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.