Pascale Petit

From The Treekeper's Tale
This giant atlas moth's broad wings
could be the map of China.
...

From The Zoo Father
To visit you Father, I wear a mask of fire ants.
When I sit waiting for you to explain
...

From The Huntress
It's time to go up to your front door, Mother,
and ring the rattling buzzer of a bell,
the door with two curved fangs.
...

After Les Murray


Inside the sandpit you are playing for your life. Your
bucket and spade that smiled all day long, like family
in your satchel, now work hard. Your material is sand. It weaves
a universe where you are huge, the cellar behind you,
eclipsed by twelve chestnut trees and their pigeon gods. On
and on you burrow, into your sanctuary, devotion's
priest. There are rituals to do, like counting leaves on the sky's loom.
Any lapse and you tumble back into the brain's forks, rick-racking
the minutes for the lock that unclicks, the coffining dark, the
hooded stranger with Papa's voice, the makeshift bed.
...

Behind the Fauverie a crawl of quayside traffic
while Aramis roars for his food, the air
turbulent as he opens his jaws in a huge
yawn. If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes
and listen hard — there at the tongue's root,
in the voicebox of night, I might hear
the almost-vanished. He's summoning his prey,
this lord of thunderbolts, calling to ghosts
of the Lost World, with this evening chant
to scarlet macaw, tapir, golden lion tamarin.
Until everything goes slow and the rush-hour
queue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caiman
basking on the bank. The jaguar's all
swimming stealth now — no sound — a stalker
camouflaged by floating hyacinths, senses
tuned only to the reptile of the road. Then, with
one bound, spray scatters like glass, as Aramis
lands on the brute's back and bites its neck.
...

I bring you a hummingbird's nest, woven
from seed-down, thistle head,

bound with lichen and spidersilk,
shaped by a mother who presses her breast

against the cup, uses her rump, chin,
the curve of her wing, who stomps

her claws on the base to check it's
windproof under this leaf porch.

The male gone, she works alone,
hurrying back and forth thirty times

an hour, before the eggs come.
She lays them in a home small as a nutshell,

the rim turned in, the sides pliant
so they'll stretch as the chicks grow.

Little mother, I've read your file
filled with letters to the mairie, begging

for a place where we could live together.
I know now how hard you fought the powers,

like a jeweled dart stabbing at their door,
before you fell prey to the jungle mantis.

Instead of flowers, I leave you this nest
on your grave, in case you make it

from your migration — only a wisp
of feathers, no flesh left on your bones.
...

This is how it is at the end -
me lying in my bath
while the waters break,
my skin glistening with amnion,
streaks of starlight.

And the waters keep on breaking
as I reverse out of my body.

My life dances on the silver surface
where cacti flower.

The ceiling opens
and I float up on fire.

Rain pierces me like thorns. I have a steam veil.

I sit bolt upright as the sun's rays embrace me.

Water, you are a lace wedding-gown
I slip over my head, giving birth to my death.

I wear you tightly as I burn -
don't make me come back.
...

I lay the suitcase on Father's bed
and unzip it slowly, gently.
Inside, packed in cloth strait-jackets
lie forty live hummingbirds
tied down in rows, each tiny head
cushioned on a swaddled body.
I feed them from a flask of sugar water,
inserting every bill into the pipette,
then unwind their bindings
so Father can see their changing colours
as they dart around his room.
They hover inches from his face
as if he's a flower, their humming
just audible above the oxygen recycler.
For the first time since I've arrived
he's breathing easily, the cannula
attached to his nostrils almost slips out.
I don't know how long we sit there
but when I next glance at his face
he's asleep, lights from their feathers
still playing on his eyelids and cheeks.
It takes me hours to catch them all
and wrap them in their strait-jackets.
I work quietly, he's in such
a deep sleep he doesn't wake once.
...

Strange how her perfume used to arrive long before she did,
a jade cloud that sent me hurrying
first to the loo, then to an upstairs window to watch for her taxi.
I'd prepare myself
by trying to remember her face, without feeling afraid. As she drew
nearer I'd get braver
until her scent got so strong I could taste the coins in the bottom
of her handbag.
And here I am forty years on, still half-expecting her. Though now
I just have to open
the stopper of an expensive French bottle, daring only a whiff of
Shalimar
which Jacques Guerlain created from the vanilla orchid vine.
Her ghostly face
might shiver like Christ's on Veronica's veil - a green-gold blossom
that sends me back
to the first day of the school holidays, the way I used to practise
kissing her cheek
by kissing the glass. My eyes scanned the long road for a speck
while the air turned amber.
Even now, the scent of vanilla stings like a cane. But I can also smell
roses and jasmine
in the bottle's top notes, my legs wading through the fragrant path,
to the gloved hand emerging
from a black taxi at the gate of Grandmother's garden. And for a
moment I think I am safe.
Then Maman turns to me with a smile like a dropped
perfume bottle, her essence spilt.
...

I've come to lie on the basalt plain
where the earth is trying to heal itself,

to peer down a rift in the mantle
when the pain gets white, keep looking

until my chest blisters - right down
where a roiling valve beats like a heart

and my own heart bubbles.
The threads of my dress

spit and snarl. I soothe them.
I calm sun flares, plasma storms.

And on the cloth of fire I draw vines.
They shoot out from my hollows -

leaves large as hands
that stroke the wound of my land.
...

This giant atlas moth's broad wings
could be the map of China.

Here are two Great Walls. And there
on the Manchurian tip of each forewing

are dragon heads to scare off predators.
But what are those windows in the map,

where crystal scales let in the light?
As if earth's skin has windows

and at certain times of the evening
they open. The newly emerged atlas

perches on my hand, and it trembles -
like a new world, warming up for its first flight.
...

To visit you Father, I wear a mask of fire ants.
When I sit waiting for you to explain

why you abandoned me when I was eight
they file in, their red bodies

massing around my eyes, stinging my pupils white
until I'm blind. Then they attack my mouth.

I try to lick them but they climb down my gullet
until an entire swarm stings my stomach,

while you must become a giant anteater,
push your long sticky tongue down my throat,

as you once did to my baby brother,
French-kissing him while he pretended to sleep.

I can't remember what you did to me, but the ants know.
...

From Riverside Drive, I stared at you
until I was in a trance.
And the trance-river was long, wide,
and glistened like a great tower
which reared into the sky.
I saw your waves were panes of glass
polished by the autumn rays.
I saw, along your length,
your windows unzipping -
splinters of plate glass stung my cheeks.
You were so bright and wrong,
as if our sun had plunged from his office
and was laid on a stretcher.
I heard a thundering in your bed
that was our star's throes.
Then I realised that your flowing
to the ocean was a falling
that would never end.
People inside you, on a hundred floors,
in your rooms, at your desks,
in your stairwells, your lifts,
in your corridors, swept by currents.
And they were breathing smoke
as if drowning in black water,
charred by flames of river-cold.
And your twin - East River -
also remembers, as it falls with you
into the Atlantic, where seabirds
dive into debris like airliners,
and the continental shelf drops away.
There, reams of scattered papers
float down into the abyss,
until all their addresses are erased.
...