The Goatish 'I'

I think of my veins blue as the sea, my blood a bowl of blue milk in the ocean.
I think of books that record the life-blood of generations and I read them
to see where my own blood will course, where I might end, the ends to it.
On a night, restless with the codes of the concierge's maze, I find myself reading V.S. Naipaul. 
I find myself turning to find what I might have forgotten in a book with a blue cover,
to a man who speaks to his father to find his own centre. 
I wonder why my hands with their bold blue veins have turned the pages of Naipaul's Finding the Centre.
Should his study of blood make mine pour?
 
I remember the shadow of the man I meet before this.
He is a rumour of secret visits to West Indian libraries
and I under the impression that this small giant wanted to hide from daylight,
an unpopularity I envy:  to be so big and so happy with being small.
I open Finding the Centre: A Prologue to an Autobiography
to answers of the blood in the mysterious shadow of the man
who wanders for the secrets of others in every detail, each detail followed by another
to find himself always at his beginnings, as naturally as the sun rises.

How could he lead himself from such fear of failure of what he should become?
And should we all come to ourselves this way–afraid to fail at being human?
Shall we have such success examining every detail? 
Taking from alternate names and pseudonyms of our genes, our inheritance of Naipal Nye Paul?
Perhaps by example we should pass from belief in the pretence of being one thing into another
where, seeing ourselves in those furthest from us, we shall find ourselves
in the goat that carries the human gene to express milk for the sick
and we shall see in the green fluorescent bunny halos to lift us out of darkness.

As brilliant goats, we will not only read books, we should eat them too
and, with our feet firmly on the ground, we will not be confused
to find erudition sitting with the natural occurrence of day and night, of earth with water,
to find them cruising together in a grey light, in rain washing what we ingest and expel.
We will not care to take a walk that leads nowhere, that fences the ground.
We could not be afraid of opening half lights with our muddy hooves.

With goatish water eyes we'll see the world under bent angles of light,
to see the comprehension of walking upright and the communion of our spirit.

If Naipaul, with his old giant blood, and the goatish-I should be standing on a jetty to discuss water business,
we would encounter our travelling shadows in their swift slow tour waiting like water,
like mutton birds migrating south from Siberia.
I'd say to him: 'I hope to see my friend of a few days, out of Africa
and circling the German Alps but making his way south too,
Will, with the death of his son and never even seeing the boy after that hitchhiking on a road from Lagos,
Will's soul mummified as if a wild beast had caught him, in the Alps, from behind,
on a night of ice storms, to set the fire-will in his name.

I'd walk wondering of Will and of the mutton birds caught in an Antarctic storm in a millennial Melbourne November
weary with the journey from Siberia and the updraft too unfamiliar
with Siberia still in their minds behind them,
the earth so spun around with arriving it leaves their carcasses for small humans to tower over. 
I'd wonder, while my mother grows old in a faraway sub-tropical climate,
thinking of her love for stories of superhuman women
in an Andrea Dworkian Womanland where they harvest men for their seed.
And what, I think, would such women be looking for in men's genes.

The big little son of Nye Paul would raise his eyes to the water's horizon for the wind,
for the lilting surface of water, the sound of trees, drifting voices,
the names of voices, their father's and mother's names, their grandparents' trails
from continent to island and back again, signs that they were there.
He, turning to eroded hills bone white in the midday sun working their way down jagged walls, inching edges to the sea
like crabs, their claws scavenging heat-dried flesh
on the shore, lovers shaking crumbs under gum trees, their fingers crisp as flies checking the freshness of lunch.

And I, mapping tides where they wept, where they broke the skin of pots bursting with feasts
where they stroked each other under petrified quilts and whispered like leaves,
their lips peeled back, the bones beneath their teeth little hills of white exposing spells to the wind,
their necks tilting at angles like tendons caught in traps.
Distracted by water, while V.S. wanders a different way into conversations on rituals of birth and belonging,
I look into the dipping surface to see who has stepped off land into water
without looking to see if their land-feet will sink them,
to see how near the edge of the jetty the dead can stand.

The lovers, new-dead arrivals, late from the hill without a source, try their dead tongues around conversations of the undead: 
'Let us read of floods, scrape the barbecue and count the digits of the dead', he says.
'But if the sky falls early again tonight...'
'I will drag nets,' she says, 'for horseflesh
and raise the moon on candles to draw giant moths
who, finding the correct season too far away in either direction,
tap the well of our shadows
for old leather waiting for the right hand.'

Goatish and heavy with milk, I let the fractured glitter of thinness take me.
I am squinting through the watery light of shimmer-travellers.
I am not surprised to see them wait for me to catch up with their long skeletal gestures,
not surprised to see them paused, waiting to look around at my thinness too.
We are standing on the jetty but we feel we are gliding through water,
surfacing every now and then to take a glimpse of a small island bobbing up and down on the horizon.
We stare to bring the island's place closer, our bodies not bodies at all
but travelling-things like sight, like thinking of the past, thinking of taste.

First published in a shorter form as The Wake" in Antipodes (USA) and in its full version in Wasafiri (England)