Mario Petrucci

I mush together the garlic and the butter
for Kiev
for Kostroma too, and Novgorod;
slip wafers
of potato onto the rough tongue
of my grill. An onion
brings tears. Its layered histories
come clean: Russian-doll rings
that quoit and bangle over reels of drumsticks.

I call you at work. Mothers
are telegramming sons not to shoot, women
encircle the cold, grey bulk
of tanks, while the junta plays
Chinese whispers.

Tonight, then, we'll eat well -
sip that jerepigo wine
till dusk. For now, I prepare what I can;
I watch, and listen,
through the frame of my window -
a radio mutters and school-children
are a chaff of colour blown about the distant yard
where in one corner settles
a tiny mandala of linked hands.
...

you leave some al-
most thing starts : your
mattress impression stops

holding its breath - begins
to relax & swivel-chair
where you tackled

laces adopts that
strained angle of the clerk
requiring confirmation - then

i see through softly shut door
a house of pointers : your
draped towel on its rail

& bone scissors left
half-open there as though
simple addition of water could

jerk them to life : not so strange
then that a house should re-
member you with each

pine surface & glass
ornament its own sextant
keen for your one star to float

these bricks by - to hoist white
rooms thinned to canvas
by your sea-smell & i

no less join them : this
richer matter becalmed yet
seeming your merest breeze

might cast me off
...

ends so - spiralling after
egg (that other half of our
chains) & setting gills

in gristled knot that buds
legs as tadpoles do & blow-
hole ears halfway down

the back & low-set eye
alien as featherless chick -
ah we have peered into

that shared ovum whose
blasto-flesh runs its gauntlet
of fowl & fish so fused at

the tail nothing can be told
apart - is this why when i am
late i find in upstairs dark

you - on placenta duvet &
hunched round self as wom-
bed ones are? - as though

i had just returned from
all eternity to catch you
naked out sleepwalking

space without even
navel-twisted purpled
rope to hold you
...

(Chernobyl, 1986)
Even the robots refuse. Down tools. Jerk up
their blocked heads, shiver in invisible hail. Helicopters

spin feet from disaster, caught in that upwards cone
of technicide - then ditch elsewhere, spill black running guts.

Not the Firemen. In rubber gloves and leather boots
they walk upright, silent as brides. Uppers begin

to melt. Soles grow too hot for blood. Still they shovel
the graphite that is erasing marrow, spine, balls -

that kick-starts their DNA to black and purple liquid life.
Then the Soldiers. Nervous as children. They re-make it -

erect slabs with the wide stare of the innocent, crosshatch
the wreck roughly with steel, fill it in with that grey

crayon of State Concrete. In soiled beds, in the dreams
of their mothers, they liquefy. Yet Spring still chooses

this forest, where no deer graze and roots strike upwards.
Fissures open in the cement - rain finds them. They grow:

puff spores of poison. Concrete and lead can only take
so much. What remains must be done by flesh.
...

(Chernobyl, 1986)
This hospital has a room

for weeping. It has no crèche.
No canteen. No washroom queue.

Only this queue for weeping.
No lost property booth. No

complaints department. Or
reception. No office of second

opinion. Of second chances. Its sons
and daughters die with surprise

in their faces. But mothers
must not cry before them. There is

a room for weeping. How hard
the staff are trying. Sometimes

they use the rooms themselves. They
must hose it out each evening.

The State is watching. They made
this room for weeping. No remission -

no quick fixes. A father wonders
if his boy is sleeping. A mother

rakes her soul for healing. Neighbours
in the corridor - one is screaming

It moved from your child to mine.
More come. Until the linoleum

blurs with tears and the walls
are heaving. Until the place can't

catch its breath - sour breath
of pine. And at its heart

this room.
...

(Southwell Workhouse)
We're men half-
baked - swinging
lead-heavy sledges

over our heads
on elbowy sticks
of bread. Hour

by hour: men
of flour. Saved by
a pinch of salt.

Here because
we ought to use
our loaf. Because

men of fire eat
iron. Rust. Entire
nations. But we

float through days
on crusts. Dawn
to dusk each raft

the same. Like
us. Each slice we
are - adrift on

a basin of gruel.
Breakfast. Dinner.
Supper. One fuel.

And when at last
we rise to heaven
then I suppose

we'll be made
to mow His fields
divine with wheat -

move mountains
of holy yeast - and
reach back down

to knead (one
by one) each grey
cloud of dough.
...

(Herak was tried in 1992 for war crimes committed against Moslems in and around Sarajevo. The Sonja Cafe was an improvised prison for Moslem women, frequented by Herak.)
When I joined the nationalist volunteers
they gave me a woman, a television and video.
At the Sonja Cafe, Miro took me to the women.
Emina, Sabina, Amela, Fatima - we had them all.
There were always more arriving. It was easy.

You just picked up a key and went to a room.
I remember Fatima. A nice woman -
about thirty years old. We gave her tea.
Me and Miro took her in the car. Later
we stopped by a small bridge and I told her

to get out. She walked about three steps
from us, with her back to me - she did not turn -
and I shot her. I went to her just to be sure.
In the torchlight, something pink slid
from just above her neck. She did not move.

*

I helped to carry the thirty men
from Donja Bioca, the holes in their chests
rimmed with purple. We swung them, arms and legs,
into the incinerator. Even within the flames
some of them moved. One even turned

his head, looked at me.
I remember most the little girl in red
at Ahatovici. Her brothers and sisters, aunts
and friends, all shuffled backwards, made
little cries, before we fired.

*

One day, Sreten took me to the compound.
He showed me how to wrestle pigs to the ground
hold their heads back by their ears
and slit their throats. It was easy.

Sreten is sixty-five. Next day we tried it again
on three prisoners. It was just a short cut -
and they were dead. They did not squeal.
They just gurgled through the black slots

above the small of their chests. Here.
They did not squeal, like pigs.
Except Osman. I have pictures
in my mind, and they return each night.

Osman, whose throat I cut, he is always
there. He says - Please don't kill me
I have a wife and two small children. Please.
He speaks through the wound.

*

Now there are trials. Many words, journalists
with their microphones. I am on the television.
They will stand me in front of a wall
and shoot me. My father is ashamed. I say -

That's OK old man, you just stay and wait
for the shells to kill you. I tell the priest -
If there were a God, I would not have been
caught. I am sorry. I did what I did.

You would have done the same.
...

This side of the fence
is clean. That side
dirty. Understand?

You must forget
that soil is like skin.
Or interlocking scales

on a dragon. Dirty
Clean - is all that matters
here. Imagine a sheet

of glass coming down
from the sky. It's easy
no? On this side

you can breathe
freely. Your cow can
eat the grass. You can
have children. That side
you must wear a mask
and change the filter

every four hours.
You ask - What if my cow
leans over the fence?
Personally I say
it depends which end. But
we have no instructions

for that. It is up to you
to make sure your cow
is not so stupid.
...

talk
lip to lip as
though morning

just made us -
parted these
mouths

wan
as clay to
make way for

words that are
for us to
try

first
time on air
deft as dew on its

leaf - so let me
speak as an
adam

might
whose moment
is under a kind god

who looks on a half-
made garden
& come

eve
-ning will
change his mind
...

Startle-eyed, me and she, in the bunshop
where fourth-formers tried on cool

like over-sized blazers, lipsticked
with doughnut sugar and jam, and girls

gave little swivels in checked skirts,
dipping liquorice in lemon sherbet.

I peered into the deep pile of her mop,
saw white crumbs of scalp. Smelt sulphur.

First detention ever, for using perchlorate
to singe her initials in benchwood.

Mr Grant: pissy lab coat, jaundiced
coot, grimace in a dough of face, thread

of custard forever stranded between
dummy lips - Use your loaf boy.

Too late. Hovering behind the homework
each night: her marooned complexion, those

small white teeth. That sulphurous perfume.
End of term. Her hand in my pocket

my éclair in the other, I blew it.
Three stupid words. I'm a Catholic.

The shop - a delicatessen now. The school
long since converted. Yet, hanging round

the drains, something still of Mr Grant
and her - that whiff of coconut mat

in her blouse, his nicotined lard of finger
and thumb, the spatula pinched between

dipped in the tart yellow of that test tube:
Make a note boys. Sulphur. Flowers of.
...

Easy for me, your son,
youthful lungs trawling in one sweep -

cigar smoke, omelette,
the girl next door.

One day I told you
how in physics we'd calculated a cough holds

billions of atoms Galileo
inhaled. It took a full

week for your retort -
as always, off the nail. Must be I've used it

all then. From Siberia
to Antarctica - from slack-

pit to spire. That's
why each draw's so, so bloody hard.

Your drenched face was me,
silenced. Had to catch you

last thing, at the foot
of your Jacob's Ladder, ascending to the one

bulb of the landing
toilet, to tell you

I'd checked with sir.
You can't use it all, I piped, not in a hundred

million years. You'll get
better. Just wait and see.

Mouth bluish, a slur
suspended over your chest. Fist white

on the rail. You said
Don't hold your breath
...

It puffed up our brains -
a bicycle-pump pressure down rubbery cords.
One hundred and eighty-six thousand
miles per second.

Dolphin has no such constancy,
hears like soup. Its grey-blue steel
jerks into air, makes children gasp.
Dolphin hoops the water - each leap
equal to its aether.

On the west coast I dug
for potatoes. Light there took its time
to gather, took time to roll in
its hard-earned pillows of dark.

Our Enlightenment boys
ply the radioactive, black-goggled
in the bomb-burst. They squint past embers
at the rim of the universe, urgent
for the one dark thing.

Already they catch it, condense it,
flourish it across the benchtop
like a royal flush. Bounce it off the cheek
of the moon. Make it check itself -
snitch on the slightest anomaly. Back
and forth, the caged exactitude.

It's the one constant, they said.
Let us build all space, all time, all
knowledge around it.

But the dolphin. The filed
white teeth, its white life.
It has missed the tide.
The fish-mammal is beached, flesh
desiccating in iridescent decay.
Its shrill scrimshaws to the marrow.

The children think it is smiling.
...

'Whenever you see a green space in Berlin be very suspicious.' Pieke Biermann

A shell ladders the wire fence top to bottom -
skids to its middle in mud, a huge sizzling clove.
And out they stalk under wide noonlight -

wary at first, casting this way and this
with the yellow of hunger that winks
in phosphorescent coins. The cats currmurr -

a liquid that beats in their throats low and thick,
almost a cello. Movement stirs instinct -
ankles, wrists, pale exposures of neck.

Jaguar begins. Her continents of muscle
flinch. She unwinds her crouch into the convoy's
parallel herd - embraces from behind, full pelt,

a traffic policeman, his white-gloved salute
the flash of a doe's tail. In the act of being
savaged his hands signal on - and for seconds

diverted trucks respond without dent or screech.
On Tiergartenstrasse, Panther is surprised
onto its haunches by Oberkommandierender Guttmann

rounding a bend. Animal meets animal. Panther
grins - lifts a black velvet claw. Guttmann
raises a hand. And for a moment they are old

co-conspirators slapping pad to palm - before
a single swipe opens a flap in Guttmann's pot
neatly through the buttonhole, spills his coils

into winter which at last he feels, threading him.
Panther swills bloodwine. Fangs the sweet cakes
of a half-digested Limburger lunch.

Orang-utan has mounted a tram. Points back
at children, one arm trailed in a mockery of style,
chin cocked to velocity's breeze. Tonight she'll drag

knuckles right up the Reichstag steps, plant
a trained suck on the cheek of the porter. His look
will pale her into intelligence. On Potsdamer Platz

Zho crops turf. Her eyes betray a sidewise disposition
towards predators louche in the alleys behind speakeasy
and bar. Yet something is missing from the maw

of buildings - a tooth pulled from history to make
this square of sward, which Zho crops simply because
it grows, because it ranks so unnaturally green.

Last is Python. Her anvil head, by degrees,
jacks towards dim hammerings of free air, grim
to push the die-cast snout into any nest of blood.

The cold slides into her. She slops into culverts
heavy as a rope of copper - moulds to the sewers,
wraps the city in coils of intention. Develops

a rattle for Russia, a string of diamond yellows
for Poland. She winds up a tension. And Berlin ticks
inwards, becomes a city breathless, a gasp of dust

where Volkswagens are specks, circling crazily.
But there is nothing to fear. Not now. The cats
have had their fill - only pawprints lead through snow

down to the mouths of alleys. A white-gloved
claw is on the kerb. The people walk round it, pull
tight their collars. Eventually, from a windowbox

in Charlottenburg Palace, a single petal of phlox
will bear down into the shallow cup of its palm
with all the weight of a snowflake.
...

(Chernobyl, 1986)

They had to teach me
from scratch. Teach me

to breathe. As though
I had fallen out of space or

up from water and breath
was labour - each breath

a pang to draw me back
from the brink. In. Out. In

this world life is indifferent.
You must will it in. Will it

out. I look at my son -
those white cheeks that

tight frown and
I wonder how I can

breathe. He says - Mama
when you go to sleep to-

night please don't forget to
breathe. Please. He is

not allowed to run. Or
jump. Like that boy who

hanged himself with a
belt. I watch him. And he

watches me - when I doze
on the red sofa he rests a

hand to check the rise and
fall of my chest. Tells me he

will teach me in his dreams -
will teach me to breathe if

I teach him how to fly. If
you go with Grandpa he

says - will you be able to
breathe? He says this and

his cheeks run wet and
he runs short of breath so

we sit once again to
teach each other how -

deep and slow. We are
flying I tell him. We are

breathing he replies.
...

(Chernobyl, 1986)

You bury me in concrete. Bury me
in lead. Rather I was buried
with a bullet in the head.

You seal me in powder. Cut the hair
last. Then take the trimmings
and seal them in glass.

You wrap me in plastic. Wash me
in foam. Weld the box airless
and ram the box home.

For each tomb that's hidden a green
soldier turns. None decomposes.
Nothing for worms.

A buckle. A pencil. Break one thing
I left. Give some small part of me
ordinary death.
...