The moon’s wide open mouth, its
thin light over fields and woods
that could be anywhere, distant names
of cities chanted on the speakers –
their two notes born free, born free.
Outside the same night: lit windows
flying backwards through the dark,
the streetlamps of little towns
lighting empty roads no one
is walking home, late, tipsy.
And in a flash of sudden neon
a tall crane in a field of wrecked cars.
It is the night of old shoes, their mouths
slackly open: where now brother,
how long ago was yesterday,
how many days until tomorrow?
A blur of birches. Borders
that are more than what you feel there,
wind rushing the reeds, long wing
of wild geese flying south, sunflowers,
poppyheads and milkweed, forest,
mile after mile the tall fields of maize,
the long plains measuring the distance,
west to east autumn yellowing the leaves.
It is a place called Russian Horse,
a place called Shoemaker in Iron County,
a city of bells and crippled Gypsies,
the Gold Boys in and out the bars.
The streetsweeper sifts his broom
for flakes of fallen gold.
The dancing whore in Goat Town calls
oh tonight I want a man between my legs.
In the far distant relation
between Finnish and Hungarian
one sentence is the same
and only one and though
we don’t know what it is
we know it is about fish,
a live fish swims underwater.
And in Vogul a sentence
the same as ours it says
twenty women’s horses go on ahead.
of a man tapping his finger
on a map: here, I live here,
not much of a place, a crossroads
with a light that doesn’t work,
a store that doesn’t sell much
and a closed petrol station,
nowhere in particular but we think
it’s the centre of the universe:
Podunkstadt that was before the wars,
thereafter called Amnesza.
After the changes the beer is better
but still undrinkable. Things are not good
but they are not unhopeful. Here
we have the best of everything
This is another place I won’t remember
somewhere on the great plain
of long byres and tall wells and sky
where I have been travelling fast
with that far shine on the road ahead
and the wind over me, at night the cars
with their lights trembling on the highway,
as if the stars were passing through us.
Moments that are snapshots, coins slipped
in a beggar’s cup, a one-legged man
on a bicycle with a broken umbrella
waiting at the crossroads that are
always unlucky places, the burials
of lost travellers and victims,
beside the memorial’s unreadable epitaph
eaten over by lichen and rain.
Over there the flag of one country
blowing in the wind of another
beyond the closed checkpoint:
fields, river, birchscrub, the same.
This is the border where the road runs out
into a tractor trail of snowy mud
to the last house by the wire,
and all the dogs are barking.
Nothing between me and the wind,
tall reeds and border fences,
here to say I’ve been here,
take a snapshot and turn home,
a traveller with his keepsakes –
a man’s bone from an old battlefield,
a bent bullet from Mostar,
On SKY and SAT late night images
passing for desire and its flesh,
the play of light wherein they kiss
and soft things flutter to the floor,
a mouth begins its snail of a descent
to the promise of a breast and cut
to the commercial: all the lives
we may not want and cannot have.
And on the Russian channel mirror script:
mountains, a place far to the east
of open sky and early snow, a swift
upland river and slow drummers,
chants, horses and horsemen, women
in a long line through windy smoke,
led by an old man wearing skins,
on his head the antlers of a deer.
Too many days counting coup on the borders:
countries sucking on their stones,
some gone rusty in the rain,
another sulking on its wounds.
Markets and stations, crossings
where the police jump on the vagrants
and the fugitives, everyone’s a suspect,
everyone an item in their career moves.
In Heroes’ Park I wake to white noise
and the world sailing its ocean of dirty air,
across a bridge men carrying planks,
copper pipe and scaffolding, tea kettles,
sheets of clear glass. And through
the autumn trees a line of bright
schoolchildren, babbling like a river,
where I wake, dreaming of chickens.