The Golden Mean Read Online Free

so that it can be born again.
    Sluggish rivers swither among the dead,
    their banks overflowing.
    Listen: those whisperings in the pipework
    are all the refugees from thirst.
    The inscription on the fountain’s cup reads:
    â€˜Drink, Hussain, and remember thirst.’
    Their fathers: their fathers’ gentle thirst,
    like sand slowly pouring into blood;
    heedless as a stone: a millstone that worries
    its own reflection back to sand.
    So they went off to war and when they came back,
    no water for the ritual cleansing,
    not one drop, so they washed themselves in graveyard dust.
    *****
    This is the birth of Air:
    Weary angels revel in it: the sky is laced
    with the gutturals of genies; those dark eyes
    that glimpse the invisible smouldering in their veins.
    Here you touch against breasts that breathed in childhood’s loss.
    Their women: their women are perfumed sadnesses;
    their gaze carried away on the wind
    bleached of all colour: their black clothes
    abandoned – still in suitcases somewhere.
    The women banked on hard graft and the smoking tanur ,
    but War won that bet, of course. War always does.
    And when it was all over they breathed in the soot of a crow’s wing;
    the drift of fans through narrow rooms.
    *****
    This is the birth of Fire:
    Soldiers trudge home from the front line.
    Slivers of shrapnel glimmer inside them.
    Here’s a dead man with a cigarette in his pocket,
    still alight – his last smoke.
    Cancers flare and smoulder in the heads of children.
    Their children: their children with happiness chalked into their faces –
    if they were a pack of cards there wouldn’t be any joker.
    Their children are little crusts of bread dunked
    in muddy kerbside puddles. Life will gobble them up.
    In other countries children have footballs to play with, but not here,
    no, in this country they used the children’s heads as footballs.
    *****
    This is the birth of Earth: Feel this: feel the earth.

The Doldrums
    after Zaher Mousa
    I
    I’ll carry this wound like a wristwatch – look
    it’s bleeding the minutes away;
    but leaves no mark, no scar on Time
    though day wears day down into day.
    II
    Dear afternoon,
    I only glimpsed you as you sailed past my window
    and vanished forever, like that girl on the bus,
    that hopelessly beautiful girl.
    III
    No. My blood is nothing like the honest river
    glazing and slackening through the seasons.
    Think of a worn-out wall-clock with its dodgy weathers:
    faster and faster, then slower again, then  . . . 

The Golden Mean
    I am to you
    as you are
    to us and
    we are to
    everything.

The Grain of Truth
    Grows poorly in rich soil. Ripening
    demands an exceptional season.
    Blights more readily than us, even.
    Sow it, you’ll reap a fine harvest of sorrow.
    Each head clings grimly to husk and chaff,
    mills the stoutest millstone
    to a gritty pebble, kills all yeasts,
    sulks in the oven like its own headstone.
    So never offer me something
    I cannot refuse and expect thanks.
    Don’t bring me this gift then
    ask me why I cannot thrive.

Northeasterly
    Driven by sleet and hail,
    snell, dour and winterly;
    it fills the unwilling sail,
    empties the late, green tree.
    Something unknowable
    lodged in the heart of me
    empties itself and fills
    Like that sail. Like that tree.

Macapabá
    We rocked at anchor where the emptying
    river spreads its green hand.
    Ochre mud thickened the sea.
    On the second morning, slender boats
    from the forest; they brought birds
    the colour of watered oil,
    sallow fruit no one would taste
    and a leaf folded around a knot of gold
    broader than a clenching fist.

Only a leaf for a sail
    and before us, look, the impossible ocean of it all;
    squall and storm;
    lash and flail;
    the unnavigable, the hungry, the whole perfect
    unstarred bleakness of the world,
    as though a dark
    we had always feared had grown real and cold and tidal,
    and the lifted
    green-black
    ragged face of its hand to pull us,
    pull us