A Shadow in Yucatan Read online

  Until they are delivered, their unmolested dream may seed itself in prayer, and fruit in lasting health...

  ‘If I were you I’d go there, it’s the only chance you’ll get...to be alone together...If money is a problem we could subsidise...’

  ‘That kind of money I can find. Now when can she go?’

  ‘As soon as she can pack her bag…’

  ‘Without her mother, it’s the best we can do...Take it darling...I shall be happy to think if I can do nothing else, I can, at least, do this. Promise Miriam one thing...You will try to be happy...hold your fat stomach and sing. Set the child up for happiness, somebody else can knit.’

  The Dream of Childhood

  In an orange orchard, Stephanie succumbed to a scent, lethargic even for bees, and dreamt a dream through the grasses of over-ripe summer.

  A mirage trapped in honey.

  Lying in a basket under olive trees, the lucid perception dissolved the slight wind on her tongue.

  The sun through wicker, bristled her cheek.

  The trees above were vivid with advice, their supplications threaded on glaciers,

  their consolations beads along branches...

  A naked baby boy breasted the hay-stalks on solid certain feet, handed her a wooden bowl, touched her forehead and laughed...

  Light plaited stalks into shadow, flickered its tongues of warm snake.

  Teased the clenched palm into opening...

  She caught nothing but air, air to spread on her face...on the tongue delirious, cool in the damp warm neck.

  Air was spinal ecstasy; air was bubble-blown, vapid blue space.

  Green was willow, willow, willow...

  Light a prism of shifting cell.

  Water the drifting necklace of leaves that swung from the throat of shade

  Water was water below, below the ankle-flex, sun-happy toe.

  Light was water sound.

  Music the coloured hexagonal beads, that pass between sky and ground.

  The outstretched finger of cypress reached for the thimble sky.

  Dim with fledgling purpose, then began the inchoate sound...

  All sound, nacreous sound...

  Over sand the sibilant sea,

  the low moan of bark before curling,

  the crack of whip branch rending, the booming forest at eve.

  Where sound and sight parted, there ploughs the milk white ox, steady as leather, foggy as stone.

  Harassed by the axle, tailing the shivering joist, wading through the barking dog, tossing the restive fly.

  Nights are cloth soup silence.

  The pressure-lamp hiss like a wasp churning oil, trapping space, asthmatic for air.

  Un-consoled by the hammer tap-tapping of shoes which when stilled, blows a ring of bright face.

  Causing the dancing arms to blur, and shadows to leap and curse.

  Space is a sharpened pencil that writes a regular day: White linen snapping at the grass, water at heel to the pump.

  The sky subservient to the brim of a bonnet, the mouth to the resolute spoon...

  Only the wind remains urchin, flying music, and booting the moon.

  Stephanie woke to a smouldering afternoon, pregnant with thunder.

  The Storm

  A woman, now conscious of weight

  she stands on articulate feet

  to meet the curling whip slip wind, with a hitched up petticoat...

  Pinned and poised on a vertical thread a dryad is drawn from the earth

  to spindle the light from the anxious trees, she begins to slowly rotate.

  Flashing quick iridescence, she holds the prism of fear.

  Eddied from greenwood, tossed, caught, thrown forward from branch to branch like a firework trailing smoke.

  It dies with sudden indolence snuffing its candle tongue, awaits an insolent frisking, by the heedless back-slapping wind...

  It comes.

  She takes it standing, welcomes its hands up her skirt.

  Smells its moist breath searching,

  shakes her hair in eloquent spray,

  lifts besotted arms in worship, grinds her heels in the mesmerized clay.

  Appeased, it retreats smiling, licks resin from the split in a stone.

  She stands in the whirlpool of luminous light, while trees discard bright fruit, to roll like luscious jewels, and break open on the grass...

  Trepidation, thirst, devotion bind these barren bearing folk while...

  the prodigal squall dallies in the distant thunder- smoke.

  Focussed on by frenzied clouds wielding a blinding knife...

  harassed by quivers of showering steel from archers massed on the flank...

  Fatigued by peccadilloes with young larches, nubile corn...

  He gathers his full manhood to shake the shoulders of the earth...

  The landscape lies down.

  Spreads its limbs, and turns its head.

  The cumulus mainsail darkens, lifts its scudding skirt, boils the seas in anger, braces a hidden keel...

  Imploring hysterical insects fret at a cello string...

  His teeth sink in earth’s jugular.

  He swiftly snaps her back. Crack.

  Wraps his thighs about her, and drenches with his seed.

  Drowning she drinks from a bottomless thirst while he loves her from his elbow, and cracks his silver whip..

  Bone snap, neck lash, back, back, back.

  Hounds chained to his chariot, growl on blood-lust bent; his eunuch plumed horsemen are shod with kettledrums.

  The immaculate artillery sprays the gusted arrows, pause, refit, and swing up-wind... following with dentist drills, the skittish novice breeze...

  Slaps her cheek

  Stings her eye

  Beats her buttock

  Bites her thigh

  Then fulsome and unstinting takes her open mouth...

  *****

  In love’s apotheosis, the battalions withdraw,

  evaporating into cloud, with grumbling after- thought.

  Cracking one slow rolling rump, spitting, not quite spent...

  leaving rain to cherish bruises, bitten in torment...

  Soft, he lifts up every weeping leaf; licks each saturated bud.

  Bathes pain and past together in mercury and salt.

  Rests his quivering nostril in her aromatic ear

  Whispers unbelieving joy and strokes her rivulet hair

  Fragments of Fortune

  1

  Duck-dipping head, redoubling fist;

  down the bottom of the river kissed.

  Here must I sit eating berries from my hat

  at the elbow of the river, while you nestle in its lap.

  2

  This wide boarded room, barred by reflected light, imprisons time in whispers, between the clattering of cups.

  All of time is curved, concave or convex.

  Future time floats forward, only held in check by the muscle of this moment and the bow of bended neck.

  The past is expressed in the crook of candid knee reminiscing over toenails, and the interrupting lap.

  While the curve of time present falls across the patient cheek;

  the loop of threaded needle, the sprung embroidery hoop.

  In the aspic of the present that congeals time’s clear straw blood, is pulse and retraction, the pump and suck of life.

  Antecedent and descendent turn slower somersault.

  Each swallowing the other’s tail, confined in Now’s torn heart.

  But tell, from where you see it, upside down...

  Are we standing on our heads?

  3.

  Your life has been gathered in this scented orange grove, (bridal flower brought to fruit), and in pomander, clove.

  Birth

  At evening, out walking, gravity plucked at her back.

  A pain like the stroke of a rowing eight was raised by her surprise...

  Doubting, she continued under the gothic sky.

  T
he barefoot forest dug its feet deep in layered leaves...sniffed guardedly at mosses, reticulate with green.

  Cold water ran, still sluggish, over the lip of stone.

  Bark clutched at wisps of lichen shawl.

  Twigs picked frosty teeth.

  Only the drifting fog at her feet was pungent as briar smoke.

  Insensate spring drowned in dream under a skin of milk.

  All of growing saved its breath to bite her clotted lip.

  Only garrulous crows coming to rest clattered keys in the canopy.

  From a lonely farm on a swirling hill a single dog barked, sharp.

  The gruel of a day in winter congealed the larded moon.

  In a cold chancel of leaded glass, the women with imminent child knelt down and pressed her face to the earth.

  History accepted her.

  A root took her slim wrist.

  The midwives of the forest gave the sweet dark soil to sniff.

  The seasons of the future roped her amphibious waist, drew the slip-line tighter, grazing the forks of trees, tethered the halter of coming calf in the throat of the unplumbed sea.

  (The rope was a five ply nerve, clamped with strong white teeth. The intrepid monkey-muscle would follow it, through gasping and sweat and help-me-God into and out of death)

  All this prepared in stillness, in the screed of the darkling wood...

  Builders in the fan vault dropped two feathers at her feet.

  *****

  Stephanie bit the threads of reluctance, and lay down in the blanket leaves; determined to take the first stage alone, with the help of the awestruck moon.

  She spread-eagled to contact as much as she could of the wiser belly of earth; harked to be taught by silence how to make love with death.

  A last late pigeon shuttered the day, finally for sleep.

  A hoot-owl beckoned the stars.

  The dark rolled the sun in its sleeve...

  The host of heaven would navigate the perilous pass to port.

  From a great height she spotted it, white foam on her saucer sea, smelt an intangible waft of salt, but it only washed to her feet...

  Retreating without menace, it promised to come back.

  Watching, the night dropped rosary beads rhythmically in her lap, eased its kneeling slightly, blew softly on her scalp...

  She sank into weightlessness, wandered into time where colour was all summer...

  Only thought was motion, and all of will was freed.

  This time the wave’s crest finger drew her on like a ring, pushed her over its knuckle, and settled her in flesh.

  She was fastened, and she knew it, on the blade of a paring knife.

  She steadied the rising fish-flash fear, and took slower deeper breath.

  Surgeon trees consulted, sprinkling water on her face.

  The wind took her pulse with a turning leaf.

  A night-jar threaded a song, single pearls of sweetness from the pod of splitting throat.

  She held the hand of a loving log, who gently braced her back.

  The tide was coming in.

  The swell now held a throb, the harbinger of distant waves gathering out on the reef.

  Defined by foam still singly, but successions now in view...

  She turned her mind to the prow of a boat, pitiful small, probing the treacherous coral ring, seeking its blind way through.

  She would need to haul on the ropes of pain to guide it into the lea; through a ring of bright fire, onto the shuddering sand.

  The forest acquiesced.

  They had delved from the deep, a flawless moleskin vessel, filled with God’s right hand.

  To vouchsafe it into Creation, they needed the hand of man.

  *****

  Flushed from the covert of the brush-beat wood, Stephanie half ran...

  Handed from pillar to nave pillar span, a pheasant confused by a straight chalk line...

  Time held panic on a running rein, flicker fused to the tight-lipped sky...

  until she crashed through bracken onto the moon-washed lawn...

  A scalpel nicked at her pelvis, and dropped a cloudburst at her feet.

  She waded through surf of her making, up the steps of a porch...

  Poseidon had escorted her over his figured prow.

  Timely oarsmen synchronized his escape from the sycophant shore.

  She was abandoned to the little men in a soiled and soaking skirt

  *****

  The interior was linen paint, the floor a well-swept bed.

  She was pushed to a couch and climbed on it, like a cat with broken legs.

  This wave broke in a paroxysm...

  All about were squeaking screens, and running feet, and tubing, a syringe in front of spectacles...a sudden jab in the thigh...

  The merciless voices receded with the return of the dignified sky.

  Her head was inaccessible to confusion, panic, or shame...

  She would bestow her body to kernel the child, and split from stem to stern.

  Her tireless knees rowed boulders of pain which crushed her bones like rock salt, gnawed loose the links of her spine...

  The cry of life escaped her, as in fire she crowned her king.

  Then frog bright limbs swum from her, and she was floating in light....

  ‘How is he? Oh how is he?’

  ‘A perfect baby boy’

  ‘Let me see, let me hold him...’

  ‘No, my dear. That wouldn’t be wise, or right.

  Lie back, you’ve done a wonderful job...

  We’ll take care of the child.’

  The feet that marched him under a sheet drained away all sense.

  She simply stared bewildered when they showed her the afterbirth.

  (They stitched, washed and brushed, and wheeled her to lie in the dark; brought her tea routinely, and gave something to help her sleep.)

  While the galaxy broadcast new stars, Christopher slept in a plastic tray, under a pale blue shawl.

  PART TWO

  Post-mortem

  In the clean swept chapel where the requiem was wrung, baptism in light has left a watermark on a transparent chalice with its liquid listlessness.

  Lilac veins draw the opalescent bone, the fragility of wrist and jaw, the clean clarity of gaze.

  All of this distilled in milk, unconsumed and trickling steadily...

  *****

  Outside the trees accept the vestments of methodical summer, daily obstructing more of the sky.

  Casting shadows to merge with the shadows of clouds, pre-occupied with purpose that has its acorn centre in harvest’s half closed eye.

  Leaving she, who felt she’d seeded it, beached with grey salt rind.

  A shell not yet stripped of its ganglion, moist in its mantle, transparent as glass.

  Trodden, half buried, by the passage of meals, the changing jugs of water, the slanting leading question, the surreptitious look.

  Stephanie burns to extinction, un-protesting as wax.

  Discarded by the synchrony of her and nature’s pulse, she answers questions timidly, signs papers without reading...

  accepts the lunatic lie.

  Starting like a dreaming dog when a hastening tread at the end of endless corridor frees a hiccoughing cry...

  Tomorrow they take the baby away.

  (She has gained consent to send an unsigned letter, and a home made teddy bear)

  When she has signed the last release, she’ll be free to leave...

  Reincarnation

  Miriam knits with wire fingers intermittently oiled by nuts.

  Persistence is a change of stitch; reward a needle of salt...

  Oi veh! A bikini I might have managed, so for why do I start a cape?

  Midsummer now, it almost seems, and who knows if she likes the shape?

  A boy we always knew it would be, and a beautiful child she said...that woman from the agency...but why can’t Stephanie write?’

  Distraction fills the kettle. The mailman
is overdue.

  A letter it is, at long last...too short for any news...Mein Gott she says she would rather walk!...but ah, in a taxi she comes...This afternoon? Is it the ninth? And the florist too far down-town...if only a nursery with nice white crib...Now don’t you start again...

  *****

  The black bull-terrier motor scents the rolling redolent street...

  Slows to claim an azalea outside number forty eight...

  A moment’s frozen action drains the pneumatic pulse. Welcome becomes fearful, too elusive to define, the austerity of grief too wooden to succumb...

  The familiar, now untouchable, purged in a foreign fire...

  Unreachable, discalced, worshipful and meet, enclosed in skins of suffering, in themselves too sweet to be discarded easily...

  The impulse that would rush to greet, and in exuberance obscure, is held to the doorknob by a thread of respect.

  Nothing now can be assumed...

  Except that all is new, built only on shared knowledge, archaic, inescapable, and bitter as the single time-scarred Yew.

  *****

  ‘Ai, to see you, just to look at you is, for me, enough’

  The spittle syllables fall like flares over arctic wastes....

  Stephanie drops her shoulder-bag.

  Considers the sun on the parched back lawn,

  the limp black mango leaves,

  the stain of shade on the old settee...

  Then she grasps the anxious waiting wrist, as if to nail with words. To spear hope or expectation with a hooked complicity

  ‘You must realise I am dead inside, and I want to stay that way...

  I shall destroy your generosity, because I cannot, now, respond...’

  ‘So for what return have I ever asked? It is enough to care for you, of course you are alone. The food and comfort I prepare for you, must comfort me’