The Bursting Test

By Linda Rogers

These poems test the capacity of individuals, families, communities, and the earth itself to stand the pressures of modern life. They walk the tightrope over the chasm between male and female, love and hate, child and adult, war and peace, and now and forever, attempting to find balance and reconcile the one with the many. {Guernica Editions}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781550714203

Book preview

LINDA ROGERS

THE BURSTING TEST

 ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 119

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2002  

Contents

The Silk Road

Women in Black

Tripping the Impossible

Cross Frocks of Abergavenny

Little Red Shoes

Dancing at Olive Olio’s

Tuning with the Enemy

Sometimes We Watch Them Becoming

The Language of Birds

A Brass Flourish of Swarming

Plain Brown Wrapper

The Little Mummies

His Frizen Harmonica

The Rare Chocolate Lilies

I am Lost in German

The Identical Words for Love

The Night of Shooting Stars

Blue

Tender Lights

No Sugar Family

Sugar Rations

The Night You Shook Hands with Ruben Gonzales

The Only Road to Paradise

Archives of Terrible Sadness

Cry Out for Summer

All Around India

The Bottle Tree

Surprised by Joy

Her Lovely Long Hair

Water Standing Perfectly Still

Grief Sits Down

Gypsy Queen

Dream Pictures of Lost

The Water-Striders

Son père est un sphinx et sa mère une nuit

The Amazing Colour of Lucky

Al’s Love Night

Praying for the Ordinary

The Rubbing Beach

Salt on the Rim

Sugar Babies

Precious Cargo

Week-ends at the Buddha Hotel

Snail Love with Opera

Missing

Her Shadow Following

The Pale Longing of Girls

Returning to the Graceful

Mourning Dresses and Grief

Rehearsing the Miracle

Remote Sandwich

Ten of Everything

Shopping for Regla

The Book of Common Prayer

The Precious Wood

Do Not Praise the Day Before Sunset . . .

Anything of His

The Weeping-Crosses

The Toad-Stone

Precious, You Might Say

Trying to Remember the Right

The Second Line

Dancing to the Absolute

Vulnerable Gaps

The Groaning-Cheese

Mind the Gap

Maria’s Painted Doors

Walking Over the Floating

The Road from Progreso

A Holy Moment

Mixed Feelings

One Evening in Late Summer

The Lovely Legato of Giuseppe Verdi

Glance in the Shine

Never Let Her Go

Sister

The Weight of Leaves

Acknowledgements

For Olive

The Silk Road

It could be a bed, Amelie and her

lover, the man she met in the photo

booth in Paris, waking up in a tent,

the only thing between them and a

starry night, oh pleasure of pleasures,

their Rubayat, their Song of Songs

in the desert between the sufi Rumi’s

medieval town of Balkh and Herat,

city of miniature painters, whose

soldiers once sent their enemies

cosmetics and dresses, out of contempt

because they had never heard of men

in kilts, the fierce Ladies from Hell

rambling the moors between England

and Scotland, the trenches in France,

rustling lambs and slitting throats.

O lamb of God, the men of Herat

made their women cover their faces,

so many pleats and folds they couldn’t

see stars or feel the wind and sand

in their faces until the day the Taliban

went back to their mountain caves

and the veils came off, one by one, until

every bared face was radiant as pearls

irritated by layers of nacreous silk.

All is fair in love and war, is

the first proverb we heard in the

playground where the winner took all

my marbles in a game of pot and girls

chased boys for kisses and boys

chased girls and took down their pants.

Silk! they said then and the next time

it happened on country roads, in the back

seats of cars, as if girls with silk

panties were soft bumps in the road.

Silk, what shepherds feel in every

mountain pasture and field, under every

starry sky from Kandahar to Islamabad

from Beijing to Bridport, when they plunge

their hands in to help a labouring ewe,

what the lovers feel under and over

their bodies, what the stranger who

invites every woman he meets in bazaars

in Toronto, New York, London and Paris

to meet him on the Great Wall of China,

where he intends to lie them down naked,

women from every known desert from

Palm Springs to the Kalahari-Namib;

Muslims, Jews, Buddhist and Hindi

women with body parts from every shrine

on the Silk Road from then to now,

Marco Polo’s tea and oranges, noodles

and spices, bolts of embroidered

satin a mere bagatelle beside the silk

skinned Oriental women in his caravan,

all of them now or about to be mothers,

their legs spread apart on the same starry

night, so that men orbiting the earth

can see for themselves in the new

map of the known universe, worlds

and planets and galaxies of stars,

the only road left to travel.

Women in Black

Today the women in black stand silent

in the rain outside City Hall,

where a tree full of gossiping birds

made so much noise a council of war

called them The Women and had someone

saw through its trunk with a chainsaw,

scattering the birds and the homeless

men and women who slept in its shade.

The birds returned and the aldermen

hired a man to trap them in sacks

and hammer them until they were quiet.

Some rose up singing when they smelled

the hammer man coming. They swarmed

in black formations, agile as the skirts

of women who refuse to be caught.

The women in black wear white poppies

and they don’t say a word when one

old soldier wearing medals spits on

the sidewalk and another makes a fist.

They are used to this. It happens in every

city in the world where women wear black,

in Belfast and Kabul and especially

Tel Aviv, where some Arab and Jewish

women embrace one another as sisters.

The women are mothers and grandmothers

and aunts. They all have stories

they want to pass on. One remembers

the words to a song her mother sang

when the rain came down and she can

almost hear it splashing the leaves

on the tree that is no longer there,

while the rest of them move their lips

without making a sound. What birds

and women remember is the great fugue

in their blood, songs without words,

the same notes the deaf composer,

Beethoven, heard in his head. Do re mi fa.

They know how to come back to the place

where they started. So la ti do.

They remember the tree and the glory

of sunset, pink and orange, the cries of

hungry children, their open mouths, the

soft skin in their throats as musical

as the secret the women in black

keep between their legs, all of them

listening, open-mouthed in the rain

beside City Hall, when the birds return.

Tripping the Impossible

In Australia, it’s almost summer

and, while a boy makes his dying wish,

his pals toast marshmallows at the beach,

licking their sticky fingers and calling

the layers of burnt sugar underwear.

They all want the same thing, to remove

layers of silk and die in the soft bodies

of girls. In our hemisphere, on the other

side of the world, it is fall, and boys

their age are raking leaves into bonfires,

smoking some of them wrapped in comics,

daring one another to put their amorous

selves into pumpkins, cosy and warm as

a girl’s insides, somebody heard.

My son, who now has a daughter, is

making a boy out of clay to give me

for Christmas. This clay boy is sleeping,

his slender arm under his head, his

feet crossed one over the other, the way

youths sleep, as if tripping the impossibly

beautiful things they think of in dreams.

My son has given him pointy ears and wings,

so he looks like a lost boy, one of those

children who never grow up. When he gives

him to me, he will say, "Remember that time

in Florence when we stood in front of

the Donatello David and you said it broke

your heart to see boys arrive at the first

and last day of spring?" and I will see

the boy is him, asleep in the man he 

became, his penis covered with a leaf.

In Australia, the kids at the beach

are burying their fire in sand while the

dying boy reads the story of David, who went

to battle a virgin armed with a slingshot

and only one stone, knowing that if worst

came to worst,