The Lefka Tree & New Aural Fashions by Mark Sargent
THE LEFKA TREE
I. “We’re all waiting for quitting time”
The guy with a fistful of grease stroking that tractor,
those Pakistanis lugging sacks of olives outta the orchards,
even, calm, revealing nothing
they stare as you pass,
bees, sparrows, those eagles screaming through the blue
are all waiting
and Bobby Bales, how he got from that cute photo in the high
school year book to the angel of death in Kandahar is one
miserable Odyssey that couldn’t wait for quitting time,
just picked up his tools and headed south.
Mud igloos with a hook on top so you can pick them up
with a crane and move them around,
this was the idea pitched to me today.
The guy had never asked himself why one would want
to move around a mud igloo, but the kicker was
you needed 25 guys busting ass for three days to make one.
Sheeeeit, I was reaching for my check book, damn,
opportunity like that doesn’t come ‘round very often.
Oh, and they’re really waterproof.
What else?
Well, I’ve got this huge dead branch dangling
over my caravan. I look up, way,
Oh fuck, that’s a sword of Damocles, what’s the plan?
I don’t have one, but I thought of taking a shotgun
and shooting that bit that’s holding it up.
But won’t it crash down right on yr caravan,
I mean, your permanent place of abode at this moment?
Yeah, it might, but maybe it won’t?
Okay, but I’d get the wife and children out of it first.
We watch his wife and two children drive away.
What’s with the car?
It’s the gearbox. First and second are just about gone
and there isn’t any reverse. My mechanic says
it can completely breakdown at any moment.
Jesus.
We’re dreaming big here in the old country
and improvising with what the wind blows our way.
All this stuff is going to come together
as soon as I get plan, I need a plan.
But then it was quitting time
and we got high and drank beer
and the night birds
began to sing.
2. Wind off the sea
An ant has perished
amid the rustle of life
beneath the tree.
The Damocles branch
still dangles.
All manner of infant mammal
plod about or whimper and cry
within the curtain of muffled clatter
of leaves adjusting to wind
and still
there is no plan.
It is not future uncertainty that paralyzes
but the unrelenting sameness of the past,
for all the hubbub and motion
there are no departures or arrivals,
only the minor mathematics
of labor and commerce:
a kilo of this, five Euros of that,
fifteen hundred kilometers South
of Bucharest the tribe is bumping
against its shabby limits
and still
the chickens come home to roost
with all the exquisite design,
fragility
and lack of meaning
implied by an egg.
3. The Kung Fu master has no ride
The branch of Damocles is done.
We waited and a man came,
an actor/acrobat who saw the problem,
he backed up to give himself room
and just ran, barefoot, at the tree and up it
to that first branch 4 meters off the ground
and up he went and detached the branch.
Damn, I missed it.
And, I’ve got a plan.
What?
Yeah, I’m the man with the plan.
As opposed to those running the country?
Yeah. I’m doing farm animals.
I got three little pigs, two sheep
and I’m getting two cows.
You ever worked with animals?
No, I don’t know anything about them.
I’ll just learn as I go.
You certainly will.
There were three sheep but
we lost one of the them,
it got tangled in its rope and strangled itself.
So we cut it in half.
Josef held its rear legs apart
and I just went down the middle
with a chain saw.
‘Sef was covered in blood.
Once again, I missed it.
Yeah, but you can eat it,
we’re roasting it tomorrow.
And after lunch there’s a Kung Fu seminar.
Of course.
Next day we arrive midst a huddle of men
trying to diagnose a motorcycle’s illness,
something about the oil, the kickstart but
then a growl, a grumble and Takis roars up the road.
A ewe, not so pungent,
the best lamb of the year,
and there in the great shade
a dozen of us tuck in with vigor
till we are heavy with meat.
So what about the Kung Fu?
He called, he can’t make it,
the Kung Fu master has no ride.
I said, Okay, but the pot’s on boil.
Ah grasshopper, may all our cryptic utterances
squeegee away the condensation of illusion
and may the donkey of good fortune
always be tied in your orchard.
Nevermind the martial arts, we walk through the fig orchard
to the beach, the sun flashes off the churning waves washing
great stretches of empty sand and
over the hill come two fire planes roaring,
huge lumbering yellow swallows swooping over the sea to drink.
Somewhere near is burning, the planes return every ten minutes
arcing over the blue, pounding along the waves then laboring up
barely clearing the eucalyptus trees along the shore and the boys
are manic in the surf and radiant in the September light.
Life’s too short for idylls, we snatch these foaming moments
on the curl, even the children are too old for innocence.
We float in the luxury of the sea
yet always the waves push us towards the beach,
the lies we find ourselves leading,
beknotted with so many
everyone pulling in another direction
yet the rotation of things churns on:
every year the turtle people show up,
the animals breed, the tree grows,
the plans,
our gestures fall short of the fatal.
March-September 2012
NEW TECH: AURAL FASHIONS™
“at frequencies only clothes can hear”™
Which ain’t just for dancing, no,
yr pants be groovin’ just sitting down, y'all,
and that muthafucking shirt is pulling in Radio Mozambique
like a dog recycling the sonic geography into T-bone technology
something you can sink canines into, that tears when you twist,
I mean get yr neck into yr eating, flail & growl & do yr worst
cause yr socks are tuning in to the goddamn Crab Nebula,
the recurrence of the carrier wave can be ridden wearing these duds,
I shit you not, megahertz o mutable sensation straight from the
helium rich torus, gamma rays o joy flooding through yr knicks, oooouu
check it out, yr threads got greater fidelity than you and all you gotta do