New Poems

R E A C H I N G   A C U P O N G

1

“Tonight we are travelling to Acupong …

Don’t fret,” you say. In that shack of a Cyber Café

you bang out for me a hasty message, which takes

what is either a short cut or the long way home

from the inlets of the Gold Coast, flung

through the finest atoms of light, pinging onto my screen:

the r on your keyboard’s lazy. The spider on stilts

so fine they are almost invisible, lumbers

across the screen, treads shallows of static, then bolts;

I imagine it from the underside, treading light.

The temperature’s rising, you say. Your shoulders,

you add, freckle-burned by Ghanaian sun.

This, while seven thousand miles back over the long camber

I hunch and cower my way from studio

to house, through that heavy veil of English rain

I must draw aside to find the bleached and latest town

you’ve reached. You’re far from home. Don’t worry.

Your very kindly absence keeps me company

by leaning into my desk-space, touching my hair;

it breathes there over my shoulder like the slow

lapsing of the Gulf of Guinea that lifts

the hem of the veil and brings very near

wafts of heat that for you are rather more than wafts;

it smiles, your absence, its hairfall drops. It blows in my ear.

2

Tonight the mozzies converge on Acupong …

I’ll bet. Like their programmed, always-hungry mouths

I think to penetrate that finely woven gauze

draped across your bed this moment. The once-in-a-lifetime-night

that swarms around your net can freeze

the hair of our lawn, at home. At home, the moths

succumb to the frost and I think of the word uxorious 

with which a friend described my attachment to you:

“…showing great or excessive fondness

for one’s wife.” Ignore all other implications beneath

the rough love of time and space. Whatever else, I like

the way in which these syllables haul

the debris of a fortnight of absence under

an umbrella of vowels from which they’d otherwise sprawl.

The temperature plummets. The plates stack up.

That trickle of sweat, between your shoulder-blades, drips

onto our frozen lawn, I swear it. I discern

with a certain sort of excessive fondness every drip

that penetrates to a burning island of green,

a burning, deepening, moistening island of green—

the frost is cruel, but for them. Much more than me

the starlings strutting on it are gregarious

and I, with great and excessive reverence, rechristen

the Wednesday into which your sweat-drops drip. Uxorious.

3

Tonight, no roads will lead to Acupong …

I fret. However pot-holed they might be

I cannot find them, lost beneath the magnifying glass,

my finger or nose on the map. So long,

so long, the beaten up track that does not lead to Acupong.

The place no search-engine will recognise—

did you mean, asks Google, acupuncture, acupoint?

The dropped, lazy r which meant you spelt it wrong

condemned it to a fiction, an unplace as graffiti’d,

as overrun with cockroaches and strays

as if it really existed, beyond jeep, diesel and entreaty;

perhaps it is the unplace where all misspelt words

end up like ghosts, blown with the dust devils

which scramble round corners, get whipped up

and spun with the dirt and a few dog-turds

a million dusty miles from Acrupong.

So I don’t learn the art of patience, but abide

with the great or excessive, inclined more to be pissed

than high-achieving, and, to be frank, to wear out

the roads on the map with staring. I wait

with this great or excessive fondness quietly

rolled between my fingers, smelt, thrown wide. You’re missed

and the rest is stasis, stacked plates and counting, until

the great sun on the other side of the dark

offers you back, dilated and tanned, to me and the frost.