Clairvoyancy

 

In a small two up-two down town

of perpetual rains and dark afternoons

a woman, a clairvoyant, waits by the phone

in a brown study without books.

 

She works the law of averages on the nightshift

in a home for discarded husbands

who lost their place in the chain of command

for dreaming of  angels and sailors.

 

This is what she does:

when the phone rings she takes its photograph

and keeps one print in a file

entitled the denial of longing,

 

And sends the other to the caller

with a message: I am a clairvoyant,

I know who you are and this

is what I do.

 

 

Escapology

The nurse poured me another vodka
inviting me to carry on
but her charm is wearing thin
and I had told enough lies for one night.

Outside the barred windows
of the white tiled room I hear a siren calling;
the footfall of fugitives following
the masked ball from town to town.

On the lawn a piano is sleeping,
in a pool of light issued by the soft clauses
of a moon tethered to a pylon,
the colour blind mad deem ironic.

I collect my distress flares, an old atlas
and hand in my apologies to the primate
playing poker with a dead airman
on a tea chest in the guardroom.

My orders are tattooed on the wrist
of another woman who keeps a guru
in a bird cage on the balcony
for me to argue with.

We all share the same signal
its light attracts the nightshift:
the itinerant gifts of big black taxis
old stations release on parole.

To freelance the supply lines 
for calling cards of the casino healers
who fall in love with the dreams 
of those who have been discharged.

 

 

Ghost Stations

Ghosts rise in the early hours 
to forage the tracks for lost properties 
and the spent electrics of wasted journeys
that turn to dust on the text of an apology 
discarded on departure by a broken man.
They'll risk life and limb to save a glove 
abandoned by a hand that touched so many, 
to hang on a hook like a dead bird 
in the archive of discarded pasts.
Out there beyond the bridges and cable life 
the longing for other places.

A northbound woman's diary records
an out of body experience assembled 
in the dreaming parish of the penultimate stop,
where she saw her lover blindfolded 
on the southbound platform preparing 
his arms to meet another.
Having given up so much she carried on 
to the town he promised would be hers, 
to redistribute her life strategically 
through the classifieds. 

Ghosts collect the evidence a stranger
leaves behind to reconstruct a life
of broken promises and departures,
a case history to report to the outside world
falling about the star studded streets
of unlicensed fights and fleapits where
ghosts wander from theatre to theatre
like unstitched patients searching
for the lost nerve of the surgeon
who failed to complete the operation.

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Santa Barbara

 

From the ledges of Santa Barbara’s rock

the neighbourhoods cascade down in alleyways,

one horse streets that furtively follow

their sins through the ochre dust and cactus,

below the watchful stained glass eye

of the godfather’s observance of old spanish affairs:

The early morning aroma of ducados scented bars cut with burnt coffee and brandy and the scorching babble of caballeros

with scored and roasted faces, spike their gravel throated oaths and the native heats dry murder with stories.

 

The cool facades in the deep shade of sub tropical gothic

or the South’s poor mans Gaudi speaks no evil

as the smoke lingers in the passageway

in the shape of a sudden apparition.

The siesta like a spell stills the air of all distraction

as the escape routes whisper to the oncoming night.
The high moon picks out strays like a spotlight

warning the shadows of North African sailors

skulking quarryless not to move

until the lamp dims and the bolt slides.

 

Then you hear the voices, beyond language

and the conspricacy of tongues:

the slap of the hand the flick of the finger,

the click of a heel,

Flamenco !

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Saskatchewan

 

Two days without sleep

on the Montreal to Vancouver, 

drilling its way through

the relentless late winter prairie.

The convex skull of Saskatchewan

scorched by the violent white winds

circling the glass globe sky

in the state of pure of horizon.

After the snow of Ontario

the traveller’s optic burns,

dilates the distance

and then the telegraph trance

pole after pole flashing by

destination west.