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a journal of literature & art

The Literary Review

Issue 10         Page 59

Resolution

We stop to admire a street mime, a statue, Captain Cook caked in grey make-up.  Nothing moves except his pink eyes.  Children compete, watch for him to sway, but he is resolute.  Enchanted, they miss his blink when stooping to drop coins in his sea chest with care.  He might imagine a looming white continent as, almost indiscernibly, he starts to lift his telescope through cold air.
I picture his ship-rigged sloop-of-war reaching the Antarctic Circle in that shadowy paleness that is night, wind’s vibration creating atonic music whipping across an ice shelf, wooden superstructure lantern-lit, icicles glimmering golden, the cold, the cold, stabbing Cook’s mariners to the bone, floes passing, glassy.  Since fog separated them from Discovery they have ventured alone.
One major collision with a ghostly shape and the light would leave their eyes within minutes of this water’s enclosing fold.  Cook’s self-financed brass door fittings in the great cabin would be of no use then.  There are no flares, no life preservers, nor radio for a Mayday call, no winner’s cheque, tabloid story.
These voyagers pass into history seen and heard by no-one but each other on the way to their own slow oblivion, charting the unknown austral  vastness bravely, singing chanteys to an old concertina’s wheeze, husky notes sighing towards the stars as the Earth continues to turn, that silent whirring in the pure cold.
A girl spots movement, loudly imparts this knowledge.  The gathering crowd laughs, so our captain gives her his slow wink, hopes a lout who arrives with mates moves on, though persistent comedians manqué, and drunks who want to touch, are the worst he gets.  Through his raised glass he sees a tram swirling dust, prays not to sneeze.

Looking for Gauguin long ago

Club Med’s rich arses sneer at my backpack.

Pour quoi?  Would cut-rate adventure scare them?

On the ferry’s upper deck a huge black

man I recognise dazzles in, ahem,

medals, peaked cap, tasselled braid, Papa Doc’s

son, Baby Doc, Haiti’s ruthless ruler

flanked by musclemen to Moorea’s docks.

Prices inflated, I spent my moolah

getting here, no hotel, roughing it cheap.

Young, encamped, I drink the grandeur of peaks,

sexy isles that lured a French banker, keep

seeing signs, his name, used.  The rip-off reeks

of what’s wrong with blind hunting of dollars,

my jackpot; this canvas, light, rich colours.

Rave On

Some ebbed memories slipped beneath life’s waves,

but reason intact, I nudge our talk now

to revisit a séance in those days

retrieved from my neural scrapbook somehow.

Hectic hours of music’s youthful fervour

left behind in the wide Sargasso Sea

of then, my brother’s tone drops, a murmur

in awe of the spirit world’s beliefs he

suspects closing in on what he has wrought.

He names rock stars dead at the height of fame,

more his idols than mine, glory cut short.

I saw, see, the occult as a daft game,

glass skating that board, a mad tombola

amped by a revered dead rock’n’roller.

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