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My Chosen Landscape

I am a continent, a violated geography,

Yet still I journey to this naked country,

to seek a form which dances in the sand,

This is my chosen landscape.

...

Sand dunes, interminable deserts, burning winds

the night temperature bitter, a land of grit;

and floating above me stars as violent

as fire balloons, tactile and brilliant.

The all-enveloping sky, a cloak of soot.

This is my story, my brief biography.

The sum total of my experience. I travel –

a compass useless in my useless hand –

through a sandscape, a singular topography.

I am a continent, a violated geography.

Restless in all this emptiness, I seek

a fellow traveller, search for a sign –

a secret handshake, a phrase, some unusual colour

like periwinkle, for instance, or bright citrine,

but the monotony of sand persists

and nothing improbable finds entry

into the appalling platitudes of speech –

the lingua franca of everyone I meet –

in this land devoid of flags and pageantry.

Yet still I journey to this naked country,

for something in its nakedness has a beauty

so pure it is as if I thrust a knife

into my immaculate flesh and drew it forth

without a drop of blood being spilled.  It is

abstract and invisible as air

this empty geometry, this ampersand

upon ampersand that leads me on

as if I were zero or minus sign,

through ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’,

to seek a form which dances in the sand

But nothing formal dances.  Only the wind

blows – unchoreographed – a floating ghost

across the dunes.  The sand molecular,

airborne and free, is faint with the scent

of absolute dryness, a small mineral smell.

And this almost scentlessness, this shape without shape

is a violated country, one in which

I am both exile and inhabitant

and though I would escape

this is my chosen landscape.

-pk page