The World Museum of Peppers
The World Museum of Peppers is in quite a small building
in a village, difficult of access, in the Pyrenees,
and is very proud of itself, announcing ‘a unique experience
that will alter your view of the world around you’.
It contains a large number of peppers, all dried, and in
a rainbow multitude of colours, carmin, crimson,
canary yellow, green as rainforest, and it also contains a map,
and on that map the whole world is depicted.
But each country is given the amount of space appropriate
to its production of peppers. Without going into tedious detail,
perhaps it suffices to say that the United States is cut sharply
down to size while its impoverished southern neighbours
gain size and respect. A handful of small Indonesian islands
prove competent to handle the whole of Russia, should they
ever be called upon to do so; Britain, of course, diminishes
to near invisibility, and I cannot see Iceland at all.
The map is in colours almost as vibrant as the peppers,
and we emerged from the museum to an altered world
where more value seemed placed on the soft, the squashy,
colours vibrating on the tongue, a world of dance and music.
Yes of course, trade and coloniality are behind all this,
but it is possible to forget all that for a moment
in a small village, the name of which I have forgotten
but which is the proud home of the World Museum of Peppers.
Hecate
‘I saw her again last night’
She was in Lightless Alley, amid the garbage skips
and potholes, dead violets in her hair,
fingering burnt dreams, a looseness at her hips.
Her eyes were dark as midnight, her arms so bare
I could see moonlight through them, and she spoke
a silent language that used no keening breath.
As she bent to her tasks unnumbered, the joke,
I saw, was on the living, for she knew only death
amid the syringes and phials, the stark remains
of nights of cold abandon. Just a child
of misery and ivory, dancing arabesques of drains,
amid all the glory we’ve defiled.
And she said her name was Hecate, goddess of the night,
mad and forever young, on a foreign shore
on the edge of limbo, on the verge of sight,
her shoulder-blades pointing to the deep earth’s core.
Mars, Phobos, Deimos
Mars, the god of war, is followed through the universe by his twin moons,
the hounds of fear and terror, Phobos and Deimos
Mars is now mined to its core
the vast glowing space-drills
never stop, never slow; demand
is insatiable: uranium, iron,
the rarest of rare metals, some never
seen elsewhere; raw materials
for brake pads, satellites. The god
of war is fostering his own.
Phobos is one huge strip mall;
everything you could possibly want
is here – electronics, clothing, games,
McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Greed,
Costa Coffee, all the brands now
banned earthside, all discounted –
from what, nobody knows. The hound of
fear now tells us what we need.
Deimos is dark, except for the red lights
of the observation towers
glinting in the wild blackness, overseeing
the worst of criminals in chains
(or so they say); but who can tell what is
locked up by the hound of terror;
who can say, any more, who is or who is not
a terrorist. Except by their remains.
Re-Education
in Xinjiang and elsewhere
You may dance your colourful dances,
twirl strange batons, flail the sky,
stamp hallowed ground with boots of leather,
sound depths in a consecrated cry.
You may sew rubied embroidery
to clothe against the winter’s long song,
pick out old harmonies on flutes of iron
accompany yourselves on pipe and gong.
You may send your children out to the round tent
where they will perform the adult rite
to the tune of birds with curved, ferocious beaks
who teach them the lasting lore of the fight.
All this you may do as you have done
in the centuried past; but you may not
challenge the power of State or minion
by slightest tittle or faintest jot.
And when we bring paying crowds to see
quaint ceremonies, buy trinkets of cheap gold,
you will smile and caper to tunes
not of your own choosing, nor known of old.
And then you will enter the dull classroom
and learn by rote our version of your history
where the plants have no piquancy, the trees
no shape, the forest floor no mystery.
And afterwards there will be work – the mines,
the factory – and you will make staples of fear
that mock your liberty, enact your dispossession,
and you may be at home; anywhere but here.
Silver Hearts
we called them silver hearts
we used to see them running
racing flowing
an undulant underworld
through and among the wreckage
we never saw them clearly
the silver glint perhaps
a drop of red
though there was no forage
no carrion no sudden kill
we used to still see them
even after the anaesthetol
though they were never still
a solid flow of liquid
silver sheens uncounted
at what we would still call night
though there was no longer night
just a shuddering dusk
we imagined them
imageless free
they roamed amid the fallen
cupolas of nameless theatres
the harbour’s detritus
the refuse-stricken nightclubs
where once we’d danced
once we followed them
until wilder creatures
reared in the darkness
blank-eyed and trembling
and we retreated to our huts
once maybe our hearts
were silver we thought
but now they are exiled
flowing along a land
merciless and free
Extreme Difficulties associated with the Gilli-Fruit
Yes, you are right; the gilli-fruit, also known as the fruit of heaven,
or the soft grenade (that is a loose translation) is indeed
the supreme delicacy of our region, which is why our masters
have sought over the centuries to suppress it by word and deed.
But now the fruit is rare. To grow it successfully you need an orchard
of at least four hundred mui-li, and land is scarce now that vast hotels
have o’erspread (you do not mind a soupçon of poetic diction?)
our prairies, silenced forever our diamond-crusted temple bells.
And then there is the picking. The gilli-tree has thorns of a sharpness
that daunt the unwary, and thus is required the manufacture of thick
clothing, the gloves, the helmets, the masteolets to protect the skin,
an artisanal craft now under constant threat from the universe of brick.
And even then, the branches can only be shaken; they grow too dense
for each fruit to be handled. So they fall (as, perhaps, do we all,
they say in the old religion) and then there needs to be netting,
particular, resistant, not to be found in the new shopping mall.
And how to cook the gilli-fruit? This is the subject of many
a weighty tome, but most agree on five days of marination, followed
by a resting period at precisely fifty-three degrees on our old scale
and even after that, each fruit needs to be precisely hollowed.
And to do all this requires intensive labour for little remuneration;
indeed, our masters accuse us, claim that the production of the gilli
involves slave labour; we, of course, have it otherwise and speak
of traditional crafts, resistance to consumerism’s endless folly.
You would like a taste – of course you would! But sadly, the season
is over – it lasts only for two weeks during the rainy season, when
the shukla winds blow, and humidity is of exact compass; perhaps
it is uncertain here when those circumstances will arise again.
Sacred Country
The path cuts and blurs
woodquake
a litter of appearances
torn dress stabbed with light
hung from the shoulder
over the shoulder lies
the dead path
the dead follower
hunched and lunging
over vanishing terrain
come to the woods
come to the graveyard
follow newspaper
chase Alice
who is chasing you
behind you
always behind you
stab of the wood
burning jackets
evidence of light and death
time is shadowed loss
a life twice lived
abandoned
like empty clothes
beside a sunken road.