The Touch

I swear by the in-laws
of my exwife's cousin.
I swear by the unlaid tiles
in my unfinished bathroom.
I swear by these borrowed shoes
and my neighbor's pickup,
by two of my best unborn pigs,
by my mother's bingo habit
that you will get your $40
back by Tuesday next.
Honest.


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Sixth Sense

Beauty, beauty is always
there, sometimes obscured
behind scrims, out of focus,
goen for the day
from the beauty shoppe,
escaped into memory.

This photo does not catch
his/her true beauty
the one once covered with
skin warm with the scent
of blind promise
whose very name was a song.

Beauty, beauty is all in the
touch and taste of the needfull.



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Voyeur

They've stopped to eat, two women
coming in from the outer reef.

I've been watching them with
glasses from my sea-side porch.

The eloquence of honesty is that
it is disarming -- the eloquence

of natural events.  They sit
waist deep in a still tidal pool

almost back to back, two large
village women in wet mumus.

They are sucking the guts out of
sea slugs they've just gleaned.

The truth is they belong there;  it's
me here watching them that's weird.


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Fisaga

Unto the first is born the next
and the center is replaced wtih
a new a more delicate center
even more precious for its remove
from our past habits of desire.

Into the greater is given relief,
a new cry to replace those
whose voices we hear now only
in memory, in stories of old time.
A call in the night we can answer to

honestly, new skin and real hands
so strong and small they displace
all those old eyes and heavy fingers.
This is how we rejuvenate ourselves.
This is where we all start again.

Like a desert tribe at night, we
close in around the child, a shield
against the darkness that we all know
too well.  We will give her all we have
for her, for her to keep her brightness

until she too has forged her own shield
and joined us, defending her own
offspring from darkness and despair.


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Orpheus I

Later, the wives got
together and chopped him up
into bloody bits.


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Orpheus II

The mad Maenads then
tried to cleanse themselves in a
river that vanished.


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Orpheus III

Musicians, in fact,
should always be free to take
their own lives -- less mess.




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Copyright 1998 John Enright
All rights reserved.

Regulators


When you've lived a while within the sound
of surf and mosquitos and swirls of children

between blindingly green ridges of jungle
emitting birds and bird sounds and moving

through the spectrums of saffron and shadow
and squall-closing grays, when the

news become who is pregnant by whom
and why who is leaving the island,

then come to me and talk about your
air-conditioned plans for the regulation of

whatever it is you've been brought here
to set straight by mainland standards.

We'll set up a time line that will most
closely resembly a slowly drifting cloud.


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Cities I have walked this way
(looking for sense in the time map)

Buffalo, Boston, Manhatten, Dublin, London, Frankfurt,
San Francisco, Copenhagen, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Portland,
Honolulu, Venice, Bozeman, Paris, Stockholm, New Orleans,
Hong Kong, Chicago, Apia, Suva, Seattle, Sydney and
Townsville, at least.

Take it to the wall tonight, bro.
Finish the botttle and the cigarettes.
You're not there yet.  Take it to the streets
long after midnight.  At the market
women are sleeping beside their taro.
Taxis are taking the last whores home.
Take it to the waterfront where always
everywhere men are awake with their
cigarettes.  Walk it past the police station,
let the backstreet dogs bark at you.
Take it back to your indigenous city jungle,
walking like a ghost that casts a shadow.
Take it back, reclaim your birthright --
lost nights on the street like a swollen
scabbed-over fist, a bad cup of coffee,
a woman in your brain driving you crazy and
a long walk home where you don't want to be
because the words won't begin and
the bottles are empty and the bed
is a succubus.  Walk it off, shake it off,
city boy.  Disappear in an alley way,
walk through the wall to survive.



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The Underworld

Someone had written it on a wall --
"Art pretends that chaos makes sense."

Everyone else was wearing sneakers
and was waiting nervously

for the next train out of there.
We were all underground.

I would have walked away
but I was afraid.  I knew

that I would look back, 
control freak that I am,

even if no one yelled out
my real name behind my back.

"Orpheus," they'd say, "you asshole,
come back here and die like a man."













Bare Feet

Liam lost his flipflops again
about a week ago--he took them off
to play basketball barefoot at Uncle Mark's.
We figured that out a couople of days later
after I noticed they were missing from
inside the front screen door.
Since then we've taken plane flights
out and back to another island and
trekked through bush and over beaches
and boulders and crushed-coral roads.
Sometimes he would borrow my flipflops
and I would go brefoot; sometimes
we would wear one each or none at all.
We have frank feet, with toes like
so many separate thumbs, earth hardened,
feet like a wood carver's hands.
I suppose shoes are a metaphor
for what it is we can do so happily without.
When I am old he will massage my feet
to reassure me, sitting barefoot
on a mat beside my bed.

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