery.
I sleep in a cloud and
faces I know pass in and out. My
eyes follow voices. The girls
video me
standing up in slow motion. I’m
like vapour, fizzing in the heat. The
woman
dances dangerously close. I
fade into the coolness of a
flowering rhododendron. I
recede deeply, the sunlight
turning green.
The Isolation of Self
Mother Mary Joseph Aubert (1835 - 1926)
A silhouette gesticulates
against a newspapered wall. It
seems to be feeding itself
hand to mouth morsels - a glass is tipped to lips,
a moth careers onto the picture of a sportsman
wearing a black jersey and kicking a ball
which never leaves the foot. The silhouette
turns to me and her sleeve wipes out
the ball. She turns up the lamp and
proceeds to pour herbal tea. She smells
of the outdoors, the plants in the orchard,
the cannabis growing in the glasshouse.
She glides about me - a noiseless movement,
the breath of her clothes speaking of
Madonnas and rituals and aroha,
the work of compassion. She
converses in French, in Maori, in
Italian. I say thank you in English
for the bread she gives me/for her
hospitality. The nuns - for she isn¹t alone -
fuss over this intruder in dust - come in from
the cold, from the wired-up streets, the green
lungs of landscapes, the isolation of self and
self and self only. She unwraps the morning
and slowly we make our way down to the river,
our shadows flapping at flies, at
leaves falling. This is the narrow path, the well-
trodden track
where locals come to swim and bathe,
purify themselves,
to drink the water/bottle it/take it away. This woman,
black robes roped to her body,
lies down in the grass,
hardly breathing. I have this feeling I
want to touch her. She’s like a garden,
darkened by a texture of soil and sand. She
can’t be touched. Her sisters come out to
bow down to green idols.
Children eat leaves. Adults
red-eyed in the sunlight,
smoke on the verandah. This morning
she shows me how to
entangle mind and body around the
most private of thoughts, to
embrace the flesh
without fumbling through clothes. It’s
easy, she says, hardly breathing. It’s like
wanting to pray without hands.
Folklore
It’s what I call a glass-eye view of Paradise,
through the cleanly
created hole of a bullet.
It’s not always clean but
it’s usually effective.
#
Of course he feels nothing,
in this case a boy
shot at close range for the sake of kissing
the book of his faith,
caught sucking on an icon and muttering to a wall
which seemed to mutter back.
#
On first seeing the Universal Sky City Tower
all lit up
white and luminescent
the boy tells me it’s not completely what
literature claims it to be,
has claimed for centuries,
promulgating the idea of yellow brick roads,
a city of impregnable gates and walls, a
continuous celebration of
party party party
dressing up, gender swapping, utopian trips,
ascension deals at a certain time and place,
the
Mickey Mouse bacchanalia
at the glug, glug of eternal youth.
#
For the boy,
getting off the grass took time.
There was no instantaneous
transformation from one thing to another. He didn’t
suddenly lose his shape,
drop his epidermis and run,
shed 17 years of muscle
in one exquisite shake.
#
And the soldier who shot him,
who dispatched him in one tickle of a trigger,
he knew -
a brother-in-arms who enjoyed the look
of being a warrior.
The boy
saw the fraternal smile of his killer’s affection.
#
It’s not what I expected to happen. It’s not
how I expected his body to be treated
on a warm summer’s day when bright red flowers
had opened to the touch of wild bees,
#
The boy says living for him isn’t about
junk food, brothels and beer any more,
but
sharing territories with
fish swimming amongst gardens
of coloured fruit,
walking with animals
which slobber and lick, listening to
languages he thought were extinct
and
sharing one’s most personal
privacies before the final absolution.
#
I hold up the glass eye to a picture of him
advertising himself as a person of
no fixed abode, a child viewing his Paradise,
a man sitting alone in the revolving
restaurant of the Universal Sky City Tower
spooning in large mouthfuls
of cloud, seeing it
thickening, swirling, rubbing,
against windows,
windows which on a fine day
have wrap-around panoramas of sea and hills
and islands and massive conurbations, of a
new city joined to another, joined to another ...
#
He tells me
in a field where the grass has
grown over the shape of his hole-in-the-heart fall,
he much prefers the probing, long-beaked birds
which know him best, which appreciate him
for the delicacy he has obviously become.
© Iain Britton. All rights reserved.
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