Ian McBryde was born in Toronto, Canada, and has lived and worked in Australia for many years. His work has been published in England, Japan, the USA, Germany, Canada, Greece, Australia, and Belgium. He has performed his poetry in Canada, England, the USA, and up and down the east coast of Australia. Translations of his work have appeared in Greek, Spanish, and Japanese. His third collection of poetry, Flank, which includes a CD, was released in 1998 by Melbourne’s Eaglemont Press. His fourth collection, Equatorial, will be published in October 2001, by Five Islands Press. At present he is working on a new collection and recording new material.
Snap
I have a picture of me, tiny,
not yet two, in the corner of
a bathtub somewhere in England.
It’s in black and white and I’m
leaning over to the left looking
startled, wearing an expression
that I recognise. In my gaze is
everything to come: the wall,
the unlit nights, the tumbril.
Calm grey water laps at my
chest and elbow. The bright walls
meet behind me. Off camera waits
the severed air, the present tense
of shadows and there still part of
me remains, not yet two, in black
and white, looking startled in
the corner of a bath, out of place
and time, somewhere in England.
We aren’t in Spain
We aren’t in Spain except
in the dream. Far escarpments
quiver in the haze, impassive
grasslands caress themselves
as they hiss away to the south.
You are on the balcony
of a ruined chapel, its walls
pocked and worn. Huge
and mute within its chimney
of stone still hangs the bell,
motionless, inches from
the deafened brick. Despite
its cracked, round mouth and
stump of tongue, the low echoes
of a note long ago unfolded
still roll across the unswept paths,
the scars in the ground where
gardens lived, and died, and lived.
Butterfly Kisses
Something woke me, something
feathered up against me in a dream.
Perhaps its soft tip of wing skipped
across my face late one summer
on the way to somewhere else.
Or a rolling echo of its voice
lasted past that particular season.
This is pre-speech, pre-definition.
I know no small worried birds
hovered above me as I slept and slept
in velvet parks that never existed.
I know I have made up the memory
of your eyelashes on my cheek
as you bend over me, whispering,
your missing breath on my neck.
Equatorial
Unbidden, I still dream of the sea.
That calm, unreal beach, the palms
nodding, fatigued by heat, already
asleep by noon. Waves breaking
quietly open, the light flat and vast,
precise. Each time I am here
the sand has moved a bit more inland.
The terrain changes while I am away.
What never alters is the ripple of beach
to the east, that indistinct shimmer
where it curves into dream distance.
Something is coming, growing slowly
closer. It has all names and no name,
its shape changed, its image shifting
from one visit to the next. Sometimes,
despite myself, it even looks like me.
Reports from the Palace
The abandoned hospital
was a godsend. We are
exhausted, and short on hope.
*
Dusty coverlets on carefully
made beds stretching
down the many wards.
*
Those of us with
training in medicine
have been taken aside
and whispered to.
*
October. No word from you.
The old cities glowing
sickly, remotely, to the east.
*
Armed guards
around the morphine.
*
Seasons slowing down.
Two of the scouts
have still not returned.
*
As yet there have
been no relays from
the south tower.
*
In the emergency bay
someone has erected
a sculpture fashioned
from used syringes.
*
The ravaged, upper sections
sealed off. No one allowed
above the third level.
*
Nightly, a rage of flame
on the horizon. The smell
of temples on fire.
*
Linen missing. Frost
on a heap of wheelchairs
stacked in the back field.
*
Another scout gone.
The meeting reset
for tomorrow.
*
Just before dawn.
All my transmissions
to you coming back
to me, unanswered.
*
Someone has been
on the roof again.
Footprints. Palmprints.
Evidence of signaling.
Futureproof
My hope remains in burning buildings long after
the firemen step back, dejected. I pack slivers
of moonlight into my ordinary case, and carry it
onto forgotten platforms. I help shift the bricks
and prop up fallen arches. Over hushed, untended fields
I pick my way through the dead, their blank stares
my signpost, their outflung limbs my map.
Around difficult hills I cut through underbrush,
pause half-way along tunnels to breathe. My chest
tightens. My throat is dry. An eerie light pours off me.