Victor Questel














Lines
(for Robert Lee)







Lines
(for Robert Lee)







Frames cracked by Lines
of doubt
hold the cleft note that is blown
as you make that journey across this
blank
knowing that drawing the map is more important
than simply
journeying.

Stone. A slate that is wet
invokes a child’s memory
of magic that vapours the mind;

Jumbie, jumbie;

perhaps
because it takes more than hope
to smash an image across these lines,
moving within like retreating rituals
erasing growing tiredness.

Articles of faith are not enough
as the hand that writes makes an arc,
a cave that you long to retreat to;

pure mist,
as you follow the tracks cut,
yet
tracing new lines. Watch as the scrawls
mounted like any bois-man’s stick
following the craft of the hawk
and the call of the Jumbie
bird,
circling.               Your head is gathered in cloud.

It burns. It becomes the sun
and
only the raised finger to Arima
dares point at you now.

Shaping has risen in stature,
and again you ask,

how to be a Moko Jumbie without becoming stilted;
stone the blank with
stares as
tension rolls beneath the rocks of things
as you track the splitting image of struggle,
the next man’s dream in print
but not what
you intended.

The slate is dry,
blank. Write.

The lines bridge
the cracks between the syllables,

the mist of collapse,
the need for height
as sprawled to a crab’s crawl
you tread the eye’s vision. Dream.

The blank turns to stone,
sounds fall again
from your swollen crutch of words
as the cave screams
as from the window of the bird’s eye view
the bullock's hump looks
normal,
all things that are humped
level of to their own
lines.











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