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Adil Jussawalla
from "Missing
Person"
(Part I: Scene from the Life)
1
House Full. It's a shocker. Keep still.
Blood crawls from a
crack. Keep still.
It's all happening.
It's a
spear.
It's your saviour.
It's a quiet mirror with
hair all over
born
to a middle-class mother.
God's gift for
further reflection.
There's trouble
outside:
crowds, stammering guns, the sea
screaming from side to side.
2
For The
First Time On Your Screen
MISSING JACK
A slave's
revolt and fall
His first cry with his mother
his last look
with a wall-
no round-up by sunset, no final corral-
his wit
with his friends,
his seed with fugitive bodies
as
settled as
armchairs now
seething with other men's children
No
one
believes
[jump cuts here
from mother to mistress and back]
his sepia
distant or lurid recent
past.
Don't
shut your eyes. It's only a movie.
'That speeding
train-
It is my life.
Those are my hands-
split-ends of
sabotage.'
Again and again, buttonholes friends
turned
strangers, strangers friends
'Believe, that's me on the screen
through the stuttering dust, through the burst-open door
The running dog runs but they've
put out
its eyes.
'Once I was whole, I was all.
Believe, why
don't you believe?'
8
A mill of
tubercular children
is what he wears.
The
wretched of history
storm into
they smash
his house of ideas.
Who
puffed up an Empire's sails
still fuel the big-power ships
still make him fly
high to jet-setter fashion.
Blood tumbles down sleeves
hung upside down
to dry in
his flat.
He'll wreck himself yet;
docked in a. bar
with a criminal friend,
his shirt wrapping him like a wet
sail,
his wood carcass breaking and burning
in mutinous sweat.
9
He travels the way of devotion
but no sky
lights
his street.
A river of pills
brings him no raft.
Death goes awash with wishing.
Cripples his own
mouth then,
sits
killing his tongue, sits
barred up behind
his teeth.
Bright sparks
on the international back-slapping
circuit
are picking up prizes like static.
He's for the
dark.
10
God of our
fathers,
of the broken
tribe
and the petrified spirit,
why did you send us
this horror?
Nothing we put in stayed put.
We put in
the family
history and prayers,
they flew out as comics.
Fed
him
grandmamma's custards, he spewed.
We poured in the tonics
but nothing sweetened his tongue.
He thrust it out
again
and again,
the bloodied head of an arrow
made
the girls run.
Drive your shafts through his neck
Switch your
hunting
lights on.
For years we prompted his first
words,
scolding the servanys for theirs:
'Sweetie, say:
Let there
be light, let their be us.'
We heard:
'Let there
be dung.'
12
In
the fist of a rioting people
his rotting head.
A mirror fires at him point blank
and
yells, 'Drop dead
colonial ape,
back under an
idealist
spell.
Yes, you've made it to some kind of hell,
backslider, get liquidated.'
'Wait! you
know whose side
I'm on,' he shouts,
'but the people,
their teeth bright
as axes
came after my stereo and cattle,
came
after my
bride
I've said all my prayers
O pure in
thought word
and deed have I been
delivering sun,
yet you
gild
street-urine-
theirs!'
So what's the
scenario
for our
two-bit hero
but sliding back further
into a
gun,
but travelling on,
paling at riots and slaughter,
forgetting
his family, rejecting his son,
men with raised arms, stripped
of
their skin,
passing him village on village,
seared
in the blast
of no food,
in the shock of no water?
14
Bright angels - where?
[the final
scene: so choir]
so faintly heard,
so long and
lost a pause
in this underthumbed compendium of joy
that's still his earth,
his shouts for law and order
won't shake the posse off;
its dogs
harry, attack,
are at his throat and back.
Watch
his murder.
His cock, his ears, his eyes, his tribe
will have
as penance.
That won't make him sick.
The better to feel your love?
He
coughs and kicks
with historical poisons,
bookdust,
lies
that turn his words to sand.
(Say the nigger does exist. You'll
save.
Smash his pride and enter.)
The trapped wrist
says it all,
how barren branches fall,
how talents winter.
To break
away. To stand
in steady confutation of the Law
is
what the
skunk demanded.
He stole his father's bread. He spat on him
and
said, 'Your reign has ended.'
Students of Eng.
Lit.,
still bunched round her merciful tit,
be up and about,
face
more terror than you can take.
And this is how you will end:
Before the final fade-out, like an ad:
'Here is
our smug
little watch that's lost its hands.
Here is our own Bugs
Bunny
who acted funny....'
There in the dark with the
dogs, in
pieces,
your fucking fake.
And here's
an announcement:
Hope
which periodically triggers
some men to act
and looses
the bonds of the earth,
has set a bright tide revolving
inside me,
a door.
Give up your seats and join the cast of thousands,
revolve about his pieces too
(brown slaves, black vamps,
white
faggots,
deceivers, women who rend and claw)
and hear
that head still singing...
O fallen
throats that went down in a war,
O waters of the dark connection,
O pit of blood and knuckles,
Open, open up your jaws,
and hold me there - your missing
person.
********************************
Nine Poems On Arrival
Spiders infest
the sky.
They are
palms, you say,
hung in a web of light.
Gingerly,
thinking of concealed
springs and traps, I step off the
plane,
expect take-off on landing.
Garlands beheading
the body
and everyone dressed in white.
Who are we ghosts of?
You.
You. You.
Shaking hands. And you.
Cold
hands. Cold
feet. I thought
the sun would be lower here
to
wash my neck
in.
Contact. We talk a language of beads
along
well-established wires.
The beads slide, they open, they
devour each other.
Some were important.
Is that one,
as deep and dead as the horizon?
Upset like water
I
dive for my favourite tree
which is no longer there
though
they've let its roots remain.
Dry clods of earth
tighten their tiny faces
in an effort to cry. Back
where I
was born,
I may yet observe my own birth.
Evening On a Mountain
The valley sunned itself all day,
its span
Curving up two foothills; then the shadows
Crossed
like wings across its back; further,
Ferries
embroidered a
slim lake, stitching
Silk into its cotton, prows
snipping...
How still it was then! the sky thin and hollow,
Deflecting
the words stoned across the valley,
The ears straining at
each
rebound; far off,
A cloud, launched from a rock, streaked
North like a startled bird.
Halt X
I
I do not know what station this is, or why
We broke our
journey;
checked, here in Derbyshire,
One senses danger, disquietude
only.
Pieces of smoke litter the huddled town-
Card collage on
felt; no pattering movement
On roads of sliding newspaper,
sidling dog.
No alighting or descending the steps of its
drizzling doors.
II
Rain fell like a
drizzle of fine
slag
On an anonymous town in smudged Derbyshire.
I counted
sixty chimneys in a quarter
The size of a burgher's
courtyard,
wondered at smoke
Sliding edgeways through the dawn's
widening
slats.
A flock of pigeons dissolved in the viscid
air
Like a piece of mud in a current; 5 o'clock.
A streetlamp
craned
its neck for the spreading frogs.
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