Monsoon

JOSEPH BENNETT

JOSEPH BENNETT

MONSOON

How slender these fisherfolk, how delicate, turbaned,

Fragile bones like pipesticks, tiny beards,

Here the body is like some black oil, left in a press, for rope,

And then taken out, coiled and expressioned,

Retrieved from an oil seep-

One wonders, can they die?

Here the wind

Blowing from the south and west

Flaps the ragged sunset with its storms.

Waters meet about a point of rock.

On stilts the human pelicans

Let the fish drift beneath them,

Black skins drying to tar.

The rotting coconut fouls the fresh lagoons

Where the hair of Buddha grows inside a concrete bulb.

A railway threads its luggage vans around the pools

Fronds glitter in the occasional fire of the sun

Hair of the sun, liquid drift,

Glittering spun mask through whose face the molten round

Must peer,

How brilliant is the rain, too hot for rainbows

Behind our curtain

The wind blows high, thickening this grace to a cloud

The white lines are surf, inside the ghost of rain

The reefs revive in the teeth of the gale

In coral traps

Your life is like stickwood, and you float

On the sea, off the invisible shore

Guessed at from the crush of the waves.

You are nearby; and you wait, offshore,

For the rush of the wind to pass, to eastward,

But it will not, for six months.

You are caught, near the seine of being,

Near the crabs and the shellfish, the lobsters and the coral shark

In the great war that tumbles, ever crashing about your ears.

In a distant tower on the rock

Invisible light is flashing

There is such density here,

Moisture and wind.

What mariner would search these coasts,

How lost, with pepper in his hull,

His bow whirling, like the needle of a compass,

His stern awash, off vocal, invisible reefs,

And the trees of the spices bowing their long heads to their lord

the wind?