APHINAR

by Norman Jope

'I wish today to change over to another transport line, to leave this one whose name I do not even know, but in any case I must get passage from Aphinar' (Arthur Rimbaud, Marseilles, 9th November 1891: translated by Paul Schmidt)

1. ARRIVAL

There were clouds in the engine-room, the portholes

barely repelled the water’s ghosts. On the bridge,

the eyes of the captain hovered

at his body’s brink. Huge hydras of foam

reached up, where dugongs rotted…

I pissed from the deck, to hide the smell.

On my first night, I walked

the spice-pollen streets,

crushed butterflies in darkness

I could not imagine ending, ever.

A mulatto woman called to me,

the slits of her eyes like copper wire –

I agreed a price and shared her bed

as her wild hair maddened mosquitoes.

Day dawned, with durian stench.

The city became mine, then – planks, tea-chests,

colonial thoroughfares, importers’ offices,

sacks gnawed open at the docks, jade lizards

flashing through weeds. As I sipped milk tea,

I remembered that I had forgotten my business.

Any dog in the street might remind me

but, for now, I was stranded.

With the funds in my account,

I could hold out for years –

but what to do? Lie back

on my lumpy bed and smoke?

Inscribe my sweat on the city’s map?

What I did was raise my glass

to toast my arrival, my gift of absence.

2. SOJOURN

This life, between arrival and absence,

guides me with soft, braceleted arms.

Let me share my belief. This is not death.

There is, it is clear, no future in death.

I wanted the future, which is why I came.

Coffee roasts in markets

where I saunter, in blazer and sun-hat,

dispensing tomorrows from my wallet.

Here, I know that I will not be caught.

No-one looks. If you have the baksheesh

you can hide from the reach of Chronos

by bribing His lesser lieutenants.

Sometimes, I sleep on a rattling hammock,

at other times, beneath the faded coverlet

and torn mosquito net of the best hotel.

Sometimes, I inspect the traders’ stalls,

watch Armenians unload their samples,

a mountain’s mass in each of their eyes.

At other times, I whisper in the ear

of a woman washing clothes in the bay.

What is the meaning of the word “loneliness”?

The whole world is beside me, stretching out

past dhows and schooners, local craft,

coiled in palm-fronds, close in clearings

of the bush that smothers the inland routes.

For amusement, sometimes, I offer my services

as an export clerk, a buyer, a Levantine exile,

to dream, with longing, of the lands I did not leave.

3. LIFE ON THE FAR SIDE OF WATER

Honest Norm, the broker of truth

lies on the sea-bed, with his retinue of daemons…

What magic in biography? Consider him

who was possibly even more human than you

but I doubt it. After all, I was him.

Today, I wake, not knowing who I am.

This is typical. In seconds,

I put on my clothes and a set of memories

appears as if from nowhere to conceal me.

Are they mine, yours, or no-one’s?

In the streets of Aphinar

it can’t possibly matter. Stranger, tourist,

diplomat or spy, I incite speculations

as I weave through indigenous traffic

in my white suit, twirling a cane in my hand.

4. ROLLOVER

And what did my past life promise?

I dream that the fruit machine pays out plums

that squish on carpeted ground.

That it pays out bells

to tinkle under the feet.

That it pays out replicas of itself,

tiny fruit machines that squeak and rattle.

There is always More, so much that rushes

towards us, cramming the arcade,

time adding but never subtracting, then

a firework explodes, another,

and the arms dump under the amusement hall

goes up. Each bullet bursts like a shell -

but too much to understand, then there’s nothing,

not even a rubble ruin to pace

and offer hope… there was too much then,

but now, there is not enough for the brain

that deletes its neurons one by one,

too tired to care that the fun won’t last…

how glad I am, to have left all that

in the sodden Ardennes, on flayed Parisian roads

or cabbage-boiled Sundays of Reading and King’s Cross

and so many other places that I’ve been to

without once visiting. This poem

needs no life to test it, nor does my dream

of a jackpot won, to be sea-chested off

to the Here-and-No, to this Never

on the banks of Null, a place from where

only death is possible, but in which life sharpens.

5. SUBWAY

Drifting in and out of sleep

in which I am not myself, nor yet another,

I think of the subway I have walked through

so many times, in a wintry city –

there, the blind organist

will be playing a polka

and the destitute, as usual,

will have spread out their cloths.

On the cloths will be old radios,

paperbacks, ripped classics of porn,

screws, rivets and stopped clocks,

light-bulbs, fitness videos, and pictures of Here.

There will also be women holding up bouquets

or cardigans, for hours

until their arms go numb. Here, tomorrow,

there’ll be women who can store the whole world in jars

on their downtrodden heads, and still retain poise –

but grace becomes so hard, in the absence of warmth.

Hundreds of thousands pass through daily

from the suburbs, on their way to work –

exhausted, older, they return to flats

and bungalows with peeling porches.

Sometimes, snow gets into the subway

on boots already laced with night

as they dash for buses and trams…

now snow falls to my pillow

and melts. Life is going on elsewhere –

but what it is I'll wake to, I cannot tell.

6. GHOST-IN-RESIDENCE

To stride through streets in my white attire,

‘our man in Aphinar’ or, rather, my man.

I can still take pleasure in these moments.

The future’s on hold. Last night, I licked kalas

from a girl half my age with amber skin –

afterwards I smoked, there will be other such loves

but who else lives here? Am I, in essence, in Hades,

boxed in by shadows, with the Styx beside me?

And “how do you know that you’re not already dead?”

asked Burroughs, in response to a fatuous question

so I wonder.

Yet, at other times,

come immaculate sunsets, shoals of photons

over mountains to the west, and the birds –

translucent, ecstatic, how they soar

to the tops of their voices, as they cross the bay.

7. BRUNCH IN THE OPIUM DEN

Crowley, my errant friend, the one

who signs his name with a phallic flourish,

basks in the den whilst the rickety city

throbs with business. Nothing is made here –

spices and oils and precious stones go out

on precarious ships to the cold coasts of Europe

in return for guns and I-Pods –

but, every day, you can hear the rustle

of transactions, even here

where Crowley reclines, his eyes

like the sails of stranded dhows.

Hour after hour, for a million years

he dozes, only to wake

so that he can take pleasure

in the sleep to come.

After all the magick, women, men,

big-game hunts and mountain expeditions,

betrayals and freak-outs, taints of a life,

he has come to rest on cushions,

attended by a Chinaman who fills his pipe

before rushing out to place a bet.

Brunch in the opium den, a place I can only visit

briefly, even now, experience being my drug...

in Crowley's speech, the hawk-headed lord

of his belligerent youth is as fluffy as a dove

and I listen to his Churchillian murmurs

as I munch at a zodiac of fresh-cut pineapple.

And still not sated, still not weary,

I stride down the street, for a fix of caffeine.

8. WOODWORM DIARY

Crunching into lights, pasting walls,

cricket-swarms, gutter-condemned,

are hosed, broomed off. Yet thriving

in clean streets, woodworm inscribe

their diaries in floorboards - mosquitoes hang

from strings of flight. Ants are at the docks

with miniscule rackets, their percentages.

Beetles, in every clod. A Brownian motion of flies

consumes the world, by instalments – the grand ground down.

They are agents of earth, genetic sturmers,

blind to all but purpose in their billion regiments.

So, in a world without me, swarms clog roads –

cold traffic, sweeping gestures of genes

that reside within me, un-transmitted,

as I ride the sail of my shadow home.

9. CONQUESTS AND INTRIGUES

Here, each morning is a Saturday morning

from my former life, with the chores done –

so, perhaps, I’ll stroll to the harbour

to watch bargains struck and sacks conveyed

with grace on the shoulders of locals –

or sit in the colonial square

as traders, nobles and princesses pass

and read old news from afar.

Sometimes, I’ll scan columns

with redoubled zeal, for a coded mission

to invent, or discover – at other times, flirt

with Gabrielle or Rosa, those mysterious exiles,

stranded governesses, moon-brides, angels,

whatever they are. These days of desire!

But it’s far too steamy for sex, at noon –

the dhows are as limp as paper boats

as I enter midnight through a hole in the day

to love the ones I struggle to name…

one of them plucks a dulcimer, singing

of invented lands, in the dream-smoke of my pipe –

I am heir to the throne of the void, in a scented palace,

slave of my fate, of the assassin’s cord,

but that’s how it is here.

In the harbour,

small boats leave, for the island in the bay

where they bury Christians. That’s one way out –

for now, we make the most of each other,

compulsion being the only crime

and love, no more than the aftershocks of lust.

In the morning, again, I can occupy the square

or stroll to the harbour, where boats lie in wait.

10. THE RAINY SEASON

The umbrella twists in my hands.

I remember Charleville, laughing

as spices intensify, brought out like rats,

as drumming on tin roofs compels me

to seek out the Priestess of the Silver Lizard.

Last time, she pressed a bone-charm into my palm

and made me kiss the ground she had walked on.

I did it for fun, because reality’s hard

to appropriate here, and there’s no harm in extremes

when you’re already exiled, hurled from the Heavenly Script

and marooned on an alien shore like Hannibal Lecter

at the end of Silence Of The Lambs, when he strolls in his sun-hat,

anticipating dinner… once, I did it to feel real,

chasing black moons and white, invoking the Double-Wanded One

in a council flat in Clapton, with at least one woman who’s dead,

with whom I slept, half-willingly then, but my regrets died with her

and those escapades with the balding poet of flowers

were his, not mine. Il est un autre.

What I'd rather do instead, from the fumaroles of my heart

is share a spliff, then persuade her to wrap

those long brown legs around me –

anything’s possible, all things permitted,

her pet snake might bite me, but I’ll come back to life,

the black cock doesn’t die, the void on the Other Side

redeems all madness and reflects our séance words.

Voodoo... the propitiation of those ashes

scattered on a football pitch, or over a hill,

or left in a box in the boot of a car

in response to a letter from the crematorium.

Voodoo, gilding night with black grease...

in the rainy season, how I twirl my umbrella,

twisting with the revellers, like the moon in its motion.

11. NIGHT

So sudden, more sudden

than in streets besieged by hyenas

of a rock-clinging city;

here, dusk’s velvet appears in the air,

scents thicken, birds block out the sun,

insects change tone, lizards change colour.

In an hour, with gentle insistence, it’s night.

So much depends upon the phases of the moon.

At new moon, everything is shadow-wrapped.

Idols keep counsel in the temples.

The city’s women dream in red zigzags.

At full moon, spices are golden,

all wombs are lit from within.

The drift-net of moonlight draws strange fish from the harbour.

I lie awake, listening to the drum-beat

from the temple opposite – in the end,

I just can’t let it happen without me

and I leave my bed, get dressed

to join the celebration, white as the full moon’s disc

in the precincts of obeah, welcomed for my strangeness,

immune from risk, because I’m sure that death

is about to happen, which is why I’m here.

And I dance through the chocolate-cream night,

surrounded by masks, kept rhythmic by white rum

as the moon anoints me, on the far shores of life.

12. THE LAST DICTATION

… but boredom sent its legions of woodworm

to rot the fabric of my brain.

I began to hallucinate, see things that could have been there.

I sweated under netting, like a crab in a basket,

knowing just one denouement.

I lay in the arms of a hired anima

and, eroded by her sweat, became more humble than a flea.

Foul smells exuded from the sepses of my dreams.

My memory sent demands in snipped-out newsprint.

I was alone on the wide wide sea, on land.

Was it because I botched the ritual

by stepping forward at the wrong time?

Have I been in the wrong time since,

expelled from the temple of my only true life?

These were the thoughts I thought

beneath the palms,

in the shaded alleys of Aphinar.

So I died. Not suicide, no reason for that –

I died. Or rather, I became dead. The last decision!

Time buckled. I learnt the meaning of Aphinar

and sit here, in river mist,

completely paralysed, like Merlin

in the temperate forests of my native land.

I can’t lay claim to memory, I can’t lay claim to my self,

what was that anyway? A juju on a pole,

an idol, Lord of the Flies,

or a pig that ran with a spear through its side

to the cliff, and over. It had to go.

But the aftermath is this – I am still, here,

watching the dust-cloud of my bones grow finer.

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