from an old notebook

Sometimes people become lost through spending too much time on their own; sometimes by spending too little.

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inscription on a san francisco monastery sundial

Every hour that passes wounds thee and the last will kill thee.

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Quoted by Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire

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4 uruguayan poems

Images

A red chair lying next to a black one
At the foot of the sea wall. If it had eyes,
Would have seen a longtime companion,
One of its conical black legs. Drifting erratically
Away. It would also have seen a bloated fish,
The size of a frying pan, coming to rest
Beside it. Before being toyed with by the macabre tide,
Dragging it away in an imitation of life for a moment or two,
Before deploying it oncemore on the strand,
Within spitting distance of a wreath, white-flowered,
Trailing a black ribbon, meandering between
Rocks, sea and shore. Joining this idiosyncratic
Latin dance of listless objects with nothing
Better to do of a sun-scoured afternoon.


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Image

Sometime in a night so warm that it might as well be day
We drove along the Rambla to Carrasco,
A retreat for vacuous moneyed youth, deluding
Itself the world over that the impulse to escape
Significance is not a misguided quest to find it.

Between the town and Pocitos, in the dazzling shadow
Of a blackened sea, threaded with the pinhole lights
Of civilisation, we passed an open truck. Bearing
A pair of passionately entwined stowaways, young
Americans revelling in modernity; enwrapping nature
With the sensual speed of fuel-injected travel,
Allowing this in turn to charge their lust or love,
Blossoming in a private public display of narcissistic
Passion, flowering in the summer of our headlights.
We overtook and they were gone as we in turn were
Overtaken by the sensuality of night, heat and dawn.


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Hit And Run on Calle Uruguay

On a bright busy morning
A dead body lies covered
In a newly-washed sheet
People chat in doorways
Some stop to stare at the
White token of transience
Guarded by a cohort of sun-
Specced police who look important
But quite clearly are not.


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Cabo Polonio

The smell corrupts the wind which tears into my features
Distorting my face into a beaten mask. Behind which I
Cannot hide. It is the smell of rotten seal. Washed up
On the beach of Cabo Polonio, a pragmatic paradise
With room for litter, revulsion and hardship; refusing
To cocoon its visitors in a vacuum-packed ambience of
Pleasure; forcing them to seize it, greedily and guilt-
Lessly, as a right, a due of land and nature. Like death:
The skeleton debris of the world’s wasted garbage
Claims its place beside the brilliant moon, the flawless sea,
The ragged music resonating morning noon and night.



march/april 1994

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a dream

I'm in Montevideo. I go to the bus station to catch a bus to Valizas. There are other English backpackers there, who don't really know what they're doing or where they're going. I ask in Spanish, and the sales assistant smiles at me. My Spanish is just about good enough.

I arrive in Valizas and make my way to Polonio. I find a spot beside one of the little ranchos. There's a lot of people there. It's busy. Evening arrives and I head off for a walk. I walk down towards the sea and put my foot in a marshy spot (which would not exist) and a baby crocodile snaps at me but misses.

I head off along the coast. It starts to become built up. I run into Raquel. She's been there a few days. I tell her there's a good bit further down the coast. But as we walk it becomes more and more built up. There are cars on roads. I tell her when I was there last, there were no cars. There's a fancy hotel. The place looks more like Punta, or Brighton. I say we should go and see the sea lions. The sea lions have had a special sea lion run created for them. It's concrete, and shallow, so they can bask there. A building crosses overhead. They seem happy enough, but it's all one great big tourist trap. Raquel holds out something for a sea lion to eat. I tell her that they're dangerous, she shouldn't, but the sea lion just lifts it out of her hand, a trick it's perfected.

There are hundreds of tourists. TP arrives. At one point, I spot a little crevice full of broken up crates, rubbish from the sea. I tell them - look there, that's what Polonio used to look like.

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achievement

The mark against which one should be measured might not be one's ability to succeed, but one's ability to fail, to continue to fail, to fail better, and to continue to fail better.

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the old bailey

The visitors gallery is entered via a white tiled passage.
After primitive security, they are herded like schoolkids
On the stairwell, waiting for permission to enter. The court
Rises for the judge. Yellow masking tape covers a bank of
Seats. In the gallery, a row is cordoned off by police tape,
As though a crime had been committed. The jury’s a scruffy
Multi racial mix. In for the long haul. Bewigged courtiers tap at
Laptops. Four members of the police defence council scrutinise
The gallery, copper genes kicking in. Unaccounted guests
Include a Brazilian, some students and a young man in a brash
Captain America T-shirt. The barristers know their Dickens.
For the police, a heronian brief, beaky, boxing clever.
His adversary appears as twitchy as a sparrow, then proceeds
To cross-examine like a mongoose, circling, darting, retreating.
She sips from her water, refills the glass from a jug, hovers, moves
On, quips with deadpan wit, runs her witness ragged. Implies a kill
She has no need to make. The witnesses are upstanding police-
Men, steeped in caution. The judge queries one officer. Surely, he
Suggests, were a suicide bomber known to be at large, would that
That not indeed represent an immediate, actionable threat
To the safety of the public? - Indeed it would. So – why was
Jean Charles de Menenzes allowed to board the bus unchallenged? Why
The four hour wait for a briefing? What really caused a man’s death, in
The darkness of the underground, on a Summer’s Day at Stockwell Tube?

031007

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Wordsworth, Letter to Mary Wordsworth, May 1812

The life which is lead by the fashionable world in this great city is miserable: there is neither dignity nor content nor love nor quiet to be found in it.

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my new home

Upon this day the headline announces:
Banking Crisis: The Fear Spreads. Three blue
Chairs and an ugly bed left behind declare
The ghostery of those who came before. Along
With unpaid bills and electriclessness. The
View across Notting Hill, Battersea and the M40
Begins its job of luring me in, revealing first
Secrets. A musty stench mutters of not-being-
Lived in. Months and months of neglect
Lend a forlorn air to the kindliest of souls.
The flyover, redolent of a megalopolis
Intrudes with its automated burble, but
Its unthreatening; the reliable riverine
Flow. Cars, vans and bikes skedaddle
Along, each one different, full of purpose,
A counterpoint to the writers vacuity. Who
Sits, writing his way into his new home,
Waiting for the light and the glow to take hold.

180907

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