John Mateer

On the pillow John Mateer's sleepy head
is a goldfish bowl aswirl with Venetian water,
and on that galleon, that luminous toy,
he is at the helm, telescope to his eye,
...

Even in an explosion
if you have the right shutter-speed: the shards of rock

- projectiles - will become fluttering leaves decorating an icy wind.
Autumn is everywhere. Autumn is your skin flaking,
...

She has full, soft lips and is beautiful.
How he knows she is beautiful who can say?
She may be the image of the Malay bride on the travel-guide's cover.
But she is faceless, not frightening,
...

The volcanic rock on my desk performs solidly.
I identify its presence.
It returns me to this room, this desk, this body.
I observe the rock. It is an eye heavy with silence.
...

Being foreign is the democracy that allows the Nigerian,
in all the accoutrements of a gangsta, to address me as brother

and offer a special discount to a nice place where the girls are all foreign
- Russian, Brazilian, Australian - and all speak english.
...

Praça do Comércio's green equestrian statue and ochre-yellow walls bob
behind us as we, in the ferry, are crossing the shaken light,
having ahead of us the bus ride, up past the limestone cliffs
of the high-rise estates and the blockhouses of the Cape Verdeans
...

You spoke my name in King João Library,
the hall closing in around us, the gilt-lined tomb
of a sinking carrack. According to my translator
in the preamble to reading your poems you envied me:
...

Valley of a thousand hills, green as the afterimage of blood!
did you not hear the poet's izithakazelo or the professor's ululating
responsive as the earth under our feet, as the rocky hills under an echo?
...

Near Lake Joondalup's untouchable burning whiteness,
midst the outer suburban industrial parks and contemporary pioneer homes,
on the dry grassy verge of Frederick Road, Wanneroo,
the old but still living tree that wasn't torn down in the early days
...

Behind the white gables of Perth Mosque,
around the corner from the block of flats where she used to live,

she who held my heart in her hands like an injured bird,
whose laugh tinkled like a meditation bell waking me,
...

We don't use the word 'exile' anymore,
despite meeting in the Mall of the Emirates,
that hyperbolic cave, ordering what is expensive
peasant food, while contemplating our prospects
...

Nobody believes me when I say this city
looks like Waikiki, the beaches curving away
under their wall of new hotels and
on the lone bare mountain, where a cryptic
...

Neither that album page, nor its pristine miniature painting
of a fabled Persian garden where plants bloom with human features,
nor that monochromatic landscape in Coetzee's Age of Iron
under which, as under a bloodied Oriental carpet,
...

When in the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela I will be invited
to hug, for good luck, the marble torso of the Saint,
I won't. Not for moral reasons.
...

The only voice to whom I'm open
is that — GHOST — between
the Spoken.
...

Doesn't all European thought
disappear into the Void
between Spinoza and Pessoa,
...

— a Persian carpet not in the Museu Gulbenkian

I'm afraid, a camel, luminous,
loping panicked away from the voice
asking: Your monster?
...

for João César Monteiro

Never an auteur, though sometimes ‘a João,'
of God, His Eye.
...