I became obsessed by Keaton in the mid-eighties after
a spate of biographies brought back those deep half-memories
of having seen all this in a now-distant but still
intense way. He puzzled me as a child and unsettled me as
an adult. It was the way his films were funny and
upsetting at the same time, and the horrendous shadow
that alcohol cast over his career. I wrote a sequence of
poems, each one of which was called A Dream of Buster
Keaton, and they were published in the States, so no-one
here ever saw them until The
Testament.
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My mother was America's
first lady saxophonist.
I was watching the landlady put our things through
the mangle when my finger got mashed up in it.
The doctor took it off at the second joint and put
me to bed; she ran back powder-faced to finish off
the medicine show. I got up and went out to watch
some kittens cooking in the shade and I saw
this peach-tree shudder in its own green heat, and
then I had to have a peach, I had entered this
strange landscape already. I pitched a rock
up and it never came down. That seemed fair
enough so I shook the tree a little more and
down it came to lay a furrow down my upturned
face. Hoodwinked. The doctor put six stitches in
and my parents set out for the evening show
and when they got on stage this prospector yelled
"Cyclone!" and the audience was suddenly
underground. Powderface on the melting sidewalks;
at the top of the stairs the bedroom door wouldn't
open and then they remembered the key in
a slow whirl of panicked hands and then
the damned door still didn't open and then the air
let go of it and in they fell but couldn't find me.
Chattering their teeth in the storm-cellar till
it blew out, they ran to look under the bed and in
the packing-case and then a man walked in with me
and said "Is this one yours?" and Joe said
"Want a receipt?" The same air that had held
the door took me out the window in a swirl of glass
and slowed off down the street to park me pop-
eyed in the settling dust as folk peered out of
their scared holes. Ever since then, I'd say
I have been trapped in the landscape of that machine.
Instead of ram horns and a charming tail
I have been assigned the ordinary monstrosity:
between my shoulderblades and screwed into my spine
is a suitcase handle with which fate can heave
me off into the scenery. I can break the ribs
and noses of the hecklers if fate is on my side
who can fling me through teatrays and black hatboxes
into a new identity. I pursue these features of my life
down the storm-bared streets and find them in
the passionless grimace of paddle-steamers which,
when I board, go arbitrarily the way I came.
If fate is on the other side of my face
I am thrown into a drink-darkened room
in which my head is filled with dancing squirrels
who bite each other's hairless tails mercilessly in
an endless stream of blood which stains my collar.
I lie down beneath a smoky blanket of ants
I have continuously to roll back off my ankles
to sleep like a bloated sardine in the bed's tin.
I roll like paint or a hamster endlessly round
the wheel of the steamer emerging for ever from
the black waters, a white cork neither breathing
nor drowned. My face runs with greasepaint but
is never cleansed; my presence alone is a bomb
thrown like a Christmas pudding into the sticky robes
and chains of the city's privileged denizens.
They cannot hide my face among the liquid crowds
but like a white cork it comes bobbing before
their banquets pouring dust on all their gilt chairs.
They heckle the unseen wheels of a machine
which wears me as a mask it constantly flings
from it into their boudoirs, revealing a nothingness
in which they see that unbearable feature:
their lives ripped bare of all the trickeries,
all the miracles of their survival-as-success
become the steel unfeeling shanks of this
machine. Groping frantically amongst the frills
of their hasty packing their fingers come upon
a suitcase handle made of bone and stretched
with my living flesh which they recognise at once.
I can never speak: these are just the expressions
that will not play across the white rock.
I am settling into darkness, the face is wide
with energies frozen from their clanking,
the oil is filling up the grooves and scars.
The city will not take the morning; it breaks
in grey waves on the suburbs I have pushed
away from the centre: here the concrete is alone,
people will not pit it. Here and there are footprints,
as though someone has pitched themselves up
into the night's heavy gears and never landed:
there are footsteps sunk in the concrete, filling
with a kind of oil. Here I am surrounded by
a crowd of silences in which my face alone
can be heard, a white rock staring at a point
you may never occupy. The curtains hang grey
around the borders. The imagination is outside.
The oil appears to be a kind of alcohol which
is not permitted here. Here it is perfect daylight
but the traffic will not move; it seems somewhat drunk.
Sunk like huge wet flies upon the tar it sits
in the cold light and appears to watch me as
I do not move my face across the centre.
There appears to be alcohol in all the tramlines.
When the buildings collapse they do so without sound;
the streets are shuffled against the dawn.
I have left the city and am looking down
from a balloon from which the sound is trickling drily.
It is perfect daylight and I can see it trickle through
the silences that search amid the dreadful white rooms
whose roofs are lifting off like geese in a cyclone,
whose spokes cannot ratchet through me in the dark
in which my face may not be visible staring like
a white rock falling slowly upwards like
an only star. In fact there are no other stars.
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