ZERZURA[1]
Saharan
Soliloquies
Only one lasting advantage had I
gained: the knowledge that the
succession of mere events in one's life is a cul-de-sac, however broad and
accessible it may seem to be; not in
the revolting and obvious scars left by the file of our outer life, but in the
scarce visible lines engraved upon our being, is to be found the solution of
our uttermost secret.
from The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink
Ashan el Shams (because of the sun)
Ashan el shams
heaven lies interwoven with hell
each coloured thread of sky and sand
daily meshed upon the loom of this life
of mine
what else that brilliant blue waters
appear amongst the dunes?
Because of the sun
the people die too quickly
even while they walk
or mummified on donkeys
the daily drudge and toil
dirty in a halo of gardens around
the fetid a shock, amongst
a delerium of scents.
Ashan el shams
I greet the day with hope and vigour
after the stabbing knot of pre-dawn dark
the waterless fears
yet eventually fall into the pitiless disk, willing it down
into deeper shades, blessed
the joyous shape
of a day forgotten.
Because of the sun
I worshipped your flesh
as a phantom would cling to life
everything it is not
and found mine burning in the sands
dragged to the abyss
and plunged in the deepest depths inside
the vast cooling dream of a new Self
alight with hopes
ashan el shams.
The Line
Achmed barks, eyes spark like flints,
squints, cracked ivory smile
pointing to the square hermit caves
cut in the walls of the ancient sea bed.
The place is dangerous with Arab blood feuds
one can step from life into death
like that:
from the green sheath of the Nile
into desert.
Above this fine line
the Jebel al Tarif rises in huge tumbled blocks
sandstone, limestone, shale
upward to chasms that disappear in the white light
the sound of a distant mill
throbs here like time itself.
The jar surfaced
somewhere in these waves of scree;
broken by peasants it released a golden cloud
a jinni of ancient papyri dust:
sha eneh
I read words brought through the aeons
from darkness to light:
ete pai pe
the cosmos is a lie
the desert a teeming sea of pneuma
ensnared beneath the hostile stars,
the Nile a tedium, its rhythm a trap
the flatlands in all directions go nowhere
along ancient wadis, great rivers of sand.
By the tenebrous stream and its etiolated creeds
flowing from heart of darkness to old inland sea,
this most vertical of places
wrought by dense unthinkable time
is a labyrinth of light and dark,
a place to hide both manuscripts and men,
the unworldly light upon whose upper reaches
something other,
still bids the fettered spirit
to climb above the dark valley.
Irgendwo
There looms up
in the minds of travellers
places where travelling must cease
and the imagination, at last unbounded
like Graves in Majorka, Bowles in Tangiers
Koestler near the Pyrenees
Cavafy, Durrell, and Forester in Alex
Thesiger in Ethiopia
anonymous drop-outs and opium eaters in Goa, Calcutta, Borneo, Peru
or Conrad’s Kurtz
at the end of a dark river in the Congo
or unheard of bright minds
in some suburban cul de sac
expatriation, involves some sort of renunciation
of one’s homeland, as a diligently bogus étranger
engaged in genuine mutations in ink
hovering on the brink, on the pale of the mythos
beyond which is understood to be madness
a sense of drama ‘midst the oriental tableaux
and an acute aversion for other poseurs.
Odd that my place is no place
at least the gravelled plateaux, dusty buttes
dried up ancient river beds, dunes and salt flats
are nameless, being
out of sight out of mind.
The desert is deserted
all that I survey
the sands in my hourglass
running out through moments
and I leave my nowhere for the somewhere
of human companionship and mortal necessity
no longer resisting the expatriate coloration
I have projected upon myself
in truth, I don’t care about this mythos
no longer hostile to this messy antheap
I am indifferent, and aided by this
the hourglass is slowly and inevitably reversed
and what has fled is regained:
what does departure mean when you know you will return?
with the vivid clout of a dream
an infinity of nowheres waits for me
a feeling of druggedness that does not wane
but increases, dominating my thoughts
until I bore off into its slumbering vacancies yet again.
Solipsist
I think it is the light and colour
bright and subtle
that draws out this Self, spiralling motes of mist
from my chest and at the base of my skull, and navel
evaporating and gone with my cooling sweat
a more oblique and dauntless Self is left
mirrored in my shadow,
in the vast glimmering shallow seas of mirage
an inevitable end in itself mainlining the void
for an inner state of desertedness
kept at bay by most
where knowledge begins and ends with oneself
I might offer up sweat to the Aten of Egypt
the blazing sun disk, if I believed
but the tracks of a jerboa and a fennec fox
around the tent in the morning, are more believable
and I hide in the shade
thinking only my thoughts
and see no others here.
Why dream of distant planets
even those where one could move about
without cumbrous suits and tanks
to provide an earth-like atmosphere to labouring lungs
it is all here, the alienness
of a moonlit desert tableau under the stars
the black spangled dome
clearer here than anywhere on earth
a vertiginous depth so unconvincing
that I concurred with the ancient philosophers
who saw it as a black punctured vault
through which the brightness of eternity fissured
it is flat, yet curves in on itself
compellingly vast and ignorant
I have no inside information on microbes, comets, and acacia
but finally it is not as an end in itself
for I have an insider’s communion with other
forms of sentience
it is the basis for reaching out
a question of how far apart we are
“distance makes the heart grow fonder”
knowledge of oneself leads to mystery
sentient communion
unseen ties extending in all directions
across the desert
along cloudless lines of light.
A preference for what is loathed
There are many paradoxes about these people
around the Mediterranean
the main one, I suppose, being their
tenuous and absurd claims to the past
as though they must have anything in common
whether in terms of mythos, accomplishments
or even physiognomy
with the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians
in the so-called pagan era.
Egypt in particular is schizophrenic about
laying claim to the pharaonic past
ambivalently setting up shop
in that tremendous theme park of antiquity
a sort of numb entrepreneurial renaissance
But a greater paradox for me is that Egypt
is mostly desert
the Egyptians loath and fear
the unparalleled spaces which predominate in all directions
forever threatening to pull them into lostness
like a vacuum
the way the ancient triremes felt terror in the open sea.
and hugged the coastlines
and so the Egypt I leave behind
is subsumed by the great desert
streaking across the rusted frontier wire built by Mussolini
lines in the sand: Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Libya, Chad
like space, rendering specific demarcations absurd
through sheer unbridled magnitude, indifference
the unquenchable thirst of Chronos
the Great Western desert, the immense Sahara
would devour these hyper rapacious children
for whom I have some sympathy and understanding
almost utterly unknown
even the fellow who works for me, a real exception
a fine human being
cannot fathom this fascination of mine.
“Why do you go--what do you do out there?” he asks
in complete mystification:
“there is nothing!”
(he, of course has never been there)
and I really have no satisfactory answer
which is in itself quite satisfying.
Zones
early in the white desert a soft cool fresh steady breeze
wafted from the north-east
and the Königsberg
as I called it
a gleaming white limestone iceberg
a massive gnomon for a surrealist sundial midst the dunes
cast its shadow a quarter mile to where I stood
beneath the glare of the just-risen sun
on a beach-like immensity of sand
with ancient seashells and quartz
I placed glittering crystals on the leading edge of the shadow
for 5 AM exactly
I thought `the tide went out
some 25 million years ago
and it isn’t coming back--or is it?’
sun cream and a striped towel for the biggest beach on earth
later, on top of a range of dunes
golden-brown sand swells
dusted with white
a hornet buzzed by
from somewhere to somewhere
in the middle of nowhere
maintaining life
but he alighted, like myself
on the perfect lip of the dune
curving like a snake amidst cascading ripples
all of it frozen, but slowly moving
like art
which is a death in slow motion
where we cease moving onwards
for better or worse
but stay, caught, half in light and shadow
regarding minute increments of time
forgotten pictures at an exhibition
hung up in disused museums of memory
pausing, attempting to rekindle the inspirations
for these, as we die.
A philosophy for the Void
`why am I here?’
this perennial question is a denominator
always subtending the fact that we are, in fact, somewhere
and so I survey my present circumstances
alone in the Sahara, and it occurs to me
that in this unpeopled lunar immensity
I am consciously trying to dissolve the line
between the omnipresent “hereness” of all life
with these minimalist circumstances
a colossal stripped-down stage set
devoid of props and lines, entrances and exits
all of that which is usually so diverting
full of the sound and the fury
the struggle, relationships and all that
the whens? and whos? and whats?
but here there is very little
nothing seems to be happening at all
except myself
and this wavering vastness
is a here that beckons to one’s solitary core
with a sense of aeons and slowness
the sensations of a lone life lived beyond the rim
be it ever so brief
and this need to explore the so-called barrens
and be seduced by its claims to eternity
is to find some other sort of plenitude
in a desert world that will eventually claim the entire planet
like her sister Mars, these stupendous arid vistas presage
that terminus ad quem
each dune I shovel across
each “empty” rubble-floored valley
set between cracked and broken bluffs
subtly hued orange, brown, yellow and red
each dusty wadi with its hallucinatory
immanence of flooding waters
is filled with numberless details
that I marvel in an abundance of observation
idly examine and meander on
picking up amazing works of art
in petrified wood, extruded iron oxides
diamond-faceted quartz and million year-old sea-shells
wanderlust pacing and filling the vacant
the ineffable reason I am here, alone:
to not know the answer, or the question
to radically alter the pure void
in knowing it.
Dispelling the cliché of an oasis pool
After a day of aimless ranging I entered the proverbial oasis
the palms and dusty lanes
the carefully tended gardens
In the sunlight of noon
I squatted in a large pool of water
a lake almost
watching dustdevils come in from the desert
and drink in the marshes
as they whipped up a dry rustling of fronds and flitting of birds
beneath a roaring empty blue sky
I soaked my hat periodically
and watched, my head just above the water
small fishes flitting about my feet and thought
that water is not the greatest gift to desert
rather the desert is the greatest gift to water
the pool, surrounded by an incomprehensible listlessness of dust
was a most sacred sanctuary
where I floated
my thoughts finally emptied of everything
a most curious and rare experience
I just floated and watched the little things
the ripples and dragonflies, birds and wind
unbracketed by time, by departure:
when there is nowhere to go
you stay.
My, what a mundane profundity.
The Road
Old beat-up and jagged asphalt, drifted over by sand
stretching 500 kms between oases
with a surfeit of “nothing” inbetween
I love this road
the way the pious love a particular cathedral
entered in a special way
with no one else around
this perfect Art, immense sanded and round
edged in upon a once replete road
reclaiming it, making it part of it all
the threat of distance out there alone
thoughts of engine failure
and irreparable tires bladed by the jagged belt
the machine between my legs hums and lunges ahead
whisking over dune incursions
front tire sailing and skidding
slowing, the rear tire spinning, engine howling
grinning beneath the sun, slithering down
until the grip of the road is felt again and we rocket ahead.
There are abandoned oases to the side of the road here and there
surreal lakes in the dunes
surrounded by palms
it is like the last road one need ever take
one does not need the points of departure and arrival
one needs only this sense of moving forward
through a void
rich with a brimming fullness.
End of the day on the road
smoking a cigarette and watching the sun set behind
about to move off into the sands to camp
light a fire for the stars:
just something so replete about that bike
ambery red
upon the road.
Umm el Dabadib
(In the desert, if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him)
“I walked 20 kms across the desert”
thus does language simplify the experience
following a morning wrestling the big black bike
across dunes, soft sand and gravel plains
and escarpments, I stopped
eyeing a sand-choked defile
that I might have attempted were I not alone
but thought better of it
and walked 10 km along a compass bearing
towards the ancient abandoned oasis
across black ridges where the glazed oxides
clinked like glass, iron, or ceramic
and crossed wadis filled with glaciers of sand
creeping due south across the depression
having descended the escarpment line to the north
one perfect parabola forming a sand-bridge
across the wadi floor some 200 feet beneath me.
Atop my final butte I caught a glimpse of green
which may have been the southern end of Dabadib
but turned back as the winter dusk falls at 5:30.
It occurred to me,
noticing that a mere half-hour after crossing my sand-bridge
that my tracks were utterly effaced
the tiger stripe ripples of sand perfectly reformed by the wind,
that it is a gigantic apparatus, this desert
where every grain of sand is a cog
my own complex machine, wondrous in effect
my maps, compass, binoculars, and determination
were not enough to reach my target this day, and
with the immensities of logic and physics so apparent
my eyes become bedu
noticing such small gradations of change.
It was hard to escape the conclusion
that everything worked out as it was meant to
the will of god if you like
within whose incomprehensible outward rim
everything else turns with everything else.
Umm el Dabadib (2nd attempt)
Mansur on the back gives the occasional direction
always, “a la tul!” (straight ahead)
slower and cautious at first
the sand flats, slopes, rises covered in flinty rock shards
like shattered black armour
tracks filled with sand ahead on the road
spread a half mile to either side
by vehicles looking for a better route away from that central slough
as though a panzer division had passed a few days ago
40 km due north with the Jebel el Sheik rising on our right
lines of dunes on either side converging
and at last the bike leaps out of the sand
onto a baked and cracked expanse
so flat and immense that a 747 could land
and we fly, circling in and out of dune-formed valleys, cirques
and cul de sacs, looking for the way through
find the break and curve through the chain
the fortress of Dabadib, the oasis ahead.
We lunch beneath a grove of trees, like elms
and walk up to see Roman tombs
their occupants scattered by robbers, ancient and recent
skulls, white fibulas, ribcages, and one torso, legs
and part of the skull still covered
with flypaper-coloured skin
higher up I saw how close I came the day before from the west
a few kilometres crevassed by steep wadis and ridgelines
the dunes stretching south in waves
into their own glare
carved into the winter-blue desert sky.
On the way out I wrestled sweated and roared
with the bike in the soft sand, softer now than morning sand
(and do the Bedouin have thirty different names
for sand types, like Eskimos with snow?)
until I threw caution to the wind
and shifted up into 2nd and then 3rd gear
“Aywa! Aywa! A la tul!” Mansur yelled
almost bouncing off the back
and lo: I learned another lesson
we began to float upon the sand
50-60 km per hour, over dunes and ridges
as though Death were on our heels
then stopped on a rise, had a cigarette and water and laughed
Mansur complimenting me, my strength, the big heavy bike:
patient teacher, waiting like the desert
for me to find my wings and fly.
“A tool-making animal”
I regard my tools:
my motorcycle by the dune
my tankbag filled with various important items:
a camera, notebook, first-aid kit,
lethal Sudanese dagger for the djinns and dogs of the desert nights
(the absolute terror of the Nileotic Arabs:
after Canadian grizzlies at large beyond my tent
this wasn’t so bad)
binoculars, compass, maps
the panniers on the back carrying
food, water, stove, utensils
tent and sleeping bag, air-mattress
sun cream, lip balm
tool-kit for the bike, extra oil, tire repair kit
hiking boots, clothes, hat
and a pen & paper
with everything else I survive in physical form
with words would I create something beyond that
not exclusive, but evoking
the depths above and below
and on all degrees of my compass
something hinted at in astronomical and geological abstractions
like light-years, Triassic Period, salt-pans, shooting stars
annual rainfall amounts, average diameter of a grain of sand
dromedary adaptations to a harsh environment
quartz crystals as massively compressed calcium
treatment for scorpion stings, unseen aquifers
stratification, water and wind erosion in the desert
dune movements and configurations:
whale, barchan, seif, and star
seasonal temperature variations
humidity, wind speed and direction, daily high and low temperatures...
yes, yes, yes...
but you have to wander through this
with a pariah frame of mind
not desiring the sight, no matter how distant
of another anthropoid
well perhaps Bedouins wandering past with their camels
perhaps
the primeval, the back of our minds, glimpsed through all of that
to something else for lack of a better word
I put my watch away in my pack
and forced myself to disregard it
trivial affair!
yet I finished constructing my giant solar clock
about the massive gleaming bulk of my gnomon above the tent
piles of quartz crystals numbered one to twelve
in a huge ellipse in the sands
on each hourly shadowed line
it amused me to know it was 4:45 within 5 minutes or so
regarding my clock from 2 miles away with binoculars
on a peak I named Erebus
the number meant everything and nothing
but the device was pleasing
you see
the whole thing still eludes me
perhaps my tools are holding me back
throw one away and I make another it seems.
Mythologizing the demythologized
In the heat of mid day
I squatted, a perspiring elf
beneath a giant white mushroom
but of course that voice from the past came in
to explain it to me:
sand storms, no matter how strong the wind
can only stream their abrading granules
up to some 7 or 8 feet above the ground
(just below the average height of the adaptive camel’s head incidentally)
a car, after 6 hours of that will have all its paint removed
its windows sanded milky-white and opaque
and so cliffs and limestone slabs
have this inward curve below that height
and great white heads
like a Daliesque vision stretch off as far as the eye can see
on slender necks
probably true
thought the sweating elf under the giant white mushroom.
(Un)Altered States
I think Zen
from what I’ve read and intuited about it
without mythologising
is an emptying out of the clamouring mind
and a quest for an altered state bordering upon
wakeful death
but this is a rather gnostic feeling
gothic Zen if you will
to survey this soft-centred chunk of rock spinning in the galactic void
as part of an almost infinite astronomic moving abstraction
a monstrous numbing mobile of energy and influences:
we would leave this incarceration in flesh and chafing personality
attain some stature with our own mental and spiritual forces
to look up at it all and say, “yes, well, scale isn’t everything is it?”
or “5000 years of apparent phenomenological consistency: so what?”
after all, does the colossal roiling furnace of the sun
baking the expanse around me
know anything at all?
did he only speak to Akhenaten?
did God only speak to Christ?
Allah to Mohammed?
why so choosy?
we mistake poetic inspiration, idiosyncratic scribblings
for religion revealed--it may be in fact
but anarchic and personal, not abiding rules
and so we make the same mistakes over and over
I regard the Aten disk flaming red
as it hit the earth’s western rim
about to circle in the ark of Re through the
12 caverns of the underworld
but he refused to speak to me
is it my lack of faith?
is it self-aware in its own altered state?
or is bloodless science simply right
in donning sunglasses to coolly eye
that massive nuclear furnace.
Hard to deny the sense
of incomprehensibly vast and mute clashing cataclysmic forces
wheeling about my head, and the scorpion I saw
almost translucent red as it stepped out of the long shadows for a moment
knows more, perhaps, than the universe which contains it.
Dust to Dust
I had been expecting it
perhaps not this lifetime
but all about that marred garden of Eden set on the Nile
are the eyes of sand and dust, waiting
to rise up in a khaki cloud
to sweep in like the Mahdi and his host
I had thought it coming a dozen times out here
but had only been played with, now
a queer electrical energy snaps in the wind
and the garden city is orange
I rushed outside with goggles on
to the shouting of voices, the cracking of trees
pieces of tin and garbage flying from rooftops
wild-eyed oriental figures
jerking at the steering wheels of careening cars
a shrill wisping of sand, and the dust thickens to dark orange
and brown, and then the darkness of an eclipse
the desert has come to town, to reclaim its own
a sand blizzard that filled me with obscurely mad excitement:
oh fill the car-choked roads with dunes!
pit and scour our antediluvian metropolis
choke us down to the water’s edge
as a final redoubt against the desert
reclaim what is yours.
Take it!
Next day they told me
some had thought it was the Last Day
and I followed a trail of sand
through the garden
past the desultory sweepers
and out to the racing dunes.
What happens next
What happens next
when all practicalities and obligations
have collapsed into rubble
when the great plain of your life
once a panorama of cities, people, forests, mountains and fields
is now an utter wasteland with you and your shadow in the centre
as though waking to it, this lostness
with faint tracks behind offering some clue
that you follow for awhile
in the vague hope of regaining the past’s purposes
your starting point and former identity at least
but after a short while
they have been effaced by wind and the elements
and you feel an obscure and perverse relief
what happens next
when the logistics of euthanasia
the jarring impact of whispering Life’s ultimate sedition
suicide...
are too much to entertain
when the writer, contemplating the farewell note
suffers the ultimate and final writer’s block
and can’t write a thing
or tears up innumerable
unsatisfactory variations thereof
and therefore forgoes the death-wish
what’s left...
nothing to do but to sit and wait
perhaps a passing caravan will take you in
take you somewhere
perhaps the mortal hour will silently slip up behind you
place her hands over your eyes
and lay you out the way a lover would
and absolve you of breaking the engagement.
what’s left in this desert
of an enigmatic sterile and sensuous purity but to aimlessly walk
towards various features
escarpments, wadis, strange white obelisks and sculptures in the sand
how often is madness actively sought, and found
one can never know standing on that threshold
I conquer each cliff and escarpment above the sands
and survey the eerie emptiness
I can see 30 miles or more in the clear light
and idly scan distant buttes with binoculars
wondering what it’s like over there
“getting my bearings” I think, and laugh
the hemlock in my pack, more than enough
is worth more than gold or water here
but I wander and wait and wonder
what next.
Zerzura
I found, in the middle of nowhere
as though it has a middle
a tank in a depression
buried above its tracks by one prong of a crescent dune
desiccated bodies inside
a hand still gripping the throttle shaft
we all have different reasons for coming here
and if we stay will end up the same
the dune moves some 19 metres a year
and so the unknown soldiers will be buried
in their time capsule
and then reappear in five or ten years
like a submarine surfacing in a sea of sand:
I came upon a circle of rocks
and looked about
as though the hands that placed them might be near by
I walked and walked until the sun went down and I slept:
I came upon a place
in the honeyed light of morning
mountains o’er a blue lake rimmed with palms
a deserted white city:
I felt a sleepless godless dry wind
softly muttering in the frond roofs
and faintly whistling through the gapped teeth
of white stone walls leering vacantly at me
small mud-brick houses clamoured and clustered, collapsing
finally, breaking in a wave of rubble
at the foot of the castle walls
something has come over me
in knowing that all are gone
as though I alone returned from a great exodus across the sands
and the others cannot recall the way back
or do not care to:
I thought, `it is as though I am dying’
my physical being drying out, stiffening
and I am awaiting soft release
the eyes with their bright blindness
see a tethered underworld dissolving
my thoughts circling on mild emotive updrafts
the psyche’s thermals
scanning a leftover carrion of ideas without appetite
I have no bloody idea what the hell:
I remember textures now
silking across the skin
roughing and ribbling the tender flesh
a softness that encompasses the hard and rough
allowing it to become what it is
and smells as vivid as colour
in a sepia chiaroscuro
drawing me off down empty side streets these beguiling whiffs
perfumy musk, the sweet sweat of women after love-making
the pong of workers as they lug sand past
in a shuffling line
curry, the alchemy of spices blended and blown in the wind
flowers, drying dung, the smell of water
then abruptly gone
and tastes as swift as wet coolness cleaving a dusty palate
luscious as the spray of a palm nut
whacked open with a machete
the ratcheting crushed cane
pulsing pale green sugary sweetness onto ice
and hallucinatory fruits tumbling golden globes
from ancient crabbled trees in the waste
bobbing in pools
where I might naked dive for them
a blade of flesh shocked into the cool depths
and, surfacing, hanging, see the hand of Eve
diffracted image above the water
holding out a choice one for me
and sounds, sighs, moans
voices rising in wordless disharmonies
plush, soft, evocative and strange chorales
that would drop one to ones’ knees
in a cathedral
clasping the ears at the intensity of a tolling swoon
I remember or imagine all
and wish only to commune with the deified dead
the living only draw me down
into my tortured flesh yet again:
I listen to a silence now that is not silence
it is a fullness of voices that quiver in a will to become
but do not yet manifest themselves
I keep mouthing words and phrases
not just talking to myself
it is compulsive and sure
this feeling that there is a profound listening
at work here
an alchemy of conjuration
be it only a desert metropolis of the mind:
“I am I or am I?
the psychic hermaphrodite
is complete, s/he needs no lineage
past or future
I would prostrate myself
not supplication but a collapse of faith into faith
flaunting my anomalies, my inspired purposelessness
my hollow personage, uselessly following me about
staggering like a golem, and then running after me like a dog
when I get too far ahead
I wish it no ill will but desire it to leave
at high noon it must leave with my shadow
nomos and physis
societal laws--physical laws
cling to me like a cheap perfume
pawing me with sandpaper gloves
goading this will to survive
I have become like so many
fearing not death but the searing gradients of pain
that guard the door
and so I head off along oblique tangents
on the rim between falling into the sun
or back to earth
what does “transcend” really mean?
I had a brilliant aphorism about my edifying amnesia
but I forgot it
float down to me spirits
drift at me
part the veils of this illusion
if carnal extirpation is the price of another existence
I gladly pay it
and expect no refund
Christ’s crucifixion, the image
pales beside a sensuous and spontaneous necrophilia
of his women taking down his body and washing it
with oils and unguents
Magdalene would draw forth an erection
from me in death
like Isis would perform the final rite
eros is my thanatos, my death a love as bright as I can fan it
something larger than life:
I had thought I was underwater
limpid light as horsetail clouds
stream by high above waving the flies off the sun’s face
I honour death
make her tea and talk about her inactivity here
her amber lynx-eyes unwavering, mirthful
watching me from beneath her blue cowl
her sharpened nails and tattooed hands elegantly inert
perhaps thinking about a myriad of awaiting practicalities
but she is unhurried
and graces me with her casual presence
I jest her
“marry me... say ``til death do us part’”
and she laughs
I was right, I must come for her
and she leaves, smiling and flashing me a look
an ambiguous devouring passion that enlivens:
I am sick of talking about illusions
as though anything I pen or do
can spring from the void
and remain suspended like a mirage
no, I have walked across the baking dust field towards that sheen of water
reflecting the rugged escarpment
and have bathed in its warm pools
felt tiny pink and orange fishes nibble and flit through my fingers
this mother of all deserts is my final canvas
upon which I heave the colours, slashes, smears, and words
of a life
rioting and seducing in verse my calm chaotic inner self
now external in deep-breathing solitudes of feeling
exquisite featherings of her hands on my face
another solemn goddess
warm brown thighs and swelling bosom
held in trust
that my quiet yearnings find their mirror
for she is he, and he is me:
I am reliving the old rite again
on a cliff with no name
and I cling, like a child to a heartless mother
precipitous ascent onto the precipitous
I have been here many times
the terror
my friend died this way, long ago
when I was still alive
and I wondered why him and not me
incestuous love is a meaningless denigration
for love is love
and the taboos need not have killed him so young
but then what other Adonis
could have so perfectly held the world
a golden apple
and then discarded it, having taken but a bite?
I am building a monument here
at the gateway in from the desert
to a deserted white city
an obsession of mine
I’ve laboured for years at it
my own tower of Babel reaching up into Saharan skies
covered with disconnected thoughts and feelings
in ancient long-forgotten scripts, antique rhymes
outmoded stanzas and a dictatorial diction, and now
a monumental full-stop of a life’s labours
at first done nowhere for no-one
marking my immense solitude and proud futility
that mocked but not too much
through the years since he left
yes, more for myself than he, perhaps
but for him nonetheless
aye, for him:
I of course lost it in finding it
these things have a way of sifting down
beneath thought
like dreams rolled on the tongue a vintage wine
leaving an aftertaste vague and partial, an evanescence
fading, waiting like dry desert seeds
for years and years
until the chance miracle of desert rain
brings it all up in fields of short-lived efflorescence
the experiences were certainly marvellous
but I often can’t remember them very well
until something unseen, an inner cloudburst, triggers them full-flushed
I am a seed rolling across the sand
with only the reverberations of feeling
and that waiting will to become:
I have reached the outer end of my radius
and prolonged the caesura of Zerzura
but you can’t stay the very stones and trees tell me
the lake too agrees
I walk back out into the abyss from whence I came
thoughtful, in an opaque mood
marvelling at each footstep raising the dust
that I can leave in the very process of returning
and when I turned again, Zerzura was no longer behind me
it lay, unseen, ahead.
Icarus in the sands
The black German motorcycle
is a small dot beneath a white cliff
standing by the golden dunes wreathed about it
shedding the clearest light imaginable.
The shock of it sends tremors through me
as my carefully wrought delirium is grounded
after days wandering
I had thought, for the first time in my life
that I had finally succeeded in getting lost
that I was about to cross the thresholds of life and sanity
and attain a dazed delirium.
But there it is, my deus
ex machina
and my numb legs drag towards it
as though pulled by an immensity of longing
slowly, slowly, the black dot gets larger in the crystalline light
and I finally fall upon it
I cannot control the joy in seeing it, the tears
yes the tent, the water and food too, but not primarily
it is the fantastic sense of purpose manifested
a palpable aura about this glorious machine
this movable creation of genius
like an exploration module dropped
onto the surface of Mars
glittering proud and black, resisting somehow
the shimmering whiteness all about
magically waiting, a timepiece incongruously set
in timeless surroundings.
Bikes like this one won the Paris-Dakar race a few times
drove through mud and dust in the 40’s
towards Archangelsk and Astrakhan
in a failed futile quest for cruel conquest.
But it is what it is, my other half
awaiting my will to spring to life
it rumbles and vibrates and all is changed
as we sough through the sands carving great sinuous lines
exulting in the wind and movement
Icarus is not a myth about failure
he got pretty damn high
had a marvellous view
and felt the unbearable freedom of flight
be it ever so brief
I think he laughed and was as happy as I was
as I fell back to earth.
Postscript
I cannot take everything with me
I cannot leave everything behind
voice and thoughts
sounded in words
echo in a life’s now replete empty cavern
no chimera of sentience
lurks in an unanswering
netherland
I await for myself
and for thee
exquisite tragedy!
strangers to ourselves
we find each other’s strange familiar
through the mirror pool
the great Sahara is no Isle of the Dead
it is the most lucent understanding
where such vast solitudes of the spirit
conjoin
aloft, aloft
higher than space or time
beyond the rushing streamers of stars
the hidden realm of Light
fills the heart with a fullness
unutterable
and the man
arms upraised
sinks to his knees upon a dune
the twilight is his oasis
his life was a half-wakened dream
forgive me lost days
bless me with your amber gaze
again.
