Place legends

For Richard LannoyMother GoddessPepper vines ring the jackfruit treethat is her shrine. She claimstributes of colour: indigo is hers,and saffron, and carmine..The rain has washed her altar.You cannot see the blood that quither veins when the storm-god's iron macesplit her head, pinned and broke her arms..Her stone skin breathes, sweats, watchesover anthill Harappas. It is not blind,this torso tapering to a cleftbetween child-wide hips..I do not deceive myself.She grows inside me..Hero Stone.Stone smeared with vermilion,the raddled god stands guardover furrows where dead cities sleep..Once it was blood, still warmfrom his victim's pierced abdomen,that anointed him..One hand carries a drawn sword,the other dips out of sightbehind the relief of the horse.Perhaps that hand, surreptitious, feelsfor what the rustic sculptordid not carve:.his testicles, twin planets that the godis afraid will withdraw into a cleft,twin planets without which he cannot ride..ANOMALIES.Find me a tailor whose needles can mendthe sky's ripped tent.Or find me a mimic who can reportthe taste of sugar on his dry tongue..I was a simple basket-makeruntil, one day, a lion roaredthrough my mouth and my fingers bentinto claws around the cane..The lin has now learned to cleave and reinthe rattan staves to fit a bright ringin his head: the lion has learnedto finger a rosary, wear a green robe..He is turning into a saint, this lion.He is learning to weave the perfect basket,a basket that can hold.the water that homes in on thirst..TREASURE MAP WITH NO SPOT MARKED "X".Master of first drafts,mason of untrowelled walls,frugal householder,he hoards the coinage of poems.Circling the ruins, you hunt for his lostclearing house of fonts,chase the smell of his clay horseswith patents..The original minotaur, he bellows,savage in a labyrinth of versions.A magneto coiled in his own rage,he melts the hall of mirrors you've devisedto catch him, retreats chafing from your locksmith gaze.You'll never tell concave from convex in this hellof inversions. I tell you, wherever you lookis the wrong place..The camera lucida moves to screen him.Slashing through its jammed celluloid,you hope to grab the missing guru, the stable truthmetallic behind the moving frame.The projector, agape, spews reamsof looped film at you: a mujahid machine gunclipping out magazinesof staccato laughter..He has married a sleeping audience,turned projectionist, mixed up the reels,escaped among the garbled images.You docket the proof to build a caseof polygamy: Garbo, nautilus, carbon, woodrose.But when it's time to pin the blame,turn your satchel inside outand you'll shake loose only shadows..His trademark. Next, with vetch and kale,blue-green travellers' tales, he sowsa garden on the beach.Caretaker of crumbling manuscripts, he needsneither cartridges nor identity cards:he is the turnings of the maze,the flickering instants on the screen.You are the catatonic, he the genius:.he masks himself as you, you face yourselfas him. Kabir weaves a shawlwith no edge: the horizonis his garden's boundary..THE GRAMMARIAN'S MARRIAGE POEM.The most beautiful is the objectwhich does not exist– Zbigniav Herbert: 'Study of the Object'.I..The most beautiful bride is she who does not exist,she who bears no heroes, who carries no firewood:.the classical absence pinned with jasper brooches,she who is hope, the high-strung trope.of an extinct rhetoric, her limbs fragile as hieroglyphsthat I must collect with arms thrown wide.as metal detectors. She is a puzzle that I mustassemble into a body of coherent evidence..II..The most beautiful bride is music, not sculpture:she will wear flowers of water in her hair.and sew garlands at nightfall from fistfuls of corn,gather splashes of stars at her wrists..In the wilderness of speech, she will be my farewellto the sins of too much talk, too much prayer;.in a high-walled town on a plain flat as a palm,she will absolve me of all my crazed pieties.of hindsight. She will be the rain of gracebursting from the pods of the wishing tree..III..She is a sphinx, the most beautiful bride.Defying the logic of her own riddles,.she will relay me from cuneiform to runic,cursive to blackletter. So copied from hand.to hand, version to version,the words of my charter are amended:.I will always be other than I am,a translation of the original text of the tribe.burnt in sacked cities, buried with jewel-hoards,torn apart by ravening wolves..IV..She crafts me on her parchment sheaves:I am no territory but only borderlines.born of her artifice. She writes me even as I writethis marriage poem for her.and I climb out of the dark nightof her beloved body, the most beautiful bride.