[Yes, Edgar, the love you had for our simple world,
love or patience, then sure self distancing; then, mind set,
flight like kiskadee from the seeding of Guianese dissonance ("until
they showed signs of awakening to a responsibility of things") clear free
hand pointing, "Look at the different tints of green…those shrubs…
at any time of day…one would hardly think they were growing wild"
and, over there, Courantyne Kattree, "walking with grace in her dirty
clothes …poised at the middle point between the past and future
and troubled by the dark thunder of neither" (I swell for her poise)
Not for you the peacock leisure of poets with easels on island beaches
fearing oblivion, these days, they search your cave, iphoners
who text, scholars retreading, bloggers who goggle, flash
light on your work vastly not read: the mittel schwarz bowel
scraping; the colony expecting passage to London (cup o'tea
curious seeming, there! like bitch at your ambition!)
and the suicide flame out message in ash for folk back home
divining: reconsider UK calling; reset sails of desire
for grey stone "bloody" cold raincoats polished shoes;
cherish that first shoeless wonder, (God save our) different tints
of green; cane pungent in the air at Diamond;
careful grass verge walking on the public road
in the public trust – truly yours; still ours
to play or build with after the suck of Empire, Pomps
& poor bodies fires coming floods of new empire]-W.W.
WORK
The busyness of others
alarms me, and yet (and so)
on my own, busy do I
become, moving towards my
next appointment of desire,
unlike trees in a windstorm
flailing their limbs beyond hope,
beyond want of anything
but the pleasure of the dance
as its service to the wind.
Or: seeing others rushing
to execute some excuse
for coming together known
as Work, I sigh and lean back,
witness to those fallen leaves
which, once they pretend to be
dead, can leap up when the wind
moves them beyond all effort,
nothing to do but dance
the Wind-way that work forgets.
(from "Gift of Screws" by Brian Chan)
WHEN NOTHING MOVES
the pen at the top
of an empty page, think of a book
with no author, imagine the sun
without its winds, yeast soaked in water
in kitchens with windows and doors shut,
houses whose floors are unscuffed by any dance.
Out of such crumpled silence words still
climb, frozen loaves out of the basement
where deaf women yet dance with blind men
who sometimes pause to absorb the voice
of the wind by which nothing escapes
being read and written, revised or erased.
So on Sunday sidewalks spread your texts
of twice-baked bread and still-rising dough.
All is given to be handed on.
This is the common good most ignore,
wealth of the bin that can't be emptied,
that overflows as long as no tally's made.
(from "Gift of Screws" by Brian Chan)
MUSE,
to be chosen by you
is bread I cannot buy,
the bread of breeze and rain
in a desert of sweat,
of dry tongues. You're the wind
that carves the shapeless sand
to hills and pools for moon-
light to define and fill.
(from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 