Walking on
the Moon, in Moulay Ibrahim
We have landed
they tell us
in the centre for all Morocco
of magic
& the old ways
high in the Atlas mountains....
We have heard this.
What we have not heard or seen
happens for the first time
today via the one TV in the one cafe:
Apollo astronauts land on the moon
& high-step in slow motion, gawky
in grey scale.
"Ha!" says Omar. "What a stunt.
Those Americans are so clever.
But we know. Moroccans
are not easily tricked. This
is a fiction to entertain the people.
Quelle blague." He pretends to toss
a rock off the dusty floor at the screen.
The crowd in the cafe laugh
at the outlandish gear, the preposterous
instrument & helmet gimmicks
clumsier than any cartoon.
Still scoffing, the moon men jostle outside
& hidden in hooded dun djellabas
melt into the lunar dusk of their grey plateau.
*
Paraclete Down the Street
Dreaming in foreign territory, directionless,
I am hunting the wild poetic in all its true
form's sequence in beaded dream sequins.
I glimpse a glance from cat-green eyes that
refract light, reduce fact, fuse and refuse.
I am lying on a matted
forest floor waiting
for the known universe to roll over me, toss
me aside with an errant claw or lift me toward
celestial spheres I might have missed by sign.
Bolting from the blue, the sudden poem lights
on my shoulder, a tameable parakeet ready to
unroll words like some sort of weird piano—
imagine, a player piano out here in the deep
mahogany woods beyond the rule! This
bird
comes close to naming herself, or her desire:
"Play a gain or pray begone! Pair again,
paragon!"
*
From Dream Sequins
The only way from the sea and its stony shingle
is straight up a grassy cliff to the native village
at the top. The last few yards are treacherous
because of the overhang. I dig through loose
earth under the grass roots to reach the plain.
The villagers themselves take circuitous routes
round the mountain along a desert path to climb
more securely to their homes. Wary of visitors,
they might shove me off the cliff as they pushed
William Zinsser, the memoirist. Black coattails
flapping, he flew into space and fell to his doom.
(I'd been worried about memoirs, not wanting to
delve in the past. Zinsser says In How to Write a
Memoir: Be yourself, speak freely and think small.
*
Travelling Palimpsest
Amulets like amber, brought home for trophies,
contain the past as nugget of story, fancied flight.
On my window are several butterflies, collected
of different materials, feathered, metallic, never
real but reminiscent of other times or places. At
a sudden flap on the pane, these souvenirs pale.
I catch a movement of wings that instantly stills.
For a moment I think my chatchkas have dropped.
On the outside, a moth has spread itself to rest,
four wings deep-streaked, moiréed, translucent.
As if you could almost read the secret writing hid
under the placidly unperturbed surface of eternity.
This moth obfuscates mementoes of old journeys
in the sun-glinting reality of the present moment.
The magic intended to rhyme the actual I cannot
now decipher. The tales encoded I now abandon,
signatures for arrangement in the thick of things.
Penn Kemp