TWISTER

Damian Garside

Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain has time to cool, —
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
     Emily Dickinson

This is exactly what Fukuyama does. He takes the modern American bourgeois and places him into a mythical “beginning of history” and surprise, surprise, he eventually arrives, after millennia of struggle and searching, at the “end of history” in modern America.
    Andy Blunden ‘Fukuyama on Trust and Recognition’

Ginger my table with Florida orange
Messrs Whitman and Ginsberg

once
we all dreamt
  (a rare human dream)

of a power, a
civilization

to take us to a place
beyond time’s terrors

born out of
gold stampedes, tides
of settlement

      exploration.

Winter
wraps its icy coils around
the heartland
like freshly milled rolls
of industrial strength wire

tough-breeding soil in this
coal-miner county
who once dug tunnels deep beneath Vicksburg
and cemented the strength of
a fluttering blue line.

But we
are here for training
not for history
here
for a slice of the wisdom
of corporate America

following the river that fed simmering
steel cauldrons

we nose into Newark, sun-blazing day down
in the factory-fresh city
head up the turnpike to hit
the Big Apple

   steel and glass bending towards the heavens
   borne on the convenience of ever- ready dollars

before
we find ourselves hurtling out of JFK
screaming up into night , crossing vast Atlantic
running through
   (internal retrospective)

all the ins and outs
ups and
downs, tangents
and angles

sifting through all the

        ironies
        discrepancies
        fault-lines
        contradictions

in our Faustian dream.

But when the lady
from United Express
told Futhi Mbanjwa, our equity officer,
that no way she could keep her crutches
close at hand

and that, anyway, even if she did
if the plane crashes YOU won't have
time to escape

there she is sitting crying hysterically
(shrieking in the heart of an imagined fireball)

whilst the goodly hometowners, gripped by
      strange panic
stream down the ladder onto the tarmac apron
that woman’s flipped, she’s
   uncontrollable

she has raised the spectre of
disaster we never
thought about before

(If I hear another waitress say ‘you’re welcome’
I’ll puke all over the washroom floor).

   ***

What civilization
never had
at least a passing acquaintance with
genius for evil

what poem
writ-back from the margin

does not need

to collude in the project
of its own publication, dissemination, birth
and termination

bringing to the collective enterprise, the
    historical will

the forethought and
inkling of the patience of
a deadly assassin.

Those bristling bronze-badged, hulking Praetorians
we met at the airports
set so many benchmarks, achieve
so many parameters

know
in their heart of hearts (instinctively)
everything is connected:
when the centre
   goes

the rest caves
in
(though so far from the centre in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania)

O America

I came to devour you
but you fobbed me off, force-
fed me
delectable bite-sized shards

(and, whilst I was eating,
got photos of my throat from
your secret cameras amongst the stars,
similarly small as a
pinprick)

tumours the size of Hawaii
size of Alaska

floating upstream and
downstream

past Three-mile Island

(ghost dancers again, along the Susquehanna).

  ***

Loosen up, butternut, you shot-to-shit rebels
you brought a trail of diamondbacks with you
and gators for the sewers

lucky Mr. Lincoln came (hallowed be
that name)
and sent your slaver asses back
across the Mason-Dixon.

But she
who is part Cherokee, part
sidewinder herself

longs to slip through the bones in
an undisturbed patch

test uninhabitable woods for
theories of chainsaw

would twist the word
out of
its context

warp the
respectable truth as
best she knows how

(nothing proto-calypso, reggae
in those feet
which sword dance the poetry of quiet defeat)

homespun, intricate,
cleverly knit

as precise as the wiring in a backyard bomb

she closes
the page
at long last
setting softest seal on
erudite tomb.

   ***

New England Girl
I near you at last

would corner you over the Chesapeake

but first
must payback to morning for
these two good eyes

with which I am good
to watch the Eastern seaboard
roused into morning flood

watch structure sag
under weight of compression
elasticities stretched
beyond point of
return,
power of retention.

Atrocious in energy,
spiral in spirit

I sense a twister’s beginnings here
fed by the Gulf stream, awash with chaos

Voodoo Chile bombers back
from the Far East (decades overdue)
dragging the
whole Devil’s Triangle home
in their wake

back in time for cable, Rushmore, Mountain
        Dew

catch a desultory wave or two off Malibu. For
the geopolitical moment, the ocean sleeping.

   ***

Wings rippling on air,
as fluid as any metal (short
of alchemical mercury)

need to feed the fantasy;
stoke the boiler

soar
sky-greedy, hanging
by a thread
over Liberty Island
(whose muse I have in
six-inch replica)

of this rich, neon-suffused,
Manhattan skyline

expansion, contraction
are but
   two peripheral themes

down on solid ground (ground
seemingly solid)
  find ourselves
crossing Hart Crane’s bridge
(steel skies livid with
     cloud

boiling cumulus in full battle formation)

we find ourselves disembarked
down at base camp, suddenly
right in the incessant
turmoil and
frenzy of
New York at street level

staring up
at sky between parallels, walls climbing forever,

sides of the ziggurat
which (at last count)

was desperately short on holes
simply begging to be filled.

back    /     to the top

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