Spaced Spaceman © dave calder, Toulouse Press 1978, Hilltop Press 1995 Spaced © dave calder, Toulouse Press 1978 Uncollected © dave calder, 1989-99  |
SPACED
|
the planets, the people
with their parasited skin
their great molten hearts
who dance their whirling
egg-shaped orbits
and hunt for death in
the mouth of the sun.
their bodies came back but they didnt
their pupils had swollen to fill the eyesockets
they sat very stiff they were still staring
into the overwhelming tranquillity, the depthless
dark of those pools, on that planet where
the glinting birds flick and are gone
where horned white beasts invisible to each other
search through precious forests
for something they suspect to be themselves
and the looselimbed longnecked dappled
creatures that carry the souls of women
sway beneath a sprawling sun
the climb up here was hard and many died
and arriving, we found food even scarcer
and flying furry monsters a constant threat.
between each costly defence we still quarrel
about rank and tactics, fearful nonsense,
though most appear to like it better here.
but i cannot decieve myself. this climb was
mere pride, has solved no real problems.
we are no safer here at the thorny rose's heart
than when we were lost men in the grass
under dream interrogation
they found out everything
the secret training in tension conversion,
neurotic energisers, the complex rewiring
that had made him into a psychic bomb
fine, they said, you can go now - your only
punishment will be to live with it.
into the morning he carries himself carefully;
knowing he may murder on some small secret trigger,
rape on a simple signal or, for an unknown reason
explode in hiroshimas of the soul
burn in dachaus of the heart
she is wearing a dress, one of her few
i remember it from a warm day in the country
around her, the gusting refuse seems leaves
or softens in coloured blurs, out of focus.
a pack of wild dogs snarls around the corner,
i fear, i look away, she disappears.
she is wearing a palegreen dress, one of her few.
her hair is still long, though she cut it later.
across the street beneath the lightless lamppost
she stares up calmly at this dirty unlit window.
with desperate fists i smash the glass, shout at
moonlight. a cold wind snaps among empty houses.
she is wearing a thin dress, one of her few,
her lips are muted, her eyes are bright
a cat howls, a broken window rattles
i do not take my stiffening eyes from her.
she comes and lies beside me on the dusty shivering
floor. i dare nort move to touch her or see the room.
she is wearing a dress, one of her few,
i remember it from a warm day in the country
and i do not know which of us must wake to free the other
from this city deserted by the world and time
I looked at the corner
of the room: my shadow
stood there. The one who wants
to wrestle with, replace me:
but he was staring at the door
I had come in through.
He was expecting me.
And finally he left by that door
as if it led into a tunnel
I had never seen.
I continued to drink my tea.
What else could I do? While
the rival against whom I am powerless
stalks me blindly as I stray
into that exact place and time
where he will find me.
the river resurrects old bones and memories
what we have buried is curious to recall
a few are talking lazily beneath wide trees
the ice it seems is now receding everywhere
collonades and windmills rise from the endless lawn
after the chariots of fire more subtle forces
rule us: the sun's song and the many tides:
across the hillside fall the shadows
of clouds and silver dirigibles, drifting
like our days, these bones, in a wide calm river
everything was possible
we toyed with the tides
set fire to rainbows
swam among the clouds
built out of boredom
broke to feel an end
yet when the sunset comes
and then the moon
our wishing keeps this
bland sun in the sky
and among the leaping chaos
the games with space and time
I am seeking a rest that
our great success denies me:
the sweet slow
sureness of decay
after the space wars he could no longer stand
the ways of anything that lived or bred
made his religion out of stone and silence and
finally, fulfilling his communion, came
here, where, so far from stars or sun that
the great stones do not cast a shadow,
he walks among the vague green tinge
of gases, where no thing lives or dies,
drifts on as aimless as a silver ghost
until the heavy thump of his own breath and blood
affirms his inescapable humanity
his weakness, fear, his life so full of death.
unclean and terrified, he runs
back to the signal beacon at his tiny camp,
but, bounding crazily, his heart
burst. he had, perhaps, a tumour.
and the great stones do not quake
or shout or cast a shadow
as in his decaying flesh and stores
the dark seeds of life are spawned.
she tends gross tubers in a roselit gallery
picking off bright insects and devouring them whole
and when the brackish water comes, she clears its way
scraping in the sharp earth with twisted hands
her mother, who taught these rituals, now lies
wizened as charred wood, beneath the vast fronds:
her mother who had known the moon and bled for it
she offered to the plants and did not eat
and though that smooth slab set into the cliff
led, had said her mother, to outside and death,
she had been taught fiercely: the plants keep us alive
and felt this death a sign of their displeasure
she traps bright beetles, furry longtoothed bugs;
drowsy, drowned in humid roselight and ferny rustlings
while into the kernel, deep below the arid husk,
the tubers great teeth gnaw into the earth
who watched a room in redrimmed darkness die
fixed on coordinates he could never remember desiring
who moved in the dark spirals, the blurred constructions
emerging, snapped into place, in wheres without when,
in nows without there, in heres without then
who vanished to himself and reappeared
carrying out purposes forgotten or withheld
who shifted from every possible time or place
to find always another here and now awaiting him
who was a universe and all its parts and time
who was a hinge, a door, an eyelid
flickering
has come to here
a room ticking time
a warm soft and unspeaking back
another somewhere
on a visit
toying with the narrow
centre of a woodknot
he discovered a passage
through the cosmos
with one fingertip through
to the outer rim
he tickled the edge
of eternity
his hair fell out immediately.
a nearby spider dropped dead.
someone called to him, softly
from an empty room.
my mistake, he said, politely,
withdrawing his finger
bright with suns and stardust
'We came in peace for all mankind ..'
as the first act of insurrection
someone took an ounce of pyrolite
to module one mainpark after curfew
and watched by earthlight as the
old imperialist lie, the names
of the coarse warriors who
put it here, the name
of the corrupt
president
who sent
them
here
melted into the melting plaque
and when we knew it was the end
we drove out to where, centered upon
a vast saucer of deserted land,
the huge uncabineted speaker of
the interstellar telescope faced up
towards the screaming sky that night
and there we set up, plugged in,
and while some danced or drank
or fucked or prayed or killed
with the throb of our blood forcing our fingers
with the earth's current surging up and out
drowned in triumphant tidal rhythm
as each light leapt to greater darkness
we played while the stars burned
out
The Dwarf's Story
Looking back, I suspect that the
authority staged even our escape.
We were a nuisance of sorts, I hope,
and it was more convenient that we
should be run off than be killed.
Still, they made it look good,
firing after us till we made hyperspace -
but the blasts were just to frighten us
and no doubt the vidinews said that we
were traitors fleeing to the enemy.
The spacejump took us here, which
was also curious, for it was habitable
despite the lumbering beasts and frozen surface,
and though all our women died in childbirth
I cannot tell if that was also planned.
So here we stayed. There was no point
in going further, no way of going back.
Nothing lasts long on this planet and we
form no attachments to the natives -
even the race of superapes who have
more recently come to power are too large
and clumsy, childish, to talk to. They
cannot help and indeed would fear us.
They believe in many variations of
Science and Oneness, and play a complicated game
called Right or Wrong, which permits
ritual murder to settle their differences.
Such sports disturb us, as does also
the recent rise in radiation levels
which, though it makes us feel more comfortable
and even life up on the surface bearable,
cannot make us glad, we who carry
the error of our ancestors around with us
in shrivelled wrinkled frames, huge heads
and eyes that shrink from light.
I keep to my deep shelter, which looks
as much like home as I can make it,
re-read the classics and write poetry.
I can no longer say whether I have
achieved, or am achieving, anything.
If the apes invent a starship, maybe then
we might act, go back: to whatever
reception, to a more definate death.
Till then I devote myself to the meditation
of the crystals, of the smouldering stone,
of energy, and of the slow
waste of time.
A Ghost's Story
When we knew there were aliens
amongst us, might
even be ourselves,
we came back to our ancient arts.
Face dancers, shape shifters,
and those whose eyes
glinted out at us
from other bodies than their own,
forced us to look through flesh
into the driving
current of a form,
the essential colours of its energy.
More, we came to view all bodies
as wet cells, contained
by gravity, space and time,
charged with the force
of instantaneously alternating
life and death.
Despite knowledge
and our purges, we were overwhelmed.
Finally we retreated out of bodies
altogether, though some.
insecure maybe,
less learned or nostalgic,
moved into trees. And what the men-forms
call or think us
shows that they still
have not tracked us here, or maybe
they have forgotten both us and the war
as is customary
with barbarians.
We do not forget; but neither do we feel
defeated: we possess the planet freely.
and their confused
fearful currents
now seem less to us than animals or plants.
The Same Old Story
This was a small planet called Earth
like 47 other planets within the galaxy.
It was underdeveloped in technology
and short of raw materials, most of its people
went hungry and its overlords had turned
much of the northen hemisphere int6o a factory
whose antiquated methods were destroying
the health and food supplies of all.
Its people were simple, easily led, and could
have constituted no threat for many generations,
being engrossed in endless petty squabbles,
corruption and survival, so that their best traits
seldom found and never kept social expression.
Our agents sometimes stayed here temporarily
in the fight for freedom from the Imperium,
but whether the inhabitants knew of the conflict
or would have understood the reasons if hey had
is doubtful. Despite this, it was to deny us
even such crude defenceless shelter that the
imperial forces, in breach of the basic conventions,
set fire to it with solar flares.
The few survivors have nothing but fused soil
to farm, flee from contact, are dying desperately.
That they were crude and murdered each other is true,
but they had a childlike grace, a sense of beauty
and interested intellegences that were appealing.
The death of these peasants diminishes civilisation.
It is the corroded courtesy of history
to remember soldiers, their doings and their deaths,
but these who died in their peaceful occupation
of staying alive from day to day, on their own earth,
will be forgotten; the crime against them
ignored in cheap vidimix of starship conflicts,
obscured by the great events at the galactic core.
In conciousness of this we have erected
this monument, engraved these lines from
a poet of the great reconciliation:
'For too long our heroes have been killers -
the true heroes are the creators of life.'
The virus's story
You may think us an unimportant race,
small of stature, of no great intelligence,
but we think such comparisons not odious
but impossible; what we know we have
is a huge positive, revolutionary dynamism,
and our society leaps as one into
each new direction called or offered.
We breed with joyful prodigality but without
lasciviousness, and each new generation
maintains that adaptive trait, the ability
to learn new tricks to suit the times
that is the threadmark of their ancestors'
survival, rise and triumph - for we have
now penetrated most of this world, though there
are naturally certain climates that we find
more amenable, and though we have encountered
some resistance we feel that it must always
be the temporary product of fear or ignorance.
And we do not see you as alien, for in our
humble language we term you brother, host;
for we are all descended from the same dust,
spawned of the spermy comets, and our
lifethreads and yours are slowly intertwining
as your own once entered other hosts, and grew
in the first humid fluids of this world.
And what shape the future will form us into,
whether size will ever be important to our success,
as it was to yours, are stagnant thoughts.
What is necessary will be done.
Nor should you waste one cell-change
to speculate on meeting us, eye to eye,
in the course of the next million years.
For the moment, honoured hosts, we are
content, if not altogether pleased,
that we are no longer
beneath your notice.
The assassin's story
And then that sirian job, a neat
lasing of that pangalactic
corporation boss, that was applauded
on most 'free' planets, but led
to excessive reprisals and less liberty
the cause and effect were predictable.
this theorem of violence
has been proved repeatedly in history,
and it follows that one, if not all,
of the parties interested, were pleased.
but which desired, which chose to follow
that old model and for what ultimate end
is not my business: to seek the bottom
of such deep games is to drown
the terran overlords are devious, indefinate,
create confused futures that perpetuate
the fear of death and of each other that
characterises the killings of their race,
their hypocrisy and wavering consciences
what i do is more spectacular, perhaps,
but their people are murdered daily
by crude insensible laws, the blunt
instruments of the ministry of plans,
are trampled by the blind elephant of power
or die of apathy, of cruel jokes and of
tiny malicious lies as surely as
they had been shot or stabbed.
and whoever dies of whatever, some will
decide to call it good, some bad,
and their choice, of sides on this same coin,
is guided by self-ibnterest, real or imagined,
or simply posed for propaganda.
i hope that more sense will be spoken when
i am murdered, by others skill or my mistake:
my race has learnt indifference to such
distinctions, thinks them unimportant,
even meabningless: for either all killing
is good, or all is bad
or all is necessary; which is
an interesting thought to play with
while i sit in this small room -
in a slum, a mansion, a spaceship,
why be too precise? -
waiting for my next victim
who may be anyone, or myself
a transcript of the holograph tape
a cloaked man was climbing a distant mountain. she
watched as the distance got smaller and smaller in him,
then sat on the sofa with the houselights off
an extremely large egg came rolling towards her. she
sawed off the top and spooned out a beheaded
body in a green cape. she put a top hat on its head.
talk to me, she said.
a stream of ribbons two doves a rabbits paw and an
exiled king fell out. she cut two eyeholes and bats
flew out. she peeped inside. mushrooms were sprouting
on the neck. beyond them
a herd of bulls was grazing peacefully.
she put her hand inside and picked a mushroom. the bulls
began to charge. suddenly a man wearing a green cape
rushed forward and lured them away.
she stuck the mushroom in her hair. it began to whistle.
she fed it some birdlime. it laid a small egg in her ear
and hatched out several plots. there were lots
of cabbages in them, leaves like curling green capes.
the hat lost its top and smoke funnelled out. she dropped
in two teardrops and the fumes turned purple. they filled
up the small room for argument. she fell back on the sofa
plushing and panting. a green head snuggled up to her
with a detached expression. the body wandered across
absentmindedly. he pulled himself together. they embraced.
the curtains closed to tumultuous applause as the screen
showed the endtitles to the rustle of rising bodies as
she leant from the sofa and switched off the set