PRINCEMERE POETRY PRIZE

Three Poems for Kamal


Costa Rica

Water shivers around our plump thighs and bellies
in warm blue, swirls of sugary juice with a lick of rum
in our mouths, the sun lustring through the sky—
a liquid pearl—glowing through your eyes
as you grin at me. Who would ever guess
you are dying?

                         We lunch on fresh fruit
and barbequed pork while grackles flit up to steal
food off our plates, grabbing at gratification, greedy
as we are.

                 In the emerald light, we can't tell toucans
from pineapples, iguanas from guava, lazy pleasure
from clawing fear. This meal, this moment, this holiday
from reality is necessary as breath, as you, my darling,
to me.

           We have lived with lack long enough to know
how lucky we now are
                                     except for this:

your bleeding bladder, liver of tumours and cankered lungs.
We are at peace
                            except for the vomiting, hacking cough
and terrible yearning for more days to peer through windows
at deer gobbling last year's marigolds in the snow,
bellies swollen with young, or swallows diving kamikaze
through an aneurism sky.

                                          I whisper to you
when your eyes are closed and half your mind in dream.
I plant kisses when your flesh is hammers and needles,
acid marching like red ants from penis to throat.
I cushion the fracture between one and two a.m.
as you retch in the toilet, brain buried in a coal mine,
organs in earthquake. I tell you, I always say I want you
to stay.

             But trust me. Please, please believe that sometime
soon when I have hauled my most putrid sorrow to a landfill,
maybe a dreary afternoon I've stuffed myself with pot brownies
to crowd out misery, a day I hope will be long, long from now,
at least a week, maybe a month—oh god, make it two,
give us an entire season—when at last I have grown
bigger than myself—then,

I won't insist.



Perennials

Hummingbird wings beat thoughts
to froth on a morning of acid sun
and burnt blossoms, this clear
and wounded morning
of mourning.

                     Evaporated clouds hang
heavy with memory of downpour and loss.
A rainbow hovers—bruised hangover—
too temperamental, too miraculous
to manifest without pain.

                                        Hummingbird
works its beak in a petunia, shameless
hunger and thrust, its small compressed
desire pulls every muscle to motion.
This bird of dervish and embers exists
here                                          now.
                I will remember.


II

For months things fall apart:
stove, job, you, printer, bathroom
mirror.
           Splinters of curse catch
in my heel, pierce a fingertip
reflecting streaks of more bloody
disaster. Treachery of disease

and machine lurch through the dead hours.
I awake to the frenetic cry of stripped screws,
fighting birds, viruses, scorched firewalls
and coughing, can't take anymore break-
downs, decide to go to ground. Like you
I go to the famished ground.


III

This year of ruin will be my summer
of perennials. After 3 coffees, I work compost
in stony soil—rancid orange grin, eggshell teeth,
salad slime—plant seeds, fountain and feather grasses,
murmur to the lavender's frugal leaves, daydream
its widow's weeds the colour of slumber. I wail

in fragrant sorrow,
                              lift mine eyes
unto the gods of chance and weather.

Day after day, hour after hour in funereal dress
of white garden gloves and hat of shadows,
I plant perennials. In your conjured arms
I place them, your perennial arms of love
and vanish.



Wait

Death is not what you want,
not what you choose, and you would do anything
to avoid it if you could.

                                     But you can't

so you slip it on elegantly:
a dinner jacket on the Titanic, the scent
of burnt almonds lingering at the lapels,
the coarse gold and black pattern of Andromeda

falling down your sleeves. You breathe in Mercury's
toxic air of silver and torture, sculpt an ice centrepiece
of the second coming, take my cold hand in yours
and kiss my fingers. You aren't afraid as I am,

terrified for and without you. You think death
might be a revelation in velvet, perhaps the gown
worn by the beautiful stranger you brushed against
just before birth, umbilical cord festering in your belly.

Maybe it was her shadow in the doorway
and not a hooker we saw as we walked down
9th Avenue the night we met, silk and barbed wire
in our mouths when we kissed.

Me, a student with kids, you an immigrant
just starting a job, we suspected life's promise
was nothing more than a flicker in a coal mine,
layers of grit on grit hovering above our shoulders.

How could we know about the long evenings
of candlelight and open windows?

Death is not what you want, you whisper,
the booby prize in Bingo, the weapon in a board-game
we play with the children, tears glittering in your eyes
when you glance sideways at me from another dimension.

Or is that just my desire?

You play death like a musician—Beethoven—
pressing my skin with fingers of stone,
your gravel notes and accent of ashes.
You perform a narrative arc, dive

through black waves and bring me pearls.
That last time I pulled you above the surface,
you looked straight at me, but saw
what I looked like from the bottom of the sea.

I raise you up, your shadows and currents,
remembering how you shone when we were young
and how you looked at the moment of death—

exquisite.

Let your beauty swim to my need,
my forever and ever longing.

Wait for me at the bottom of the sea
at the end of the world.