Where the Sun Shines Best

  ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 200

  Where The Sun

  Shines Best

  Austin Clarke

  GUERNICA

  TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2013

  For Gladys Irene Jordan Clarke-Luke, My Mother. 1914–2005

  THE YELLOW leaves are trampled over by the black

  boots of three soldiers from the Moss Park Armouries;

  in uniform, intended not to be seen, nor identified,

  for their intention and profession is to kill

  to shoot from a distance, clean and perfect

  and wipe their minds clean, erase all imperfection

  of marksmanship. War. War has been declared.

  War. It is all that’s on their minds. War;

  and the intention for war declared upon Moss Park.

  THERE ARE three other men standing as if at attention,

  though they are no soldiers; one man’s posture is stooped

  with old age, another is hampered by Saint Vitus’ Dance,

  uncertain in his balance and his gait,

  all three men, crippled civilians, taking puffs from one

  cigarette, from hand to lip, smoking their jewel of luck

  found amongst the rotting cold leaves that numb

  their fingers. A cough drop will clear their lungs,

  after each passed puff, will make them high, will turn Canada

  into Florida jaunty and warm, for five minutes, the life

  of their happiness, and clear the head, to unlock the lungs

  and watch the pure white smoke rise over their heads,

  precious as the breath they breathe in this crisp December cold.

  THEY ARE passing the stub, passing it, standing

  under the bodies of maples and the other trees,

  their names not taught in geography classes in Barbados.

  They were not names learned by rote and heart, carried

  here to this wide country of snow and wind and whiteness,

  to take pause on their daily long journey, their constitutional,

  in Moss Park, common in its uses, and users, not always swept;

  condoms, discharged bullet-casings decorating,

  in silent boasts of manhood, the shooting of anger,

  desire, hunger after the flesh of women,

  cheaper rates now that they are east of Jarvis, east of Church

  and McGill, the prices lower the farther east you go.

  I HAVE walked on these artificial, rolled-up leaves,

  long-lasting and long out-living the fall of foot and instep,

  flowers of cream plastic, a patch of two red ones,

  boasting virulence in a man who has lasted longer

  than the red and yellow fallen leaves from the trees

  whose names I do not remember.

  SQUEEZING THE last puff of joy from the joint

  disappearing like spit on the lips, they move like soldiers

  in disarray, shaken by the battle, ragged,

  marching, “Easy!”, coming in my direction.

  I can see the last spit of marijuana cigarette

  leave the lips of the man walking in fits,

  alcohol and broken legs that barely balance him, who laughs

  and jogs and plays like a doll sculpted from the two

  stick-spines of a popsicle. He spits a smouldering last blob

  of phlegm from deep inside his chest and walks

  in a straight line, leading his two companions,

  dragging his feet in the thick dying leaves.

  THE LEAVES make the same sound as the poisonous dried

  black pods of the shack-shack tree in an un-tilled field

  in Barbados. His head is cut off, beheaded suddenly

  by my window that is too small to frame his shoulders.

  No rhythm to their footsteps as they walk like three men on stilts.

  And I stand and think of popsicles and of men made of cloth

  dropped from the needle-worker’s sewing machine. And I think

  of walking in the burning sun in Old Havana,

  in a square, the playground of dictators; once; now an ordinary

  square for tourists and the poor and prostitutes; turned

  into a museum of contemporary knick-knacks and dolls,

  piece-work for Cuba’s poor and indigent, the works

  of artists, and the frustrations of poverty: row after row

  of golliwogs that stare me in the face, locked eyes of brotherhood,

  and womanhood. I am embarrassed by my pity, as the whores

  are following me, sticking to my black skin, like leeches,

  like moles sucking the pity out of my Yankee dollar bills.

  MOSS PARK Armouries where men just past puberty wait,

  their heads buried in the silken pages of the Holy Bible,

  praying for the luck of the draw and the trigger, to return

  to this park. They come from the ticky-tacky suburbs

  where identical and monotonous backyards clean as Pyrex bowls

  after cornflakes, raked clean as skeletons, as if from plague

  and household germs, and the influenza from pigs,

  and bacon at the same hour of suspended morning.

  YOUNG MEN waiting for the jet plane to Afghanistan

  where poppies are pure and stronger, from Scarborough,

  Mississauga, Don Mills and Brampton and condominiums

  in Pickering, are certain of victory: for luck in war

  is vouchsafed in beliefs, and luck of the dice, the presumption

  that race and place, country and flag, give easier growth

  to ego and hatred of men, and women, homeless and whores

  who sleep on leaves the colour of gold, on a park bench cold

  and damp, under a yellow sleeping bag, colder than raccoons

  and squirrels warm in roofs and attics where they bury

  tomorrow’s breakfast and food for the week.

  A MAN without a home, and a whore without a trick left

  in her cold skirt, lie on two benches of cement

  and wrought iron, a half-empty plastic cup of ants

  that frolic on the surface leaving their journey marked

  like lines in the middle of the palm, their horoscopes. They foretell

  the beginning of dreams, of warmth, prosperity once known

  and lived: the man was an editor, and printed stories

  of homeless men; the woman remembers days

  when her bed was warm with the body of a man beside,

  her husband.

  THREE SOLDIERS in uniform of dark green camouflage,

  one with three stripes, one with two stripes, the third with one stripe

  against him; their weapons left behind in a rack

  in the Armouries with bigger guns, automatic, to kill in the dark,

  and you don’t know you’re dead when you are dead.

  These soldiers walk like the other three men who had left

  the park before, puffed with pot, puffed with power.

  THREE SOLDIERS, unsteady on their legs, stagger in uneven step

  from the bar on Barton Street, where books of Canadian fiction once

  were born; round the corner, walking-distance

  from the Armouries. They are spinning and slipping-and-sliding

  from blowing froth from the heads of draughts — more

  than they could count — Canadian Molson’s and U.S.

  Budweiser, coming out on George Street dark as a back

  alley, desolate patch of road a few steps down

  from the Mission House which kisses Queen Street East.

>   They cross this road singing their favourite march,

  “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” as the streetcars rumble; and they

  imagine Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Canada’s enemies.

  Their arms become machine guns, and bullets fall

  out of their mouths like a stream of bulbs on a Christmas tree, rapid;

  repeating a long line of perfect aim.

  They come upon the enemy: the man sleeping,

  the camouflage of dark and yellow leaves covering

  his body not exposed under the umbrella of the night, still, breathing

  in the perfection of this black night, happiness

  and fatigue gained from his collection of four empty bottles

  drained to celebrate, and five cigarettes butted to one inch

  of their life. “Let’s scare the shit outta this fucker!

  Trespassing on our Armouries! Bringing their shit ...”

  The first attempt missed. The sole of his boot was wet,

  and it hit the cement, and fell harmless; as the pain whizzed

  through his ankle he lost his balance, and fell in the wet

  freshly-cut grass. “Get-the-fuck off! Fuckers!”

  the soldiers hissed, words boiling over like milk

  in an enamel saucepan, like spit rising in small bubbles

  in the fresh snow, like baseballs thrown at deadly speed

  in the nearby empty diamond.

  THE SOLDIER with three stripes on his shoulder ignores the woman

  at Jarvis and Queen, mistaking her limber body for a back-pack

  under a blanket in the half-darkness, in his hurry and his anger

  to land his boots, left and right in the same soft spot on the man’s

  chest. She thought she could pull a trick on this night, safe

  on the mowed lawn tucked neat inside the rectangle of fence,

  blackened iron to protect the Armouries from invading whores;

  attacking bloody beggars who cross the Rubicon,

  brown dying grass carved into paths of Xs,

  going and coming during the light of day and the unsafe

  darkness of night, asking for spare change.

  WHEN THE sun has left the skies, and stars come out

  like fugitives, you can catch them swapping their bodies for a street-

  car ticket to ride to the bars on Dundas Street,

  to wash down the peckishness in a glass of draught beer,

  in the same bar as the three soldiers, or a cup of coffee

  getting thicker and colder, held with two fingers, as if

  it is champagne, the same plastic cup I see them use

  as an ashtray then drop into the uncollected green garbage bins

  in front of my neighbour’s house, the neighbourhood dump.

  “DIRTY FUCKING shit! You fucker! How dare you

  trespass on these Armouries?” And then, in the same blackness

  of the night, he realized there were two sleeping bodies;

  three fuckers fucking with the Armouries, noticing

  the second body in the darkness, he screamed as if

  it was this ghost that frightened him. “Fuckers!”

  “Fuck-off!” the second soldier screamed, finding voice

  and bravery in the blackness of the night. There were no walkers

  of dogs peeing against a tree, just the ghosts in the shapes

  of maples; just the wail of a police cruiser going in the wrong

  direction; just the shriek of an ambulance. It was a shooting

  on Shuter. A black man. Gang-related. Related.

  It was a gangster sixteen years old, too young,

  the Law said, to show the city his face, for only his mother

  shall know, and his father, if there is a father living,

  that he is dead. “Deading,” as they say back where he originated.

  “FUCK OFF!” he says, for no words suit the venom

  in his body, only two hisses like daggers. “Fuck off!”

  And the third man, without the anger to match his manhood,

  to clothe his manhood in, stands silent. He turns

  his face aside and says, “Pardon me,” and the next

  second all three are listening to a sound like water

  hitting the ground pounding, pounding heavy as iron.

  The sound of gushing water that could never rouse

  the homeless man from his dream.

  MOLSON’S DRAUGHT beer gurgling in his head, losing

  his balance, he led his two companions tied by the rope

  of friendship, members of the same cult and secret society,

  a brigade of violence, tied to obedience in the same drills

  of precision, standing at attention, “Left turn, right turn,

  Roy-yal Sal-lute ... Pre-sent ... Ho!” the training manual

  gave the words and drills, to inject bravery into the veins,

  to squeeze bravery into violent vengeance mixed

  with the corpuscles already there, floating in the weakened

  red liquid that has turned pink.

  “O, MARY, mother of God, I put my life into your two hands!”

  “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,

  I entrust my life!” And the haunting voice spreads

  the hoarse comfort of the blues, “Bring back, bring back,

  bring back my bonnie to me, to me ...” without weapons

  tied to their thighs, with no hand grenade, small

  as a pineapple rotting on the stem, the size of a testicle,

  manhood shrivels to the size of the balls of the sleeping man.

  WITHOUT GUNS and hand-grenades, wearing their mufti-clothes,

  blue jeans, blue t-shirt and black leather-and-canvas boots

  tipped in steel, they came like sneaks upon the man

  chloroformed in sleep, hard concrete for bed springs and bed bugs

  from the halfway house. But the soldiers’ words are bullets,

  the cold steel of drawn bayonets stern as the iron

  painted black on three sides of the Armouries, and keep

  this homeless man from dreaming that the concrete of the park

  bench is a soft made-up bed, enticing as a mattress

  standing on display in a show window of a second-hand

  store selling bayonets and goggles, swords and rifles,

  helmets and boots from wars in foreign countries

  the soldier could not find on a map of the world,

  because he did not reach grade five in school, and was not

  yet born when wars were fought and lost, in foreign countries

  painted red in The Times Atlas of the World;

  no geography in his head.

  SURROUNDING HIM is his silent audience; tongues

  cut to the stump, silenced and dumbfounded, unable

  to tell their opinions, so speechless they have become

  witnesses of the spectacle, in the arena, sitting on cushions

  softer than the yellow maple leaves broken at the spine

  and the ruptured veins, behind thick curtain and white

  plastic blinds matching the colour of the television screen

  reflected on its white face, intolerant of the blackness outside;

  from three floors above the leaves in townhouses patterned

  after England, Victorian and Georgian; their windows sealed

  against the cold draught of the night, and the dust of summer,

  to escape the smudge of life swirling around them,

  as they fence themselves behind wrought iron, sturdy

  as prison cells, in carbon copy of the barricade of iron

  running round three sides of the Armouries to keep bums

  and the sex-workers and homeless men hiding beneath heaps

  of maple leaves rotting side by side with used condoms,

  cigarette butts and chewing gum.

  I ST
AND in this silence; in these shadows thrown from the Armouries

  and the cannon sweating in the silent dew, coming alive

  in the purr of this soldier’s anger and fantasy; this cold

  morning with the sun breaking in a soft cool kiss, a mist,

  a cloud, weak enough to raise an aura from the dew on iron.

  I hear the language that bathes his quarry clean,

  words flung at the man without a home,

  to wake him from his wet cold blanket; I sit,

  try to stand, and count the number of times

  the pendulum of the boot takes aim and lands in the stomach

  of the sleeping man.

  THE FLAG of Ontario, its Crown, its Cross of St. George,

  three branches, from the maples in the park, and the trillium flower,

  once silk and white, delicate and sensual,

  covered in myth and superstition, not to be touched,

  flies regal from my neighbour’s second floor

  window, guarding her roof, flapping in four

  different kinds of wind in hurricane, storm and flood

  and pouring rain that makes me think of Barbados,

  fifty years ago, when the chattel house made from grey

  unpainted deal board and sheets of galvanized tin

  the colour of the skies when rain is falling, and the coral stone

  were dumped in backyards, by the side of the road, hidden

  in the gutters and cane fields, and the population bathed

  in tears of blood, cried “Help!”; saw Sodom and Gomorrah,

  moaning “Help we, O Lord, O Jesus Christ! Help we!”

  THERE IS no sign of the three men smoking under the maples

  in this morning’s bright sun, now that the leaves have changed

  from gold to brown and some have turned to garbage

  irrefutable as condoms, and all of a sudden, I am not here, not here