Three poems from
Cry Wolf
(Templar Poetry, 2012)
Winner of the Straid Award, 2011
by Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton
Edison Peña Runs The Six Miles
There are places in the Atacama desert the rain has never been to.
The rain doesn’t know the inside of the puckered tunnels
of the collapsed mine where Edison Peña dreams
he’s eating a fist of sand. The running scene features him,
guzzling from the tap over the kitchen sink,
and his wife, with washed hair, reminding him there are glasses
and fondness; then a close up of himself
forever finishing that bedrock and rocksalt bite.
When he wakes up, he’s still a lump in the gut of a whale
that won’t cough up. A knot in the throat of a world
that swallows hard. His body is eating itself
half a mile down the driest place on earth.
Time stews slowly in the dumb tum of the mine.
Time has nowhere to go in a tumor of rock
on a spoonful of tinned fish and a sip of bad milk every other day,
and drills holes in a man that it fills with dross.
So Edison Peña gets up and runs up and down the doltish pit,
till he reckons he’s done the six miles
from the mouth of the mine to the mouth of his woman
waiting at the door. Then he stops with his face to the wall.
Ivanhoe Prospections
To the people of Monywa, Burma
He held her by
he did not
and kept
on the open pit
in the abused
she’d known
when the water
her left hand
the hand
need
to strike
an eye
over her shoulder
the hunch of copper streaks
side
f the hills
the way
of the river well
did not run
bright blue
before it was dragged away for these prospections
she’ll be fine
if she
but remembers
on the furtherance of great things there is a tab
she’ll be
safe
she just needs to
let the other hand heal in the cast of this new
enormity
keep
her eyes down
her back
loaded
her feet moving
away from the
smoking
shacks
her mouth shut
in the presence of uniforms
Love’s Prospects
Yours is the prospector’s love.
I am sluiced and raced and winnowed.
You gold-rush through my gangue.
The home-coming of the surveyor:
to rest on the cadastral map
where his metes-and-bounds are tangible.
Furlongs of dross and lode,
the prospects of your love.
Welcome to Eritrea
In support of Helen Berhane and the prisoners of conscience still held in
shipping containers in Eritrea.
This is where they pack me up.
Time says nothing: clamped and gagged,
it lets my pulse come back with a rusty jerk,
the taste of alloy. Here is here
and here, a caulked tin ventricle,
where I clog the arteries of my country.
This is where I cocoon in my own filth.
I slowly cook during the day, and go
straight from the oven to the freezer
in one dish. This metal container
is no metaphor. I have been preserved.
I am being shipped without moving,
a crouched rat rotting in cargo sweat.
Welcome to the compound, you dissident.
I hear the knuckling down,
the stiff fouling: there are other rats,
my neighbours, my incommunicado kin;
dragged out to the latrines once a day,
then shoved back into their airtight cans,
or butted under ground.
It’s time out until each one denies
or dies, as we cringe, trussed-up,
each in our shrunk dimension, where
we’ll manage our disfigured oxygen,
we’ll fold and wait like foetuses,
learn to breathe with the mind of a beetle.
This blind tank amplifies the swearing,
all the bloody clang of pow. This new beat
sticks in your metronome, it drums your brain
like live surgery. Their loud slogans teach you
what comes next, tattooing it into your mettle.
Soon you will not recognise yourself.
Darkness drinks the darkness of our hair
till we glow in an orange halo and toothless
from this sun theft, shackled in a three by three
fixed thirst. We monologue to shrinking
walls that talk back in our face.
One would have to lose the thread of days,
to loosen oneself from this raw drag.
Outside we stood purposeful and wonderfully made;
we developed in brightness,
our souls responded to increments of light.
We, good for a pulp.
The embryo goes to the ground.
We are ripening for history,
and the day outside days
Full Circle
On Second Circle, a film directed by Alexander Sokurov and written by Yuri Arabov.
“Men become mortal the night their fathers die” , from ‘Moonbright’, Dannie Abse.
The man slogs through the snow, the wind knuckles the man.
The blizzard blinds him; he crouches, bows his head
to warm his throat. His hat falls, the drift blows icedust
down his neck. If this was just a film he could give up,
die in the snow. But this is live. Siberia on his knees.
The only way to make it to the house is through the cold.
There are different sorts of cold. One stays out
with the snow, the stopped tractor, the burst pipes,
the ruined barn and workshops. The other begins indoors
with the bed, a cabinet, a table and two chairs,
a leak over the two ring cooker. The leaching fridge.
A bath filled with weeks of unwashed stuff. The grime,
the unsafe switches, naked bulbs. Rust, rot, grit, mould.
The bed is urgent, as here is where the old father
has died and is found when the son comes in.
The son first sees the feet, then the absentmindedness
and rigor of the face. Shaking the bed won’t raise the dead,
and his own breath just clouds the room. The metal
frame of the bed is a fact. The cruddy mattress is a fact.
The facts do not alter while one sits in the room next door.
Sobbing, if one can sob, does not reverse what’s done.
Nothing ends with death, except that one life. The body is here,
stiff and bare under the sheet, and needing handling.
It has been hollowed. Sparse as a fallen bird. The room reeks.
Who will handle the body lying here without a father?
The son’s now at the front and time shoots straight.
Things are black or white in winter, with a flush
of red from the midnight sun on a side wall by the stairs.
Something, maybe wind or ice, clangs through
the structure of the place. Snow high at a standstill.
One makes efforts not to pray. We are mumbling to the cold.
The body has to be washed, dressed in a decent shirt,
issued a certificate, measured for the box. The white ones
are for brides and more expensive. All this takes time.
The son is at the front, making decisions under 300 rubles,
looking through the old man’s vests for cash to pay
the funeral officer, opening the door to the embalmer,
who will do the job much more quickly with the help
of his two sons (will they one day embalm their father?),
while the deceased man’s heir squats near the sink,
seeking the numbness of a drip, a rhythmical opening
and closing of the hands. The embalming’s done.
It’s made things worse, and sleep in peace impossible.
We tell the cold outside all we should have said to the father
and how unprepared we are for any death or duty.
He’s got the coffin now but no clue how to go about it
and the funeral officer absolutely wants socks on the dead.
Is he an idiot and can’t even see a man can’t go like that?
The son takes off his own. She thinks he’s a git,
but he insists he can do it, can put them on his father by himself.
It’s obvious he’ll need the slippers, not the shoes. Is he asleep
or going for a walk? They push flowers round his head.
Taking the coffin out and down the stairs is ridiculous,
a job of awkward furniture for three-strong with three failures.
We get spared the committal, more cold mutter under one’s breath.
Only once the body’s gone can the son go through belongings:
a tin box with odd buttons, pills, a badge, safety pins,
a cigarette holder from the war, a knuckle duster.
The stench needs to be burnt, in a tall pyre, overnight.
Interim
You are getting on, and past that safe threshold
before which one takes kith and kin for granted.
I’m allowed a spell on loan to get ready for that call
letting me know something I can’t skip,
the gist of it encrypted in a bolt
and flushed 1,300 miles up northwards
as soundbites I must decipher calmly.
I will first need to consider the messenger
more carefully than I’ll need to consider you:
it is likely to be a close relation, alive and grieving.
That’ll be it, then. You, apart from you.
A final statement. A box that fails to answer,
with a name-tag stuck to rags. How utterly unnatural
this whole natural thing, this slope to chaos,
this thermodynamics second law.
I have to brace myself for the inability to run in time
to the clumsy dress rehearsal of departure,
when we rescue wasted time and love’s kissed back to life
from under the rattle of last breath.
I’ll be useless in my exile from your warm leftovers;
they’ll be too feeble in their slender leniency
of soft fruit after picking, of fish fished.
Before the prescribed deadline of bad news,
I organise my mental homages to you:
you teaching me to wash my hands professionally;
you letting go of the bike; letting go of me
at the deep end of the pool, proving that necessity
was forced be the mother of invention. You running ahead
of my dog-bitten self, incapable of facing it.
You telling me to fetch the dictionary,
and find out for myself. You, knowing every term. You,
who never had a knee for dandling, a dad after the war.
You cycling, diving, digging, reaping,
self-sufficient, by your leeks and onions,
like most things to do with you, beyond my remit,
and me standing on the side, sucking the one drop
of nectar in the throat of the honeysuckle,
and naming all things and the crack lines in between.
With this absurd mileage between you
– from whom I came-, and me –who came from you-,
how would I reach the derelict palace of you
in time for pressing any gentleness into your rigor mortis.
How does one live an orphan
and outlive the child we’ve been?
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