V iii
V iii I am giving up on land to light on, it’s only true, it is only something someone tells you, someone you should not trust anyway. Days away, years before, a beer at your lips and the view from Castara, the ocean as always pulling you towards its bone and much later, in between, learning to drive the long drive to Burnt River, where the land is not beautiful, braised like the back of an animal, burnt in coolness, but the sky is, like the ocean pulling you toward its bone, skin falling away from your eyes, you see it without its history of harm, without its damage, or everywhere you walk on the earth there’s harm, everywhere resounds. This is the only way you will know the names of cities, not charmed or overwhelmed, all you see is museums of harm and metros full, in Paris, walls inspected crudely for dates, and Amsterdam, street corners full of druggists, ashen with it, all the way from Suriname, Curaçao, Dutch and German inking their lips, pen nibs of harm blued in the mouth, not to say London’s squares, blackened in statues, Zeebrugge, searching the belly of fish, Kinshasa, through an airplane window the dictator cutting up bodies grips the plane to the tarmac and I can’t get out to kiss the ground The Poetry of Dionne Brand / 9 ...
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