Various Asian Poems

by John Bennett
　

Hypothesis: dreaming as an aerial view of the body

I write from nowhere, in the air.

I write in the sky from boredom or beauty

or because it's so easy to concentrate

on the extraordinary surface, the blank sheet

of paper washing nervous water runs, splayed

ends, crocodile tail ridges, serpent salt trails.

Saliva wells in my mouth, nostalgic for flow

as synapses terminate in red dust.

Nothing's happening on the lizard-dry skin.

Time has disappeared into the past

leaving signs of erosion, some form of evolution

no longer anaerobic exposed to ochre fossil colours,

any trace of civilisation obliterated by geomorphic process.

Lake Eyre's heritage colours have a touch of toxic bloom.

After rains, miles of pocket lakes leak currents

of chlorophyll down the leaf's yellow veins.

Form reproduces itself in cloud reflections, frozen waves of salt

multiplying a mesmerising horizon an inventiveness of immensity

along plains of desolation unimagined by the Greeks,

only pink lines of road appear to give a civilised perspective

until you realise that civilisation is a culture in touch

with the land, and how these custodians had somehow

as their painting confirms, an aerial perspective.

There’s no obituary, the red fades to everlasting blue.

I request the flight-path from a stewardess

who brings an invitation. I time my entrance

for Uluru, shake hands with the pilots, take a seat,

note the autopilot movement, the video monitors

and disappointing forward view. Clouds cling 

above the monolith forming a screen.

"It's often like this" the pilot says, then

hints at some mysterious mechanism at work.

My destination, Kelantan, they called ‘a backward state’.

The co-pilot championed Ipoh, his home town,

I remember for some of the world's worst toilets.

Challenged, he claimed the best brothels and restaurants.

They were the state's success stories, gung ho for progress

and subsidies, bristling at mention of logging and the Penan,

repeating Mahahtir's point about the right of indigenous people

to belong to the twentieth century, as if choice is available.

We argued, they sent me back to my seat. The Dutch

turned their backs on the primal red waves that pull

the Great Sandy Desert across the continent, as we left the coast

estuaries then tentative islands re-appeared and from the map

I guessed we were crossing a claw of Cape Leveque

snaring sea-green daydreams and advertisements

of alcoholic torpor, perfumes and the exact time

in a country animated by light while empires plunder night.

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Listening in English

              Kota Bharu,

Catriona approached me on the Sultan's Jetty

wanting help prizing the lid off a jar of marmalade,

tasting the sweet orange off her fingers,

chattering wildly, withdrawal symptoms -

her first conversation after a year's abstinence.

Her language is bent out of shape, she's been

teaching English too long. It's become sculptural,

confusing, self-conscious and sub-conscious

uttering fragments for pleasure - "the golden skin

of the river" in a twangy hard-to-place voice.

We watch day close down together. It seems just

about the start of monsoon, a tarred and tattered sky

advances in pursuit of a cold wind as if a window’s

just been opened banishing the fervent heat.

The molten river flows a lava of retracting light.

Conversation is an art of context, timing, interest,

we practise dancing our ebb and flow

but our walk on parts suffice, the river

is the drama, sparking silver on the fountains

playing from bamboo pipes that dredge the bed.

"Everything is impermanent", she says simply

as she carefully separates the damp

black wings of her umbrella,

borrowed from a Buddhist monk

(pronounced with a wonky O).

We walked back along the bank,

greedy for the alchemy of light,

she's heading back to the Thai monastery

then returning home to New Zealand

to what she's been missing - green apples.

We took tea and questioning in the joss house,

Guinness bottles held pride of place

in a dark grimy shrine of uncertain allegiance.

We walked back through the square where

the British executed terrorists, a generation back.

Malleable light skinned the palaces

and solid yellow building being renovated

Japanese headquarters during the war, beautiful

compared to the concrete city risen around it.

She hates the new, "You wouldn't recognise Chang Mai."

The city is saved by small details: a bamboo bird cage,

advertisements painted onto the bamboo blinds.

Seeing English again, she reads the odd language aloud.

I thanked her for increasing my potential audience, but warned

of the dangers: homogenisation; monthly languages becoming extinct.

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Killing Time 

their mouths ooze saliva into a world endlessly alive

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A Short Tour of Heaven

Jul, Pangloa Island, The Phillipines

I've found an island off an island lying off an island,

bancos nose ashore at dawn to rendezvous

with an old man burdened by scales. He weighs

the catch, balancing tiny fish against iron weights.

Children appear pushing pigs and cows into the sea,

a man scrubs his fighting cock, breasting the waves

its bronze feathers squeeze the light like armour.

I share my beach with an agile oriole ardently feeding

on insects in the talisay tree losing large red leaves,

two orb spiders are left holding either end. On the ebb

the woman employed to clean the beach appears,

the seaweed's saved and spread across the fields,

she gathers leaves dropping round me. I motion to take

her picture, she shakes her head. I smile, I totally agree.

Dauis, Pangloa Island

Escaping Magellan's death, survivors tacked around

returning later to unload the sacrament onto this promontary

where the dead were already congregating. Using taxes 

they massaged the earth's crust balancing the spoils

into belfries floating over the rug of coconut palms.

I almost genuflect in the heavenly chorus of sparrows

echoing to the golden ceiling in need of repair

The faithful bow in martyrdom beneath the candle-lit

statue of the Virgin. Her miraculous powers

tear across the dotted line of pre-Hispanic anything.

I lift an awkward wooden cover set into the altar,

from the lip of the well bunches of angels peep

over flushed cardboard clouds welling like tears

down a swollen reflection jamming the rock, my dim face.

The Chocolate Hills, Buenos Aires, Bohol Island.

Mysteries are rare and to be relished in their season.

I'm pleased experts are still arguing haycock hills,

marine limestone and a spade of impermeable clay

or legacy of theories, a giant's tears falling for a woman.

The mists start lifting, I drop from the observation deck

as a rainbow hoops the hills ranged neatly, like

rich kids’ burial mounds patched with teddy-bear fur.

I circle my own hill, sunbirds singing in my ear,

searching for a slippery trail trace sneaking up

through the briars and sawgrasses. I get to be solitary

with a sodden shirt and lacerations, marooned

on a small mountain advertising a view of the sun's

soft vibrations on a thousand hills; the view repeated

as in a kaleidoscope, the monsoon late, still green.

Return to Jul

On the swaying roof of a local bus I’m squashed

between sacks of cassava and corn, crates of beer,

trussed pigs and a turtle I tread on accidentally.

I'm a prince or politician waving back to the children

who yell out ‘Americano. Americano’. The campaign trails

through cool mahogany, rainforest remnants from Eden

adjusting to settlement. Rice paddies reflect a faint watermarked sky

and rough jerry-built mountains; the road binds

the copper-green Loboc used by Coppola in Apocalypse Now.

The grandest structures are not ordinary banks or insurance

offices but churches. The bells clang bronze for virgins

dressed in Sunday best assembling near the Compact Site

facing my island, locked into the thick blue concentrate

by bands of gold. My caption would read - A first mistake.

The temperature of light, Jul

I've spent the last two hours of my life paying attention

to the seam of sea and sky, an equation in flux

redrawing the coastlines of Bohol, Negros and Cebu,

In fact, our falling star has set the sea on fire,

or else solar incandescence is leaking east of Cebu.

I'm an intoxicated eyewitness unable to digest the light

of every wavelength, so it seems whiteness is finally repulsed.

What work does the word God do for this mystery?

A silver moon entices the nocturnal grid of sonorous stars

each with their own transient reasons and seasons.

As Alpha Centauri burns light fused before my birth

the sea gnaws its limit and the first cock crow of non-stop

night is heard, art tries to feed this yawning mouth of heaven.

Is there really time for speechless sleep?

The reef, Jul

As the procession of fishing boats glides home

I wade into an ebbing milky sea and once overboard

row my arms backwards, I'm blinded by the day's

dazzling parabola opening from the edge like a can.

Are there challenges in heaven? A kilometre later I roll over

face down like a dead man with no name - just a pair of eyes

attached by breathing tube to bird breaths of blue sky.

The magnified spectacle vivid as fever demands attention,

starfish drape the monoliths and fleecy forms,

two thousand species conspiring to diversity. Each corner

checks an immediate horizon promising pearls or parrots,

butterflies and angels in small sizes and carnal colours.

The sizeable are dynamited. What could we learn in heaven?

Crowns of thorns hug the reef I'm shipwrecked on.

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Expatriate hoax

for makeup and die in a white cotton shirt with stains.

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Uprising

                        Sarawak               

                24 october

There's this towering tree, the waving canopy,

me and the force-fed light becoming confused

as birds fly their final sorties for the day.

It's another green world suspended mid-air ,

plants feed on plants, detritus is compost

working hurriedly in the one hot wet season

that bandages the round edge of the world.

How to be here, beyond the relief of escaping

the leeches, the mosquitoes, the heat?

Cooling mind drifts across the succulent sea.

                25 October

As light infiltrates I begin my move into the suburbs

of dripping trees. At a crashing noise I look 

for gibbons in the tree tops, (eyes are a godsend

but the Penan use their ears in the forest),

it was another leaf falling through the stories.

The jungle exerts a dark green pressure, slowing

the descent of light by pith, pulp and ripened leaves,

Crash - this time a falling branch hits the ground

a few feet away. Now I believe in the real dangers,

worse than snakes or poisoned darts from a blowpipe.

The weakness I feel is the strength of the forest,

its roots trip you, its streams slow you down,

not hot this early but humidity is on max.

After a few hours I turn back, having chalked up

one scarlet minevet, a couple of squirrels

and a spectacular fall. Exhausted, I climb the rungs

one by one to my refuge, slump against the trunk

and concentrate on the slight breeze drying my body,

my mind blank, watched over by feeding flowerpeckers

accepts an expansive sleep, without one wall anywhere.

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Lights in the sky

all over again, drifting downstream towards the sea.

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Monkey Business

                        Kuala Selangor

The happy yellow train welded to a tractor

pulls excited trippers up the hill

for the view from the district officer’s house.

The Straits of Malacca sway blue with fishing boats

heard this morning chugging through the forest,

unseen because the mangrove boardwalk has rotted through.

The Malay/Portuguese/Dutch/British fort is a ruin

overwhelmed by tall spidery towers receiving

a flood of foreign sounds and images.

Grey-leaf monkeys with dark capes of hair

clamber the structures above a man in a white tunic

who waves a stick to keep them off his papaws.

They dance the barbed wire fence and leap

into the gang on the bank where youngsters

tackle each other, tumbling down the grassy slope.

In the momentum of energy without paradox

I take a dancer’s imagination, swing through

the canopy on a bright orange baby velcroed

to mother by miniature fingers and anticipate

that what’s real might ripen in the noticing:

loud shadows, the wilderness of a kite-strewn sky,

wary of the pale page or canvas deflating

the taste of roasted nuts or colour of mangoes

ready to eat on the roadside stall.

What it is like to be a monkey is as unknown

as what it is like to be a bat or, for that matter,

an artist who is absolutely devoted to humans.

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Flying Home

like lead paint until pipes and tanks intervene.

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