Megiddo Junction:

                            Route 66 forks off.
West Bank: Jenin's just a stone's throw east,
half-bulldozed, curfewed by the IDF.

Assyrians, Egyptians, Ottomans, British,
all yomped through here. Slid their arms
round Israel's impossibly tiny waist.

Now iron corsets - Green Line, Intifada —
cinches waist to an hour-glass these lines in sand
run through. One click north, it's Armageddon:

camel's hump or monk's scruffy tonsure.
From the bald patch, look out where Jordan's
just smudged horizon: the Valley of Jezreel's

blunt with haze. Down there, all green bits fade.
It's 40 in the shade. There is no shade.

•

She unplugs the plastic tappet, glugs water
from its blue-ridged shell. Hot as hell, you unstick
shirt from skin, wipe sweat from inside straw hat.

Nothing said. Displacement activities.
Blind fingers trace words. This rock's
a palimpsest that's thirty cities deep …

Lizards skedaddle. Stop. Beadily check
you out; or drop to breathless reps. Press-ups.
Khaki fatigues merge with dust or dark.

Little sun-driven engines discover fissures,
skitter off on erratic missions into stone,
seeking tunnels, caverns, water-courses …

It all began round here, you think: Big Bang,
the One True... and then that other thing...

•

You watch as what slipped skin through rock ghosts back.
Now tiny restless dynamos materialize;
you see saurians play tricks with their stored-up thunder.

Basilisks. Blood cool from rivers underground,
stripped to nerve, low bump, mere lobe,
they outstare, throb with something ancient, limbic.

Your mind's on rifts, cracked stone, hind-brains;
things contrary, strange; cloven or twinned;

things winged yet featherless; mythic, primeval;
that crossroads where what slid, crawled, or crept
met the newly and clumsily bipedal.

Back at the car, you're already headed north.
A dragonfly shimmers on the aerial's stamen.
She turns the key; unwinds the road to Nazareth.

Travail

After the Instructions to the Pochtecas,
from the Mayan scripture Chilam Balam.

You are to wander,
entering and departing strange villages.
Perhaps you will achieve nothing.
It may be that your merchandise
finds no favour in any place.
Do not turn back, keep a firm step.
Something you will achieve: something
be assigned you in the fullness of the World.

•

And you.
(Always leaving, arriving, leaving.)
Don't get too comfortable.
Let's face it, the border's good as home.
Can't promise a life, just journeyman's wages.
Chin up, they say the next town
needs muscle, has friendly bars, soft beds
- the prettiest women this side of Hell.

•

Nothing here for the likes of you. Take off.
Don't let your shadow darken the door
of that girl with the eyes, the flashing smile.
Your wages are waiting with the agent
and the rest of the crew,
the ones getting nervous in the truck
idling where the road's already exhausted,
a stone's throw beyond the city limits.

Voices Off

Leuven

“The chit-chat of occluded voices
is a corollary of irony,”
she informs us from the lectern.
There's a certain chilly sensuality
about her dark-framed glasses,
the shift of her body against the restraint
of white blouse, tight black skirt.
French academics come and go,
talking of Lacan and Henry James.

The buzz-word here is acousmatics.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that
academic for voices off?
In the Beguinage: French cuisine, Flemish voices.
The Catholic University is all medieval brick,
and somewhere boarded-up in the mortar
the ghosts of Erasmus, Lipsius,
phlegmatic renaissance neo-stoics.

Afternoons we skive off, ignore
the arrows aimed at Varieties of Voice:
Third International Conference for Belgian Anglistics;
seek out beer and chocolates,
the ideal forms of blondes and brunes.

Let us pass over in respectful silence
what was brewed by Trappists,
merely drain the foaming trophy
won from this of all days;
give thanks to the chocolatier
who sweetened your Christmas dilemma,
left it wrapped in gold.

Examine now the ledger of life so far:
bivalves, pepper and lemon,
the shavings of salty ice.

Back in the Dutch barn of the Faculty,
dusk falls, papers overrun. Acousmatics:
the acknowledged expert from Paris or Texas
loads up her Powerpoint,
stares out at the ghostly plenary,
begins her disquisition on voices off.