Keo Sirisomphone
Swimming,
Familiar with death’s edge,
Swimming towards you, the waters giving up
Your frail face wracked by the
Changing tides History & War,
Swimming.
Your face all I want of this planet,
Liquid thunder in my ears, as delirium surfaces,
And I think I hear your helpless cries,
But it is only the wind and bursting
Shells of panic.
Swimming,
The long rowing towards you,
Arms silt-caked doing battle,
Against men’s crimes, with only a man’s body
Swimming,
A wisp of pain sucks in gut then flounders
On the sharp stake of my will,
Stronger than snapping turtles
Whose saw-teeth, unlike ours,
Never kill for love.
I feel the scaly rake of dead fish
From the weeping wounds of a furious river
Who does not know who I am or why I am
Swimming.
Sipping in death neatly, cooled by fathoms,
Blinded by barricaded water
That sees so clearly
The only solution to our problem is:
Swimming.
Mouth filling with silver’d eels,
The predators slipping by my temple,
I bear the waters.
Astonished goddesses glance from the deep, And I strike out for them
For they know Zeus’ days of thunder are at present
Coded missiles and heat-detecting rockets.
Ribbons of fright stream behind me,
Shells of longing chalice upwards,
With dying eyes, I see you on the farthest shore,
A thin red dress flung round your body,
Flapping like a battalion flag.
Weariness blurs the spot and changes my course
Yet nothing will change our course,
This swimmer’s race laid out for me
By astrologers long before
I swam.
Ghosts of drowned men pull at my chest
But not without awe,
For I am no longer
Swimming,
But loving.
I drag myself on shore:
A slip of red silk bursts in flight under fire,
Sand splicing, arms flung open and now
We are two.
Wholesale terror in my arms as your heartbeat
Merges with mine and the guns spit
Steady behind me and I dash back into the deep,
One hard breath of yearning.
Then all my loving is conjured for
Swimming.
I have swallowed your heart, diving past exploding shells,
As I make for the other shore
Of the horizon less Mekong.
Your feint weight drags me down
And allows the sky to roll over me.
River grass rakes at your hair
And hot metal strikes all around us,
Like God’s sperm.
I hear a voice like a bright hallucination
Choking, as I try to claim my prize,
Cursing all men
As death-waves rock and
Deep shutters rotate us.
My grip loosens and you plunge downwards
Towards terrible whirlpools.
I dive to retrieve you,
A nail-hold on sanity as
River snails stare blankly,
Watching my half-murdered burden sink,
And I am no longer loving, but
Swimming.
Bloody shoulders sweep
Onto the seventh circle
Breaking destiny
Which drinks in tumors of another man’s war,
Propelling me onto that plateau beyond pain
Swimming.
I let the nightmare carry us where it will,
Insidious as the pollen of our era,
Churning like the century’s politics,
The honky-tonk waters suddenly still, so still
I never see
Arms and hands relieving my burden,
Pulling you from your comatose chaos,
From darkness to living.
And still I could not believe
When the weight faded and floated beyond me.
I called your name
As I was pulled from the ringing wrack,
Your small hands and child’s arms cradling me,
Singing, that we were no longer
Swimming,
But loving.
Camellias
We entered a cathedral
One stormy day,
Rain still glistening
On hyacinths shivering orange.
Rousing in wrath,
The reluctant Gatekeeper
Eyeing us like Lucifer deciding
While we danced
Iridescent from the rain
And laughing, having spent
Half an hour wailing
To be let in,
Stranded on this island
Like Crusoe and his Man,
Pagans come to incorporate
New and lovely Gods.
All set with the rituals
Of our tribe,
Revised to new and modern music,
Ignorant of rules
For the Primitives,
Stories invented by that snob Peter,
The eternal doorman
Of the washed and scented Christ,
Snubbing the Saint Esprit of
Filth and red,
Forgetting that holy men
Would never dare to pass
These waxed and varnished doors into
This cheap bazaar of glass beads
And fetishes, plastic hearts
And Color-Glo postcards.
Yet we pass,
Leaving summer rain
And Eden’s grandiose landscape into
A musical mountain that
Floats like a stone ship on
Rusty water, breathless,
Sprawling on top of sin,
Spilling it like a sloppy drinker;
Warm Sambucca that
Cuts ragged and parched lips,
Releasing in one collective heave
The steaming Christian cant
Nodded to and cheered on by
The Eternal Prompter,
Half voyeur, half pornographer,
Who has all the forgotten clues
From when this cathedral
Was the scared rock of the Mother
And not the Son.
We entered, yearning through rows
Of empty pews, yawning
Like Nubian slaves being baptized
Dark, sullen and insurrectionary,
Subversively black,
They crouch over,
The white-bleached
Skeleton of Saint Julio,
Rattling below in his glass coffin,
Smothered in decaying blossoms,
Epibole on rank and startled bones,
Afire with flickering wax,
Worshipping but not warming
As if any fire
Could quench Sainthood
Except love and so
Love entered,
Splattering boiling blood on chilled sacraments,
Alive so long as Death staggered
Burning in feverish and sacrificial flame,
Making our offering to the Saints and Holies,
Groaning on flower-banked altars, afire in
An armada of shimmering light:
Believer’s wax
Warming us in its worshipping glow.
An army sent to meet the agnostics,
Yet, there is no one here.
God’s legions having deserted
Before the advancing heathens,
Abandoning the high-swept ceilings
Of pale baroque frescoes and the
Tabernacle in beaten gold,
Pregnant with the muffled prayers of pilgrims
Pounded into the polished metal
Like fiery boulders, indenting
All this richness of facade
With unwashed bodies
And simple needs.
The red-hot iron of grief
Laid on lace and linen
By a race of dark-shrouded and shapeless
Women to the manner born,
Perpetually lit
By the glow of penny candles:
The permanent make-up of the pious,
The cleansing cream of the poor,
Smoothed on each morning for mass,
Slipping into wrinkles
Of disappointment and miscarriage,
Folded and bloated bodies
Kneeling
In the fagged confessionals
Each morning.
Each morning
The chronic keening of a new confession
Lived the night before
Under someone’s clammy, impudent hands.
The sun rises inventing sin:
“I don’t believe …”
Yet the blasphemer is beatified
By the thousand strokes of burning wicks
That lick carousing flesh.
Our dance of Life
Flashes contours of
Limb and shadow.
Nirvana blooms
And the Holy Ghost prances,
And the Archangel announces
An Immaculate Conception.
I yield, face to face with Krishna,
And Christ takes me from behind
And Lazarus rises moaning
And over all
The stinking sweat
Of gladioli and carnations
Sinks under foot and flank,
Roaming the walls pocked with
Niches of despair in which sit
Silver-framed photos of dead children.
Our possessed bodies
Mingle with the coying odor of sanctity
A single beam of light
Crosses us, a reminder
That ranting, raging, rowdy, perfidious
Life goes on: a wild Italian garden gone to seed,
Its perfume creeping even
Into this crypt,
Strung with crushed camellias,
Their taste in our mouths,
Their white in our eyes,
Their imprint on our souls
As we lay amongst them,
Entwined in holy Love and sacred Blasphemy.