25 August 2013

Strange Dancers pt. 3

3. Children of Earth and Ocean



Here is a moment:

Domine in the Perhentians
An argument between the ocean and the land
A young boy watches his belly fat and his skin like
Dried coconut husks and he is in the middle of the tug
His boat is red and teal and an outboard motor is choked and ready
He kicks his legs along the measures of the ocean
Its troughs slapping against 
Grasping for the bleached wood 
He has for many summers neglected to paint
His craft is weighted and in lulling waves his eyes close.

Boxes of tangerines and coffee though he desires neither
Overweighted and enduring the tide with anchored bylines
The call to prayer rings out on the radio from
Kota Bharu but no one stops 
Women in their headscarves obedient to the trade that 
Paints the boat and fuels the motors and fills the beds 
And otherwise consumes the business of the day
The women committed to the business of the day
Scarves glittering like jewels on the arms of infrequent tourists
Pale and watching the boy fight the boat’s urge to capsize in a swell
Watching women thick of trunk load crates up narrow stairs
Wading out and back wrapped in glittering veils bearing geometric images.

There is a flicker of the daylight and
Its unquestioned ubiquity is Compromised 
All present are arrested of agency 
For a moment too brief to grasp
Amplified by the break in the sunlight the Mirage 
Rises from each cardinal point and sands rear up beneath us 
A wall of white sands our trident with entangled arms
Diatoms grazing us and lacerating our final boundary
Thrust towards the sky and below us all are
Enveloped by a cackling Mirage.

The Mirage convulses and It like the sky flickers
Grasping Itself, Its gut and like rolling dusk Its dark veneer
Lowers towards the horizon along the entire circumference of the sky
It wails and a sucking sound of such proportion so as to subsume thunder
And cracks of gunfire from belligerents unseen
Pulls our hearing outward into a reverberating vacuum.

A newly naked virgin girl spills from the black Mirage
A labial vibration ejects her as a vomitory slipstream
Into the argument between ocean and land and into the boy’s boat
Her head is wrapped with a nearly fluid film, a remnant 
The now sun-spotted constancy of the Mirage’s veil
Even as the sun raises boils on the girl’s body in her nascent exposure
Her former cohort trembling as they perceive their own exposure
Her eyes of a striate palette and flesh accompanying and they see they are
Her left iris black as the ash-speckled midnight which hems the Mirage
Her right iris the tarnished gold of our own skin beneath the fissile sun
And its nuclear gleam of white sheen of tears glinting on her corneas
Her placental veil choking her as she spits up oxygenated amniosis
It is her vestigial propriety which alienates her in this exposure
Even as to her we are endeared by the subjection we now share.

Aisha she is and a virgin with rough husked breasts
Henna'd toes in the tide in which her feet hang limply
The ocean rinses the rocks below her feet of afterbirth
Her head covered, a diaphanous gauze
Embroidered with copulating pairs of creatures
Geometric in their adherence adverse to true depiction
Her form and physique an hourglass of sun-roasted brown
Her time already internally ticking in unseen granules 
Which duplicate the boils Aisha’s youth sloughs off
Sun plays on her breasts and belly
Her limbs likewise in geometric proportion 
Like an embroidery herself along the shore on the boat where once
The replaced boy was before and perhaps in Aisha’s presence he persists.


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