We have broken our oars and sharpened them into

paring knives. You remember the desert way the wind

sucked colour from the foothills, put a fluorescent eye

in the heart of the firmament. You

remember January cigarettes and January

porridge, your belly in the ocean,

how you made

lights in the heavens, augured beneath

the august sky a chord sequence and

wrote it on your palm with mud.

In mirrors, sunglasses, and sandcastles the

braying of a boar, a wildebeest, a

typewriter and a computer in a tavern,

licking port wine from their lips,

a January cigarette. Your belly

in the concert-hall.

Songs and dances in the pages of memory,

a guitar strung about your breast,

a pen, an amplifier stuck in your ear.

People in cars and on bicycles in the next room,

mothers, goose-farmers, toecutters, pneumoniacs.

Eating bananas, fried rice, January porridge,

your belly in a supermarket. Ears

living in trees, listening to telluric currents

and the new radio. Your belly on a

television.

You remember drinking crystals and coffee-beans,

two kangaroos and a hookah, stealing

a grape, a lanyard,

unclipping paper in a dream.

West of the waterways the wild city at night

congested with salads, cider, and prophylactics.

Your belly in the newspaper, your

voice becomes an antenna.

You are a mile and a league, a

pedestrian, a composer, a lunatic,

a thistle, a compost-heap, a ballroom,

a watchdog, a liturgy, a city-street,

a caldera, a

cup of soup when the wind and the steam

and the baritone voice of the

second generation are singing in gay harmony

and the dead are watching your belly

through a looking-glass.

We have broken our oars and sharpened them into

batons, and you are playing your heart,

playing your heart like kettle-drums,

playing out your life and

killing the clown.