Author: FarJourney Caribbean

            He left the house one night telling Amarelle the rooms were stuffy with heated air; 
       he was going for a walk. She looked at him as if he were deranged. She reminded him
       where they lived, what the news had said just that evening about gunfire blocks
       away, with warring gangs, an innocent bystander cut down. To think of walking the
       streets with no real purpose at that late hour!
            She followed him with her eyes as he got ready to leave, hoping he'd have a change
       of mind.
            It wasn't all that late when he walked. The darkness that swiftly came over the city
       as early as four in the afternoon gave Amarelle the irrational fear of unsafe streets. 
       There was nevertheless a strange excitement about neighborhood streets at night, never 
       mind the broken glass, the graffiti, the vandalized phone booths. Always the sense of  
       people refusing to be cowed behind closed doors and drawn blinds; people coming off 
       the bus, charging head down into the wind and personal troubles; teenagers hanging 
       out on stoops; kids chasing each other between parked cars.
           Always the sense of people not satisfied with simply turning in for the night; making
       what they will of their lives.
           He found a street with a neat row of houses, a kind of aberration of respectable
       dwellings in the neighborhood, with a concrete stoop and iron rails and doorways like the
       entrance to Simone's place in Ottawa. At the end of the street he'd turn back and walk
       down the other side of the road, looking up at the doorways.
           He'd pass fellows lounging outside the Deli, their eyes darting with the edginess of
       birds; they'd catch his nod and ask "Howyadoin'?" He imagined he was no longer strange-
       looking to any of them. What sadness. Here were able-bodied men whose lives, still in
       their prime, had gone off the tracks.
           Sometimes they'd ask him for a quarter. He was always amazed at the request. What
       could a quarter do to transform anyone's life?
           At a street corner someone, tall and thin, wearing ridiculous dark glasses, would be
       coughing and hacking in a frightening near-death way. Radix felt sure the man, if asked,
       would insist he didn't need a doctor; a beer or a cigarette would do. And that round-
       faced fellow with the woolen cap, bracing a wall or lamp post as if it gave off heat – he
       had this fierce-looking dog on a leash, an overfed pitbull it looked like, ungainly on its
       legs. 
          The sodium street lights gave the streets a desolate look. Never once did he feel
       threatened, or fear he'd be mugged. He didn't have much in his pockets worth stopping
       and mugging for.
          When a lone hooded figure crossed the street behind him and a whiff of danger
       reached his nostrils, he'd take a deep breath, strengthen his stride, walk on.
           (from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
    

                                                                              Time takes one hand and helps us up the stair,
                                                                              Time draws the shades down on our clouding eyes;
                                                                                         …now, as always, light is all we have."
                                                                                                    - "Tiepolo's Hound", Derek Walcott

                   [First you find what look like body feathers spry & sprouting.
                    You wonder, should I clip or shave or show? (Tattoos might work
                as mask.) What if loved ones ask Please, take off your clothes,
                grow old with me?  Shrug. Look away.      

                What's that light flash pointing like auld Morse
                on the horizon? The code of Earth O2: breathe change > transform.
                The sky's the unknown new, now all
                you see? What else but give it a go.

                Lift from hard blows soft spreads, dry showerheads in office 
                youth eaters all; from history agents with shovels & ledgers
                and guns of hunger in the night; the kite strings of comrades
                shady from the sun, you'll fall! closer to us you belong!

                Watch out for envy flying glass, the call back of fears
                & jeers in tribe bluster; crows of bald pate ordure
                freshening. In the colon doubt might spore but rupture will
                self heal in Time's defragmenting blue bar.

                Don't, don't look down: the sea oblivious salting! not whales,
                groupers bilge pouting!       

                Hitchhiker once from bush through blood and oath,
                just one clear day snips cords. Catch the first light 
                out and away you go, when you fly you'll know:
                breath eyes wings, yes, I; new lang syne]-W.W.

                    HOME

                           nails your hands
                    to polished wood, points
                    a finger in your eyes red
                    with dreams of bridges which also
                    prevent your hands and eyes but, so far
                    unachieved, stengthen their pivot and stretch.
                         (from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan) 

                  LIGHT

                  doesn't spite all day long
                  those who disdain it at dawn but
                  your appointment with the sun is
                  one faith you must keep or else
                  the golden chance you won't know
                  you miss in every sorry cell
                  of a soul riddled with dark.
                     (from "Thief With Leaf" by Brian Chan) 

                  A ROAD IN WINTER

                 The sky, however grey, is still the light
                 that mothered us and to which we must all
                 return to fill with other dreams like this
                 that, grey, moves nevertheless uphill and beyond.
                     (from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan) 

                            "So many things we have not done 
                      together, we have not been abroad
                      together we have not seen snow

                      be good
                      don't make me worry
                      don't make me sad

                      care more about me" 

                      [from "The Most Distant Course", a film by Jing-Jie Lin, 2007]

                The rain kept drizzling that Saturday morning in a way that made him feel trapped
          in the apartment. The fellows who usually sat on the stoop had retreated under the 
         awning of the nearby bodega. They joked and drank from bottles in brown paper bags;
         they looked up and down the street, ready for distraction.
               The postman dropped the mail through the slot. Radix felt the need to read about 
         the world.
               The bodega across the street didn't carry the Times. He took the car and drove off
         to the newspaper stand near the subway fifteen minutes away.
              There was no space to park even for a minute; no choice but to double park and
         make a dash for the papers.
              He didn't have exact change. A lady was fumbling in her purse for coins while two
         kids beside her squabbled over the selection of candy bars. The man who ran the news-
         paper stand, from Pakistan in a turban, kept admonishing them in clipped English.
         "Please, be careful what you do." People came by, snapped up the tabloids, dropped 
         coins on the paper pile and hurried to catch the trains.
             The rain was a thin streaming nuisance on Radix' shoulders. He waited his turn; he
         watched the police cruiser at the traffic lights. At the green signal they might cross
         the intersection and pull in behind his double-parked vehicle. Should he abandon his
         need for news about the world, dash back to the car before he got a ticket?
             He took his change and made the dash just as the cruiser pulled in behind. He made
         frantic signals with the papers in his hands acknowledging he'd broken the law, smiling
         guiltily. The officers sat stiff, stone-faced, watching him. 
            Waiting for the lights to change he stole a glance at the Times front page: tensions
         in the Middle East, a landslide in a remote village in Colombia; filibustering in the U.S.
         Congress. A blast from a car horn behind him, so loud he felt slapped on the ears, threw
         him in motion again.
            Forget the politics of the world. Keep moving. Make way for people coming up 
         behind you.
            When he got back to his block he found to his dismay that a car had parked right
         across his driveway. This sort of thing happened frequently. A fellow would drive up,
         stop right in front of his entrance and stroll across to the bodega to purchase
         cigarettes.  
            He hated this kind of thoughtless, irresponsible action! What was he supposed to
         do?
             This time he switched off the ignition and let his rage slosh around in his chest. He
        was stuck near a fire hydrant; he couldn't risk leaving the car, going inside to wait for 
        the entrance to clear. He tried reading the Times. The effort of turning pages over the 
        steering wheel deepened his frustration. He set the windshield wipers in motion so he
        could see outside.
            A glance in the rearview mirror, and there was Carlos! Waiting for the rain to stop.
       Yankee baseball cap, sneakers, snappy tracksuit pants, a baseball bat. The rain had
       trapped him, too. He must have woken up this morning with a burning desire to play
       softball in the streets. Rounded up three of his buddies. All huddled now under the
       bodega awning.   
           Radix' heart leapt with hope. Carlos would know who the obstructing vehicle 
       belonged to. With eyes like a hawk and the patience of a panther Carlos, man of the
       streets, would shout up to the apartment windows, heedless of the rain, until the
       offending driver poked his head out.
           Carlos waited for him to come right up before he acknowledged Radix. His bulbous
       nose was shiny; his face shimmered from early morning imbibing. His features now
       suggested some ambivalent parentage, possibly Chinese, especially when he smiled.
           Radix explained the problem, pointing the car blocking his driveway, but Carlos
       didn't spring into action like a companero willing to help; didn't shout up at the apart-
       ment windows. He shrugged his shoulders; he shook his head sadly and slipped back into
       conversation in Spanish which Radix had apparently interrupted.
          A puzzled, chagrined Radix made a gesture of deepening frustratio
n and hurried
       back to his car.
          What now? On this wet morning, if he couldn't count on Carlos to spring him loose,
       what next?
          He stepped out his vehicle, slammed it shut, walked nonchalantly to his front door.
       He'd wait inside, leave the car in the streets; he'd take his chances. He didn't look at 
       Carlos again. 

                    Your mother blames the breakfast scramble, evening commute
               why you never "took" to Sunday mass; cat furled
               sleeping like your dad 'til midday. She shows off
               postcards mailed when the carrier drops anchor  ̶   
               her only son leaving family footprints 'cross the globe!
               
               Handsome unsmiling in uniform your picture's framed
               for duty in the living room. 
               She'd much prefer you
               wear a gentler safer (Ph.d not Sgt.) tag on your chest.      
              

               She worries: who are these older women showering
               gifts on him? what do they ask in return?
               In the wilderness cries of loneliness
               & cold are not wolves' only.

               The Marine Captain's retirement party must have been
               a blast, though why is he the greatest guy you know?
               (Sometimes the enemy's in camouflage salutes
               or bows; 'the kiss', remember?)

               Always too busy, orifice-overwhelmed: your mother's
               pow! pow! at my hard boiled eggs. Might be true; again
               too late to reel you home. Stay in touch
                                                                            
               on line is all, for now I ask

                                                             – W.W. 

                      TO A DAUGHTER

                    
                    He never hoped for you, he never not:
                    it was you who gave birth to a father.

                    A baby, you wanted often to play  
                    with the only friend you had all day long

                    but the drug of Work would pull him away
                    to a desk, piano, easel or stove.

                    If he felt you were keeping him from other
                    life like salt running out, he might bark

                    Leave me alone, in the anger of fear,
                    and he would feel his voice quiver your spine.

                    But you never stopped running to embrace
                    him, teaching how gratuitous is love.

                    Your father's love for you, shadowed by pain,
                    clouded by duty, was never as free.

                    Yet though you're now 'tall as a lantern post',
                    you still sit on his knee and hug his neck;

                    but that he once frightened you still frightens him
                    should he snap Leave me alone, meaning now Don't.

                            (from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan) 

                                                  
                                        The way I heard it, this famous golfer
                                        builds a mansion, buys a yacht, 
                                        a life with high wall branded Privacy

                                        then one dark night some mysterious
                                        smashed car knocks a hole in the wall
                                        and the world storms through

                                        like the troops at Normandy
                                        with questions & chatter & blogging bayonets
                                        O yeah… Omigod… O no.
                                                                                              -  W.W.   

               From Carlos Radix found out that the building he occupied used to be one of a
            row of six originally built on that side of the street. Carlos pointed to the vacant
            lot where the three missing buildings once stood. What happened? Radix asked. 
            "Fire!" Carlos snapped his fingers and made match-igniting sounds. "Just like that
            somebody set them on fire…building #1 Boom!…then a year later building # 2
            went up Boom!..thenbuilding #3…Boom!    
                He made it sound very simple, both the task of setting the fires and the confla-
            gration itself. The charred hulks had been demolished with similar swift ease and
            the rubble cleared away. The remaining three buildings looked marooned and more
            vulnerable now within the history of the fires.
                "Check it," Carlos said,"you won't think they had fires there, right?"
                Radix looked. He didn't know what to say. He tried to imagine buildings standing
            there, identical to the one he occupied, grimy brick structures somehow spared
            the graffiti squiggles at the base of the apartment buildings on the other side.
                Noticing he had made quite an impression on Radix Carlos drew closer and 
            lowered his voice; he knew, he said, why the buildings had been torched; he was
            privy to certain information. 
                Word in the streets linked it all to a guy visiting from the Dominican Republic who 
            after the first fire had looked down from the apartment buildings on the other side
            and had this idea of turning the empty space into a car park. If somehow he could
            get control of the lot, there was a fortune to be made offering secure parking to
            baseball fans, in particular white baseball fans worried about their cars left at night
            unattended along neighborhood streets.
                Carlos shifted his body about after disclosing this. Suddenly restless, he punched
            his fist in his palms as if more information, straight from the streets, was right at
            his fingertips; but he wouldn't say more for now.
                 Radix with folded arms stared at the vacant lot, still waiting to be transformed
            into a paved parking lot; at that moment it was filled with weeds, car tires, yellow
            antifreeze containers; a baby stroller, a shiny white toilet bowl.
                 He looked up at the properties next in line for mysterious fires, building # 4 
            (Blackwelder's project) and building # 5 (the one he lived in). Had Blackwelder
           known about all this before he'd invested in his buildings? Was the dreaming man from  
           the Dominican Republic satisfied with the space now available? What if the arsonists
           with new grander  designs decided to set fire to the remaining buildings, clearing
           all in one huge final roof-leaping conflagration?
                Carlos had his own ideas for developing the space. He declared, rubbing his eyes
            as if to remove some foreign substance, that he'd held a long-cherished dream: he 
            would love to convert the vacant lot into a basketball court. It would make the world  
            of difference to the community.
     
            

             He had a labourer's rough hands; he said he was a construction worker but they'd
       laid him off; times were hard for guys like him. How you doing? Radix would ask.  Carlos
       would sigh and say Hanging in there. It sound like a working class struggle and lament.
       Radix was sympathetic.
            Carlos wore his standard hanging out clothes, spotless white vest, blue jeans tube
       socks and sneakers. He seemed in his late twenties, still a young man, with a chest
       swagger that suggested he wasn't ready yet to let go of his late teens.
            He'd step out his building every day about noon time as if he'd just that minute got up,
      made love, then showered; slapped his body liberally with cologne, eaten; and now he 
      was ready to discover what the rest of the day had to offer. 
            He was surprised to learn that Radix was a school teacher. A teacher! Right on this
      block! He'd seen him sitting on the stoop, but he had no idea…and his wife – not his
      wife? his girl friend? – anyway he'd noticed her going off to catch the bus.
            He slipped into an aggrieved monologue about the importance of education, the
      opportunities it offered which he now regretted he had missed. He'd dropped out. But
      he had a two year old son who would not, he swore, suffer the same fate as his father.
      Radix was touched by his candour, the armor of his resolve.
           Carlos was the happy fellow on the block, stern and good with the kids, an ebullient
      problem-solver shouting up intructions at faces looking down from apartment windows;
      he slipped cooly between English and Spanish, clever shuffler between both worlds.
            One morning he asked Radix if he smoked. Radix didn't. Carlos waved a hand as if it
      didn't matter, though he seemed a little disappointed.
            "What happened to the guy who used to live here?" he asked, casting a probing eye
       inside Radix' open front door.
            "What guy?"
            "Lived here before you came. He was a Corrections Officer."
            "Really?"
            "Yeah, man. Was my buddy. He had the night shift at the Corrections facility…? on
      Jerome Ave…? Used to come home late, past midnight; we'd sit right here and drink
      a beer…right on this stoop… hang out for awhile, you know."
            Radix said he hadn't met the man, didn't know the man. He disclosed he wasn't much
      of a beer drinker himself and Carlos turned away as if, again, disappointed.
                (from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
 

             [Rustling along at 79, foliage wind aided? papi?
           You'd think he'd spend his homestretch days on a park bench
           under a leaf hallowed tree in Brooklyn; shepherd dog lazing,
           smiling at school kids; at summer skirts
           worn shorter and shorter as he aged year after year.

                                                     His gods?
           "The Chinese, son." He lectures me on
           acupuncture, herb tea, organic crops to halt global hunger.

                                                          His secret?
           He takes the subway Saturdays to Chinatown (risks
           jostled body falling bones.) What game's he
           after? a kitchen steaming soups? wizened Chinese pals smoking
           glass pipes, doing Tai chi? He has no Chinese tongue.

           Ma complained (until she passed) he'd take off
           every weekend, return with a bag of scallion basil bamboo shoots
           as if he'd been shopping (if only; her folded heart, still bridal
           in trust, would not play dragon and shadow) 

           His face glowed like the first hours of Chinese New Year.
           His clothes whiffed of petal scents 
           as from popped tulip pods. Some witch,
           she swore, had switched his body. (Some kneading hands,
           upyielding lips kindle his mottled quick, I think)

           Mon. Tue. Wed. she'd feel cat growl and eyes on her. She'd turn
           & snap, deer stare and for no reason; wondering what's come
           over me? over him? old lion
           padding 'round his cage; waiting
           for Saturday: subway, the spoor; paw marked rides to hills in flower
           heavens in body]-W.W.   

                    THE HABIT OF MEN

                    Human's a habit, a man struggling
                    not to become his chair stretched and ripped
                    like a sinew, a pirate pulling
                    a cutlass on the numbness
                    of his drunken brothers bent

                    on raping one another's sisters,  
                    a monk taking hammer and chisel
                    to fashion gargoyles after the same
                    brothers who think him an ass,
                    a man pointing a path through

                    difficult mountains to his woman
                    who sweetly insists that they remain
                    on flatter ground a woman's habit,
                    a child pulling her balloons
                    behind her as she dashes

                    across green fields towards a cold room
                    in which her husband lies slabbed and tagged,
                    a bored queen lusting for the life-blood
                    of her maid about to crown
                    their king with flowers but reaching

                    instead for consolatory sweets,
                    a naked girl becoming the words
                    she reads opening her thighs to flip
                    through their leaves, a pallid girl
                    without a face who knows how

                    to read but has no desire to be
                    read, numb in her cocoon of icy
                    blue, a woman reading yet one more 
                    book of herself by the light
                    of a man's lamp hovering

                    over her like a centurion,
                    a woman kneeling before herself,
                    trying to rise out of herself by
                    herself only to be trapped
                    in webs of her own spinning,

                    a woman about to slake her thirst
                    at the spring between her lover's thighs
                    that gives more than she would surrender,
                    two women putting an end
                    to their habit numb of men.
                         (from "Gifts Of Screws" by Brian Chan)      

              When Amarelle left for work in the morning she stepped off the stoop and turned
          left. Turning right was the shortest route to the main roadway but it meant walking
          past the vacant lot and the adjacent empty building Blackwelder was working on.
         Fellows were always hanging out there, red-eyed, unshaven and unwashed; they
         looked dangerously idle. Besides, at some point in that direction the sidewalk
         disapeared. 
               She had to pick her way through tufts of grass, broken glass, dog droppings, oil
          stains, plastic garbage bags torn open by the dogs; and her eye always fell on the stuff
          people dumped in the vacant lot. Like a refrigerator, "a whole new refrigerator", she
          told Radix, who reminded her it was cheaper sometimes to buy a new refrigerator than
          to repair the old one.  
               Turning right, then, she passed the stoop of the corner house owned by ex-police
          officer McGuigan; there were idlers there, too, but they made room for her to pass,
          and the sidewalk held smooth until she got to the main roadway.
               Once at the bus stop she kept her gaze fixed on a point down the road where the
          bus, coming up a slope, pulled to the kerb at the stop before hers. This fixed look, the
          lift of head, the tightly clamped lips, was intended to put off taxi drivers prowling for
          fares to the subway station. They honked invitingly at anyone waiting at bus stops,
          shaking your composure and forcing you to signal No!  
                This brazen street hustling – acceptable on her island with its narrow roadways, and
          people who didn't mind being squashed thigh to thigh – struck her as out of order in
          this city. These Jamaicans! With their transports along the route! Those minivans with
          sliding doors and pounding music and a silent operator with one eye on his sideview 
          mirror and one hand reaching over his shoulder for the fare!
              Amarelle liked riding the buses. They were solid and safe with ample window glass
          for looking out, and designated stops along the route. They trundled along with the
          wheezing careful movement of pregnant women. They had single seats so you didn't
          have to sit beside someone. She could take out a book and read. The bus took her
          straight to the hospital on Third Avenue where she worked.
              Returning home would have pleased her if there were neighbours to wave to,
         people washing their cars, mowing lawns. She needed the friendliness of the people 
         she knew next door to feel part of any place.    
             But the moment she stepped off the bus and saw those plump young women in tight 
         shorts hanging over babies in strollers on the sidewalk, she groaned. This is a tenement
         area. Laundry  hung out on the fire escape, loud music, children with bad teeth, bright
         paper litter on the streets. This is tenement living!    
             She could have survived; she could have held her nose and stepped past the human 
         clutter; clamber over the fellows on the stoop without a murmur of protest; if only she 
         could open her door and walk into a living room she had furnished, a bathroom she had 
         fixed up; a home with hanging plants, nice curtains, simple smooth things from Ikea. 
            But Radix was indifferent to all that, to what he considered bourgeois tendencies.
                  (from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)