Peter Wojnarowicz

Skinless on the wet sidewalks of Times Square,

He hustled to survive, an abused kid.

On perilous Christopher Street pier,

Its urine-smelling shadows,

Where men’s hungry lips traced lines
down men’s lonely bellies,
He could breathe the freedom of birds.

On the warehouse loading dock on the Hudson,
He drank a coffee from the Silver Dollar.

And read Funeral Rites under the swamp-yellow glow,

Headlights moved across a wall;

The ocean tested the rotting pier posts;

Tin doors complained out loud like seagulls;

His Marcel Duchamp was flaking off the wall;

A rock had holed Rimbaud’s face on a window;

The place was dying like secret hobo railyard lore.

The reel behind his stoned eyeballs saw

A junkie saviour serene above criminal Saint Genet.

He could teach Jesus to be serious
About the least of his brothers.

She thinks of Aleppo

She watches the sea twinkling blue and green

and the boats brighten in the small harbour

as if they have heard rumours of sun and wind.

The mastheads quicken and wave the wind in

to the sound of ropes against metal and wood.

She asks me, Do vegans’ bodies rot more quickly?

She tilts her head back to the buttermilk sky,

Gulps a scalded tang of salt and surf and sun.

An agile yachtsman steers his boat out to sea

With the easy familiarity of an old postman

Gripping the handlebars of his bicycle.

She says, What counts is the living, the eating,

the drinking, the sleeping, the laughing, the loving

that every soul needs. A fisherman unloads

a sheen of striated fish from his blue-and-white boat.

Sapped wills flap blue and black light in the box.

On the shore a hulk is splayed open like a gutted fish.

She says, When I saw them crawling in the square

they looked like lizards dipped in dust but it was the children,

their skin burned off and their bodies broken.

The sweat shines in drops on her forehead and lips,

trickles with her tears in streams down her cheeks.

She watches the white wake of the boat cleaving the water.

She says, We die into the blackness of fainting but the mind

and memory can live on in writing. She thinks of Aleppo. 

ancestral

The ice sheets tore welts in the earth,

Like six furry spodeks – the Comeraghs.

The sea churned gravel-raking storms.

The rain stirred mud into the streams.

His ancestors planted their feet there.

Now, the keening of days sounds from the falls.

The branches of suspicious trees eye the valleys.

Where turf-smoke verses rent by the wind

Made banal prose of the pyre of his past,

The sheep have laid waste to the stone walls.

Lichened apple trees lament at the stream’s edge.

Bracken and thistles scratch my skin

In the fields that once were freshly ploughed,

Or pastured, as if I must expiate his degradation,

By planting seeds of redemption in the meadow.

I yank the front door and it shifts on its hinges.

The cottage walls stare at each other behind manky curtains.

In the pots and pans in the shadows I sense his life.

In the open-book fireplace his name is burnt.

Like windfall fruit his books are pulping in the press.

His raft crashed against the rocks of a harsh mantra:

A viable farm had to measure up as an economic unit.

He retreated like a gastropod into his lonely conch.

He lived on - killing time until time killed him.

I had forgotten that once I remembered him.

He laughed when I found the hens’ nests in the field

Where threshing left straw mattresses on the ground.

Economics laughed his life into the mountain’s clay.

The molten core of the earth warms his Nire grave.

But in the void he tumbled to the bottom of my mind.

The rays from the Nire river are razor blades in my eyes.

Under the bridge it foams white at the mouth.

A tree bleeds sap to mirror only the shades of the sky.

The clouds are mummies in buttermilk bandages.

A cat’s tail tempts it to whirl in circles on the flagstone.

Words will discover

Three hippies from the garden centre cross the bridge,

Looking like seconds on a shelf of messiahs.

I play with the stream waiting for word sounds to flow.

Like the rust-flanked redwings on my snowy lawn

Ripping the berries from the cotoneaster,

Will word shapes discover my white sheet of paper?

Like verse rhyming through a halo of high rigging,

Snowflakes float down through an umbrella of lamplight,

Swirl like dreams into a dizzying bell of white.

Some drift down and frost the river for a second.

I want words to tongue-stick to my glacier of brain.

Blaze ink! Lick, pen, this iced page with your tongue of fire!

Haiku

Mowada hangs from eaves

Ready for winter weaving

The bag has a bark

Draught horse gallops hard

In rhythm of up and down

Summer rides bareback

Autumn blows maple

Through an open wooden door

Trees shed October

A runner zooms by

Bees sip juices from blossoms

The world is buzzing

Elephants hosing

Water at one another

The pool laughs out loud

In Kikita’s springs

Mount Fuji’s purity loves

Wrinklehead Sculpins

Dragonflies dry wings

A frog grabs a grasshopper

Storks feed once again

Blue ceramic bowl

Tea brushed to peacefulness

Quenches inner thirst

Green frog on a rice leaf

Waits till it’s his time to call

Plop! – watercolours

Crabs scuttle beneath

the wasabi greening sand

under the alder

Pure water washes

Sand from the wasabi fields

Back into the stream

clouds, intensely blue,
find a mirror in the water,
turn violet there.

Idioms

He spoke idioms that made me smile.  

Heavy rain would ‘drench you to the skin’.

A severe wind would ‘clean corn’.

He pronounced ‘clean’ as ‘clane’.

Or if someone added fuel to the fire of a fight

He’d shrug, ‘Skitter flies high when hit with a stick.’

And if you told a good story, he’d chuckle,

‘That one’s worth putting up on top of the dresser.’

His soft-hearted wife would ‘cry for the ducks going barefoot’.

It’s not that he had a knapsack of clichés.

It’s that he thought it all worth saying.

It was his heart’s desire to say something

That rattled the word chest and gave

language a dunt with the elbow of his tongue.

‘Dullness wasn’t worth the full of your arse

of boiled snow.’ Because he wanted you to listen.

Bring a name

The roots of trees bond the earth 
and hold the ground up.
Not the poplars, or the birches, 
threading the morning sun.

We trust our legs to walk what 
might have been a swamp.

Don’t bring me all the facts if you 
have them to hand.

Don’t bring me a suitcase, glasses, 
a woman’s wig,

Nor a menorah if I ask for 
candlelight.

Bring a name, like a bird with a twig
 in its beak,

As the wind carries grains of salt 
and grains of ash -

Hartzog, Zylberman, Cohen, 
Fleischman, Barron, Wolf -

I have no memory of them to keep 
this boat

Afloat on the green waters 
windowing their grave.
Who will see the stones my left
hand leaves?