FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN

[Don’t think of boarding rituals you missed: not leaving
through the front Gate; not tasting order and civility
at Customer Check-In; the sneak peek at First Class
that’s Not For You; your first walk sideways down the aisle;
farewell families squeezing handkerchiefs; and that last mile
to the airport, the taxi speeding for takeoff on old Atkinson runways.

Scuffling to get through, at sea on subways scuttling home,
you’ll soon forget the bush paths taken, mosquito
stings, distrust and gamble. Your winged dark nights
will scout new crabways to old watchful mornings: hey, budday,
y’know where Richmond Hill is? 

      Not so, those Jean-Jacques & Jasons pushing off
Haiti’s shores, whose last look back snaps the boatbuilder’s sign
of the Cross. Nor brave Mamadous booked on Libya’s coastlines
for Papal portos, who startle stooped Neapolitan pensioners like crows
in the olive groves: out of nowhere, again these Moors!
showing up, bare face, bare bone! with nothing
to declare but bodies of water.

Bodies in waters crossed back when still stink
and stack the myth they show no proclivity for Olympic
swimming; though free them ashore, any shore; marvel
at marathons of endeavour, wailers of enduring light
chipping to the ends of the earth
The wonder and fear in their eyes once, up on deck!

No, count your stars & stripes, backtrackers. Check your hearts
zipped pockets for dry papers. Run. Don’t know
how lucky you are]

– W.W.

THE TRIP I WILL MAKE

is the one I am.
The skies will mirror

the clouds of my eyes,
my sinuses will

decide the weather,
mountains will rise up

when I fall, and fade
if I fail, in love.

I build my own boat,
stitch and hammer its

sails and anchor, flood
these rivers of blood

with fish that I eat.
They too are stewards and

masters of all my
deaths and of their own

fate: death’s but a shape
of exchange, the price

of forever, one
more gate and bridge: we

know the trip we will
make we’ve made before

and the trip we do
is already done.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

TO ENTER

another town, to wear
another tongue, to hear a strange flute
and to know all their rhythm before
their speech, their song, the familiar and
the new, and not to mind that sometimes
it’s all a stony racket, a clash
of rocks the sea will make smooth, of knife-
blades which will sharpen one another
into profiles human of the moon.
(from “Gift Of Screws” by Brian Chan)

AMERICA

A bright shore wakes the drowned dreamer
to his own questions: these are
what he seeks through deserts
of ribbed care or pitched by waves

of desire. To stake some cooling
pool or to be washed ashore
is not to tap the deep
well or discover a new

world but to frame an old still-life.
So the quicksand dream remains
the true rock of water,
the real continent of light.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

[Where to turn, in your heart of sudden darkness, when you’re locked out
the bedroom, and mosquitoes in waiting swarm over that kneeded body
shivering in Sati’s nighty? To sniffing cross-eyed bloggers in heat
for scandal? Or columns in newspapers sworn to protect
the entitlement of the nation’s First husband?

The shame of that. His wretched country. The shame.

Suniye! There’s another way out: just two clicks through the forest;
past the bastard’s cave, the victims backtracking. We choose
our mates, not our unruled desires. So be a tigress, lady. Turn
again to poets who understand one night you’d scratch
or knock on Hillary’s door; ask to come in]

-W.W.

FOR JANE SIBERRY

But tenderness is hard
to inhabit. Skins and masks
to be shed. Every act is
a pretence of yesterday’s.
The pain of love, what more, what?
These stirrings of rain cloud.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

TO A WIFE

Your obsession with your duty makes
you customs officer
to my love: I have nothing

to declare of it to you even
though the most secret pouch
of my heart is full of this

golden drug that you once discovered
and seized for no reason
but that it made you feel full

of power. But love overbears itself,
can’t stand the weight of its
own fruits of repetition

and sleep. Yet I hope mine can still move
you before you become
one more warden of the jail

where love locks itself, itself to think
free, a captive serving
life, an artist of escape.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

ANGELS

fall off their clouds
of care to become fools
who walk tightropes and fall
off cliffs only to learn
how to turn into safe
burghers who step sideways,
around and back or not
at all, till they fall off
their rugs of calm to turn
shocked back into angels.
(from “Gift of Screws” by Brian Chan)