The Ofi Press Magazine
International Poetry and Literature from Mexico City
By Sarah Clancy (Published in issue 23)
It’s the Dark
On this day of halogen and helium
we’re dodging shadows
our eyes squinting against late afternoon sun
but it’s with us despite the whiteness;
it's a hand not held
it's a dark bedroom, in a dark house, on a dark street
that sunshine couldn't deal with
where no one ever thought to leave a light on for us
it's every un-blown birthday candle
it's a school of sorts, an education,
it's a taunting lane with pine trees and a wind channelled down it,
it’s the terror that made our fat legs pedal faster-
made us flee it, as if
in the bright lights of the kitchen hours later we still
wouldn't feel it
it’s that car journey we didn't want to go on
those other headlights sweeping past in freedom
and our relentless windscreen wipers beating rhythm
to the place we swore we'd never get to
on a morning night wouldn't relinquish,
it's a bridge in an inferno crumbling
and I can tell you there's no crossing back over
it's the confessional where we don't know what to say
or even who to answer
it’s a hundred pagan folk memories;
persisting because they never tried to conquer it
because it's the dark
it's the dark
it's the dark
and it's best to leave it be.
Blame Walt Whitman
I should never have brought you to sit on these dunes in all their
kitsch holiday bleakness, I know this is a place that hurts you but
at least you know it, and I should have refused to take you down
streets looking for the Santa Muerte when those were my own
dark journeys, or to the port in the evening where things feel
different, nothing there is female but maybe that’s what I wanted
to show you, I can’t believe I took you to look at children’s corpses
when it’s my buzz to name the dead and most days I know it has
less purpose than scrawling ‘I was here’ on the brutal walls that
will outlast me, and you with that conflicted DNA hardwired
your essence would be to sharp-tongue it, you’d call it an experiment
in detachment to touch those baseball caps and soiled jean legs
with my own fingers and not in turn be touched and I can hear
you say; will that be your epitaph Sarah, nothing touches you?
But I know in our connection you’ve only got more gentle words
for me no matter if I’ve never earned them, and in fairness you were
with me when I sat and watched white-lime letters spelling ‘Tito’
carved out on a sickly green hill in a country so pastoral you could
see why violence just might be the antidote, maybe anything is better
than triteness? And putting my hands in sun-warmed war-damaged
pock marks on sandstone buildings in that split city Mostar, you called
it escapism and shook your head but you wrapped two arms
around me from behind from across those misnomer peace walls
that are your geography and I wanted you to do it –that means
something, doesn’t it, even if it’s only back ground music?
Or that day I showed you the Lipizzaner horses and you said nothing
but I knew you were thinking what has she got against comfort
and so I said I know with all the things I’ve done, this might sound
like hypocrisy but if I had my way I’d set them all free and in
the fakeness of bad wine and literary conversations later, you said
there’s not one true thing here and winked that if you’d your way
you’d set them all free and let freedom be their new poetry and I
guess its faith of some kind when you never ever asked to be
brought with me to places I hadn’t any need to go but I took you
to the Cafe de la Habana where you told me to go a bit easier
on myself and it’s funny how I couldn’t bring myself to listen
even though I wanted to hear it, so I went down Reforma
and dragged back the young man you were curious about and
I fucked him on the floor for you because you were curious and
because it was easier than hearing him say so much nothing
and it cost me very little except the sound of a downpour that would
have been better heard alone and if I said what I remembered
of our encounter it’d be the drone of one persistent mosquito who
might or might not have been responsible for the purple bruises
on my neck that made me think of you after, and I did it as a way
to break your dead grip on having said forever and discovering
you’d never meant it and sometimes physicality is easier than
to listen to you talking, I don’t know if it was vicarious when I couldn’t
be bothered reporting how the evening light caught on his alabaster
haunches and how so alone you can be when you don’t feel anything
except the ebb and flow of pulses and I know you’ll get me when I
say for that one it’s fair to blame Walt Whitman and you came with me
to where the glass shatter sirens and songs of revolution choked you,
those lines of union workers singing The Internationale in the dead heat
of a random Sunday in two thousand and eleven? When they
clench fisted in unison you whispered that you couldn’t see anything
true in it and I said so let’s set them all free you and me and on
the strength of it I bought you those carved out imaginary animals
from a street child but then I never sent them because in all the things
dissolving that I was certain of, I was unsure of their welcome
and in New York we all absconded down through streetscapes so
familiar that it felt like trying to swallow something when my mouth
was empty maybe trying to swallow the idea that me the unbeliever
the heretic believes that you’ve been with me all this time and in
all these places on the strength of one slim every day connection.