LOUISE WAKELING

you should leave the country like Gogol

for R.M.

go Roman before summer’s red hot poker
sears the skin like roasted eggplant and the place
becomes impossible – that little seaside town

in Norway beckons like an old man putting his feet up
by the water, maybe the Old Man of the Dovrë himself
and you won’t even notice the iced-over mountain

squatting there like a troll-courtier in the great Hall
(you’ll be too busy hiding from the troll-witches
wielding knives, ice in the blood)

but now the driveway cops the flak
of jacaranda flowers, their hitchhiker bees
tumbling in fluted heaven

already mauvember’s launched its spring offensive
and you can’t leave now, with that tree rolling out
its welcome mat, upturning your heart, rolled

over like a stone and warming on the other side.
a captured asteroid, you’re stuck in earth’s orbit,
your interplanetary probe won’t lift you

up to Mars.  here’s the prospect:
vertigo, forever falling from mountains
into the fading soundtrack of the world,

or going forward on all fours,
the world spinning on its crazed axis,
restlessness prickling like heat rash.

you’re not hungry for Tahitian pearls
in Beijing Friendship stores or fitting room Nirvanas
in Hong Kong, just on-again off-again road affairs

memorable as skunk-stripes tattooed on US Interstate 82
the heart in a trajectory at last, amtracking
its own fault-lines and desert places plotting

fresh horizons, the way stoop labour might dream:
asparagus-cutters, bent double at the waist,
slashing at green spears in a dusty field