Frank Harding

Frank Harding resides in Ayer's Cliff, Quebec

State of Grace

This is what is left - a broken whistle
made like a clay idol, souvenir of Peru
and other days, before she lost all and everything.
There is a book! But it's last year's horoscope for Libra.
She's a Gemini. The television hisses and flares French
infomercials and incomprehensible soaps and finally
snow as she drifts in and out of sleep.

I see her every Tuesday, a little ritual after taking my medicine
She waits all week for this, and if I fail to appear she calls to weep
and berate me and, and as the week comes round again, implore. She is my friend
though I can hardly recognize her now. Speak to her and it's like speaking aloud
in an immense lightless hall. You can feel the emptiness, hear the void. Her eyes
look past me, as though the angel of tomorrow stood at my back.

Her Johnny's gone, with their daughter, remarried and living well,
his health returned. He's done with the juice, with the junk and blow,
holding his father's job at Cascades, the union card and dental plan, the SUV
and trophy wife. Grace kept the parrot and dog but both are now long gone, sacrificed
to the coke bugs burrowing invisibly below her skin, shed with their mites and nematodes,
Sometimes there is a new boyfriend snoring noisily in the other room.

Thus I came to sit one day across the burned and cracked formica waiting for coffee
and listening to the litany of persecutions - the witches stealing her urine, the plot to install cameras in her eyes for the training of police-cadets, the hidden microphones, when there came stirrings, coughs, the toilet flush, and the latest rubbed-out looking lover wandered into the kitchen, mumbled and poured he last of the coffee into a grubby-looking cup. She began
"This is Gaetan. He's my new boyfriend…"

and he spat out in fast crude French: "I'm not your damn boyfriend. I've got a wife waiting for me at home!" I gaped. Grace crumpled like kleenex in a thunderstorm. Her face twisted with pain and the sobs came. Gaetan's twisted with disgust, his eyes cold stone
"Calvaire!", he swore, and began to pull on clothes crumpled on the floor. I could smell
rotting teeth from across the room. I stared at him . He stared back, pulled on his boots, stood and clomped out the door, slammed it hard and stomped down the stairs.

Grace weeps quietly now. I squat beside her chair and put my arm around her shoulder. Convulsive sobs. There there. Utterly inadequate sympathy. She does not notice. I dare not
look at the approaching day with its pitiless winter sun. It is the broken whistle on the sill
that stares blankly back at the sky, older than each of us, far from its home. I release Grace
and pick it up, brush off the dust and put it to my lips and almost blow it. Instead I put it back,

afraid of disappointment.

"Much Obliged"

I ask you bring me back to life, breathe on me

so I may breathe, with tiny words make world enough

to wake me - but I must ask before I leave

- why do you care? Why would you? Why should you?

While years pass by like highway shrines and dark nights

grow still darker, while I wait for nothing and dream

to pass the time, dream that I have asked you

long after you have moved on, to wake me, to wake me up

in darkness to the living world, where your warm breath

stirs my heart to beat again - but this is mist

and I dream alone, and you do not really care, and words

make nothing worth singing - they only make the song.

© Frank Harding 2002

"The Dark Humour"

The taste of poison lingers

it comes back in the sap of my bones

galldark bile reaching into everything

and I know I have done this to myself

but forget when, or hope so, or look away

and there should be something one could do

to throw the world away, the old one anyway

maybe there is someone who will give me

a ticket on a starship, or a rapture

to lift me naked into the sky

at the end of days.

and the world begins again -

the same one, fortunately, and the saucercult seat

that would blast me into someone else's heaven

the magical solution to my failing system

is crap, worthless wasted work.

I have poisoned myself

and I am poisoning the world -

it keeps the world away like yesterday

and the people who live there who love me

are stung with my venom afloat in the air.

© Frank Harding 2002

"Dreaming"

I found myself in the body of a murderer

after the fact, desperate, looking to hide

the bits and so ashamed, so ashamed,

lying just a bit to everyone I met.

She was beautiful, decapitated, simple,

and gentle and innocent though she’d had

a rough education. I taught her what

no one should ever have to learn.

Reader, my mind is too small and I

am too selfish to make a decent prayer.

"Brief"

I have no fear of whiskeyjacks or jets or snow,

things that have their home in the sky.

It is the earth that clutches me, that waits

for me to lie down and feed its seeds.

My home is there finally, a thin white line

in limestone strata, a neocene fragment

to love the fearful home - granite hills

and dark ravines, tectonic moans and

pulsings, holding, a lover never spent,

a mother in constant labour. Peaks thrust up

and wear away, and the things I love the most

are those most awful and enduring.

© Frank Harding 1998

"Andromeda’s Chains"

You forged them. I smashed them

and now she floats far away

at the edge of the southern sky

where even winged feet on

mirror warriors cannot fly.

My chest should never have been opened.

I am a thief of eyes and I can’t bear it.

I turned my family to stone and thought I’d won.

Now astrophysicists make photographs of what I’ve done

and her spiral ghost is everywhere admired.

In books they name my name and call me hero

but I have left a woman stranded in the sky

so far away that when they first found something

beyond the universe it was her shade - and they

see light - a whole new galaxy of suns.

"Sap"

I remember being a kid walking in the cool

early night along the tracks

beside the still black lake and hoping

and wishing simultaneously that I was God’s

one chosen prophet and unblemished son

with the sum of all wisdom neatly written in my mind

in a language I could not understand, only speak…