Peter Sirr Poems

You say
there is a language in which the word for family

is also the word for departure.
Handing across books, tapes, the world's

thinnest dictionary,
learn it, you say.
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Welcome 3755547K
your small head rests
in the arms of the State
your fingers are counted, your toes
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Even asleep, you're everywhere.
You fall through the house,
right down to the small room
where I sit staring at the screen.
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First comes the idea, someone's dream
of a winding street, of streetlamps.
Then sticks, wattle, ships flaring in the sunset,
serious heads on the coinage. Flagons
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What vagabond bones
and you, too, Ivar the Boneless,
come together now
stench of what plagues
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I'd grown almost to love this street,
each time I passed looking up
to pin my father's face to a window, feel myself
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Minced lamb, apricot jam, milky bread
while onions, garlic, ginger soften

not having forgotten bananas, bay leaves
nor neglected
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The mapmaker downed his tools.
I've caught it, every alley, every street,
every fanlight and window-ledge,
the city fixed and framed.
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And often, when I have finished a new poem,
I climb to the dark roof garden
and lean on a rail over an ocean of streets.
What news I have for the sleeping citizens
and these restless ones, still shouting their tune
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Nunca fiz mais do que fumar a vida

All night I have dreamt of tobacco,
of a world filled with smoke
and governed by tobacconists.
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