by Patrick Warner

How could he remember; how could he forget,
his stock that had fattened on little but lies,
his stock that would never make it to market.

And how they might have, had he heeded advice,
had he listened to sense: to be both drawer
and drawee, they said, will earn only disgrace.

Who should he blame; should he blame his mother
who could not only conceive and bring
a child to term but raise it without a father?

What a mess, and now all his scheming
would not bring oysters, would not bring bacon.
But then, wasn't that the nature of dreaming.

The thing must be bought without inspection;
you must be one caught in the middle
between ironical disbelief and pious devotion,

conniving with mantras of please the pigs:
Oh Lord, abrade my will to finest sand,
search out my pride, blast my parts to slag,

send me as ballast to Van Diemen's Land;
en route let me double as litter for dogs
they are shipping to hunt the great wild

boar, first brought by Captain Cook. Mr. Boggs,
the First Mate, spends the whole time shaving
and rubbing oil into his muscled legs,

or leaning over the starboard railing fishing
for long snouted fish he calls wrasses and grunts;
these he barbecues on deck before washing

them down with home-brew lager. He wants,
he says, only to retire and grow pig face–
as if saying this makes him seem less ignorant.

I would have read his ignorance as disguise
had I known the morning we ran aground
that we were not lost but in the right place

and that there was nothing sinister or underhand
about it. Imagination is not navigation,
and Pig Island will serve as Van Diemen's Land;

a place between disbelief and devotion;
a place where we carve out a language
some will call nonsense, a devolution;

a place whose modus operandi is as much
to confound as enlighten; a place where
there is no poverty at all in being rich;

a curious place where it's winter in summer;
where horses gallop and jump, without
ever bringing their four legs together.

Mother, before when I blamed without doubt,
I now can only doubt why I blamed
and by this curious path walk into the light

of your presence again, the frightful calm
that trailed about you like the fragrance
of the arum lily. To remember this is a balm,

which is a curse, because I remember that once
to cure a melancholy, on which I had fed
to bursting– my belly blue white as a louse–

you laid your hand on the top of my head.
It was August; you wore a summer dress
the colour of a hog, or hickory nut,

which afterwards bore the imprint of my face.
There, there you said. There, there, my pet.
Never repeat yourself. That's my advice.

Remember there's virtue in learning to forget.

Patrick Warner lives in St. John's and has published poetry in a variety of periodicals and newspapers: TickleAce, The Fiddlehead, Matrix, Signal, The Sunday Telegram (St. John's), Poetry Ireland Review and Metre (Ireland). His first collection, All Manner of Misunderstanding, was published by Killick Press in the spring of 2001.