From Even Though That:Home - - - Jonathan Dunne
Poems by Jonathan Dunne
New poems:
FOOLS
Juan Marsé, a Spanish writer, claims
that, when he was fifteen,
he saw (but did not speak to)
a girl in a green dress, who was beautiful.
Not a day has gone by since then
(he claims)
that he has not imagined that girl in the green dress,
her melancholic eyes, enigmatic smile.
Juan Marsé is now an old man.
Is what he claims true:
that he saw a girl in a green dress, who was beautiful,
and imagines her still every day?
I do not know.
The girl (I would venture) would lead us a merry dance.
Better not to have spoken to her.
Her beauty is not lessened by our walking past.
LIBATION
Take the bowl in your hands.
Sprinkle it lightly with basil.
Carry it into the other room
(being careful not to spill a single drop).
At the appointed hour, pour
it on the ground with largesse.
AWAKENING
The light was pouring in
through the window you had opened
when I woke up,
the leaves shimmering in the breeze
like early-morning swimmers.
The light this morning
was an altogether different experience:
not the customary dread of another day,
but how temptation had subsided
to a single pinpoint of darkness,
been replaced by happiness,
a feeling of lightness,
I could flex my shoulders and
breathe in open space,
a dazzlingly white courtyard without spectators
(there being nothing to see or show
since nothing was hidden),
without this world’s constant teasing
(responding to the third dimension:
a hole for our form, and a form for our hole),
and all were welcome,
all had had their burdens lifted,
which didn’t matter anyhow,
all were accepted
and loved
and laughed
in a frankly non-dogmatic, unpessimistic,
non-denominational,
trade-free area that was God.
All secret desires were acknowledged
and without disgrace.
In fact they represented
an integral part of all being
and were loved and respected for that.
All shameful acts
– mass murder, theft, adultery –
were quickly dismissed:
no one ever caused any real harm,
besides, they didn’t understand.
Here was bliss:
all races and religions
lightly embracing in a spiral
for spiritual
dance.
The light was pouring in
through the window you had opened
when I woke up
from my dream,
and the world was no longer
the miserable place we make it,
but the home of an ever and
everyone-encompassing
elite.
THE MASSEUSE
A Bulgarian gymnast in her sixties
well-endowed and with eyes like walnuts
direct descendant of the partisan Vela Peeva
dressed in a leotard
took me by the arm and
slammed me on the bench
worked her way up and down
my back rotating screws
loosening bolts sliding
levers
She did some kung-fu
located my pressure points
applied a machine I would call
a packer
that ground my bones muscle and flesh
to mincemeat cellophane-wrapped
She climbed up on the bench with me
and taught me to breathe
while pistoning downwards with a thwack
There was a confession rising within me
slowly like mist or
smoke from a chimney
years peeling away like bark
from a fir tree
She sat me on a stool
took me in her embrace
and as she wiped away my thoughts
as she absolved me
I felt her breast like a coffin
From Even Though That:
DOMENICO
Domenico has a tub of net in the hallway.
He worked nineteen years in the engine-room of a merchant ship.
But he’s really a fisherman.
He sits in the day and darns.
I’m never sure if he has advanced,
because the net always looks the same.
It seems to have no end or beginning,
like the coils of a snake up a tree.
He darns in the day.
He sings while he picks at the thread.
They are songs of heart-stopping beauty that
I do not understand, but I think they have to do
with memory, and I understand.
I listen as the coffee bubbles through the smoke-hole of the pot,
molten copper,
I listen to the strands
of centuries.
TRAFFIC
On Procida, people own houses,
have dogs to guard them,
gates to protect them,
walls to keep out prying eyes.
Everyone drives a car.
There are no pavements,
so you have to walk in the road.
Some people slow down,
but most don’t.
The only quiet places
are the bridge to Vivara
and the cemetery.
Here,
you can hear the birds sing.
The traffic worries me.
It scares me, if I’m honest.
The drivers are blissfully unaware.
They think I am the madman.
Sometimes I process slowly down the middle
(the road is too narrow to pass)
as if I were deaf, had not heard
the crunch of tyres, the driver’s breath revving.
When I’m going in the opposite direction,
I scowl at the drivers,
I scowl with hatred in my heart.
I open the way for them
with a sweep of my arm.
Toro!
They fume, I perspire.
Other times, I splay against the wall
in mock horror
like a starfish.
They think I am the madman.
I don’t know how else to behave.
IT WAS A BAD DAY
It was a bad day.
I was woken by the builders at 7:15.
I was so tired that, working in the morning,
I fell asleep. I wasn’t taking much in
anyway. When I came back for lunch,
they were still at it, this time
drilling on the wall of my room.
Not much, I know, but I’d been hoping
for a kip. I left in a fury,
went walkabout, ended up in the cemetery,
unable to make sense of the living.
The dead weren’t too forthcoming
either, unwilling to let me in
on the secret of all this.
I was just about beat,
so at four I took my work
down to the beach.
It wasn’t a particularly bad day, I know.
It could have been much worse.
Someone could have died or
got sick, or done something awful.
I was tired, that was all,
letting it get on top of me,
until, after a swim, my mouth
parched with salt, she appeared
out of the sun, drilled a
cold drink on to my chest.
Not much, I know, but it made
me feel a whole lot better.
I looked up then and took it all in.
THE SCORPION
The scorpion just came to the wrong place at the wrong time.
It wasn’t to know.
It waddled towards us, content almost,
as if it had news to convey,
some juicy gossip, a joke, something like that.
You could tell it had something inside it wanted to get out.
But we don’t speak its language,
and it was heading straight for the dull, yellow light
of our front door.
Lisa jumped up, skipped off in search of a broom,
returned like a gymnast across the mat.
That scorpion didn’t have long to live,
I could have told it that.
It hit the step before our front door,
took a detour.
It may have changed its mind,
been heading out of our lives,
in search of someone else to talk to,
someone a bit more receptive,
someone who spoke its language.
But it was too late for that.
I leapt outside, turned
as Lisa raised the broom (the axe),
took aim as the scorpion cleared the step
(stairs were not an obstacle then),
brought down the broom,
missed!
raised it (the scorpion was fighting an invisible enemy now),
took aim for the second time…
The scorpion’s last vision of life
will have been a broom hurtling out of space –
a spasm – and Lisa washed down the tiles
and Torborg asked if scorpions were dangerous.
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