(‘Behold your future,
newborn and weak,
like a twitching shadow
inside the shell
of the serpent’s egg’
Genevieve Clisere)
1.
A map, with crossroads cut out, a build-it-yourself-tilt-awhirl
stowed in a rented garage, Telemann pulsing from the radio
and the picture begging for a title.
Brisk as a gangster on holiday, racing gloves
slap down an attack of nerves,
probe the holes in the wall where the mural, now plundered,
once ached its primary colors.
Do as he orders, provide the clean sheets, the sad whispers,
the drugs that sometimes bring a good night’s sleep.
Others, elsewhere, take watch by shift, no rest so easy
as the plan hatching at its murderous middle.
Shadow is at wit’s end, a trick to turn heads from rain or
haunting wind, fistful of gravel pitched at the bedroom window,
two minutes to homecoming, the burglars having come and gone,
each tool wiped clean and muffled spotless in the black leather bag.
Rotten with guilt, she mourns and hides from the others,
tea kettle whistling the lost child’s name, her precious secret.
2.
Do these words mean anything to you, any personal reference,
a vacation, portfolio, love affair, cover-up, anything at all?
The man in the sunset-over-empire suit will be happy to wait,
in no hurry or none he’ll admit. His associate
stands at the corner outside, trigger-fingers compulsive
with coins, matches, moustache tips.
He too, will be happy to wait, and should the daughter
prove as lush and pragmatic as the wife,
he’ll be the one who sends the signal rhyming ‘Sumatra
moonrise’, ‘can you hear me, bluebird’, ‘the lass is safe as
houses’.
(At least for tonight.)
3.
More planning went in than was needed,
while a safe white cottage was set afloat
in its model bathtub, adrenaline greening
the drawn, eager faces.
The distant windmill ate ideas and no one once mentioned
the morality of commonplace murder.
What are the scissors up against,
where is the advocate who will mind the glue,
the fodder, the greedy mechanic unsuspecting,
the driver flirting him into an alibi as the detectives hurtle past,
radios screaming?
Eighty-eight minutes of black and white,
four of which are solid hardcore,
twenty more taken up by wit designed to mislead,
much of it murmured by a leading man whose dodgy accent
defeats geography.
The original aim took as its target some little prize,
a respite from banditry, a tug upon a peasant’s cap,
first choice of available girls.
Fanned by faulty air-ducts, Stockholm syndrome
or head cold?
4.
Here’s then temptation, slit-eyes like sundown, powder burns
on perfect fingers, the stall and creep of a third party hustler,
whose own schema is division and date-sick columns.
Too many names, an unmarked two-door revving the Jacobin
gateway, lights turning off and on in innocence that isn’t,
babysitter passed out drunk in the great man’s waxlit study.
The divers relax beyond the cable, paw it like bears drugged
on honey, dozing the winter to its broken end.
Claim the least likely motive, focus all eyes away from your own
dilation and pearl, a fin’s wide arc outside the radius of detection,
the underwater opening of silent jaws, ancient appetite in dread
return.
Locked by another’s weight, held by a killer’s broken beauty,
the spell extends its bounds well past her silence,
and drives her, angel of addiction, beast with needs, to ask:
why won’t you look back?