After the wedding comparing notes with
Cousin Elspeth and Cousin Caroline
about our childhood bareback riding
on the Kaiwaka farm –
How, fallen with your
10-year legs did you get back up
even supposing he stood for you?
Cousin E remembered vaulting from the back
of her pet pig.
I used the ruts worn deep
by the cream sledge – stood him in the hollow
and leapt from its edge.
Elspeth
and her sister, blonde babies
under the trees I climbed –
wooden veranda
hot dry garden sheltered by macrocarpa
dogs panting in shade
my face black
from the summer burn-off.
In sleep I still trace those tracks
below gum trees
skirting the swamp
through bush to that pool of pools
where the small brown fish suspend themselves
in shafts of light.
My feet sink
midstream in heaped silt
clouding the flow.
Water had cut its way
through black rock greened with moss
down to that glassy stillness overhung
with trees.
In the rock cleft
a deep hole water-worn and cold and dark –
I caught the eel that lived there
its sinuous spirit.
In recollection summer is for ever
renewing itself even in the thickest
leafmould shade.
It draws a life
from heat in the ploughed field
where I gathered fossil gum
or in a hayfield
or in sunlight above the flame
above the dam.
Cousin Elspeth, Cousin Caroline
cantered bareback
fell
(years after me) from the same horse.
Weddings are full of God and the Word of God
and the word God. I wonder what they mean.
To be one with your body, your body one with the world –
more than a marriage, it’s a consummation
bracken and oil-flame like red cellophane
flapping on the hill-slope.
Eden
won’t ask you back, you must make your way
in dreams, by moonlight, or by the broad light of day.
There was another stream, a creek
on the far side of the road
where the old house had been.
It ran through reeds
silent.
The moons repeat themselves
the moreporks retort
the eel and its sibilants
are fluent
an old chimney stands.
It’s not what the landscape says
but the way it’s said which is a
richness of saying, even of the thing
said –
that finely articulated slope
a few words at the water
the breathy manuka and the precise
pernickety ti-tree
a long last sentence of cloud
struck out by the dark.
After the wedding
I lie in darkness
I see something that might be myself
step out for a moment.
It makes the moon
look at itself in water
it makes the stars
gaze.
It hears a nightbird and something
that rustles
in reeds.
mirror to the mystery
mirrored.
Break it
(the mirror)
the Supreme Intelligence
is always silent
and death will come
in the guise of just this stillness
or another
but that was always the case.
‘Marriages are made in heaven’
– not so.
We marry to be nearer the earth
cousins of the fur and the stalk
talking together
that brown water reflecting
these green hills.
Remember writing a story ten
years ago ended driving a
van ‘The Magic Bagwash’ north
of Auckland with the motto
‘Everything comes out White’
parking on a coarse mat of
grass under pohutukawa
listening to waves flopping
and sighing those days when
Joni Mitchell sang ‘Clouds’
and we marched for peace – just
a fiction but now like
something that happened
‘really’ to someone really
young, giving it away
cutting his losses. You know
how it is the human
spirit keeps on breaking
out but it was looking down
the long empty beach from
the van with its motto
under pohutukawa gave that
perfect past tense to what
the waves were saying.
He liked to put it on record – a dream of jungle,
red loam, still water, alligators basking,
their ruffled brows done out in green designs.
Cats in the garden woke him. He slept again
and dreamed a word-rejoinder to his dream –
woke laughing and forgot it. Dream One remained.
Woken into his dream he’s naked in an upstairs room.
Trees on the high far slope show no signs of spring
but the sky shifts, the air promises something – a lifting
of the heart. He kisses a thigh where it joins a crotch
first right, then left, hair-springs touching his cheek.
She smiles an inward, languid smile. He pushes on
Up the valley into the dream of the dream of pleasure.
Landed in Amsterdam he slept in the airport lounge
waiting for an onward flight. The huge round orange lightbulb
over the tarmac was the Holland sun through fog.
Where was the black box? He could paint Van Goghs in his sleep
or slide in A4 blank and bang away at dreams
of the freckled lakeside lady her sky on a spike.
She was wild with wanting, but only to go down on paper.
That summer so many dreams like cars on a rail
drawing alongside, you climbed in and pulled away
or let it go, there was always another the same
unlike the London Tube and they ran all night
Sloane Square to South Ken where he missed the last
on the Piccadilly Line and took an actual taxi –
anticipating Paris, remembering Los Angeles,
living in Auckland, but only by word of mouth.
What he always wanted why should he argue it was
what they called the real because he saw the rock
in the word and the moss around it, water running
over the green beard, and if it was a Zen Master
spoke out of the dark deep hollows among roots
of ancient trees that was something of himself, something
for the child beyond the dream who could smell leafmould.
So he typed his letter about visiting the snake-house
the snakes seeming to look right past the faces
looking at them looking. He climbed the stairs with her
inside the greenhouse and she photographed his face
looking down among tropical flowers, admiring her.
He thought maybe his face fell forward into folds
or was that the dream? She never sent the pictures.
Looked at by any standard she was beautiful.
We live in a gamy world. Yesterday he read
it was Radiguet said real poets have their own voices
and prove it by imitation. You remember the review
of two women writers, one English and obese
the other American and anorexic – they both looked out
from under her left breast when he took her clothes off
and lay down on the brilliant Indian bedcover
under the slatternly light. How he wanted her,
how he had her, that’s not told in their stories.
The wind in the garden blew as if nothing had happened.
Eden Park
Gathering under a hill
under banners
many
being part of many
and waiting.
Up there
the bridge squad
the airport obstructors
waving and leaving.
Here
the gangs leading off
under shields and helmets.
How long since this
whatever it is
so squeezed your lungs and heart
so choked your throat?
*
Look to left or right of your subject
not at it directly.
A balloon sails over the park
bearing a name: BIKO.
The street rises and falls
the many grow more.
In all this movement
watch your feet planting themselves
one in front of the other.
In all this noise
listen to yourself chanting.
Here in the stills
our mouths will be black and white
and wide.
*
With one voice and
fifty thousand mouths
the park is singing.
*
No poem is ever so much
about an action
as the batons pretend.
A block away at a signal
the metal blue and visors
are closing.
Now maybe it’s time
for the reign of stones.
You see how it is
out of something like shame
wanting to dig down
and find yourself in fear.
Long forgotten
this hurt of men charging
knees boots fists elbows
and bones.
No reason to be solemn because
they’re whacking your head
with sticks.
Interrogate
your bruises.
Demand
they give you a name.
Bastion Point
It has many tongues and many children
who sit around it singing.
To put it out you put in
two hundred men in metal blue and visors
with truncheons. It’s happening now.
Arrest the fire, put it in handcuffs
carry it to the cells, bring it before the Court.
Give the fire a good stiff sentence.
Will houses go up on Bastion Point?
Will they go up in flames? The fire
has many tongues and many children.
In my game (and yours, reader) it was always the Frogmen
had clever theories. We did the dirty work
using the English language like a roguish trowel.
Tonight, two rubberised heads have set their Zodiac on course
from Okahu Bay. Past the Container port,
around Marsden Wharf, they’re ferrying a transitive verb
called Bomb. In a hired campervan a man and a woman
smoke, check their watches, and bicker.
Turenges don’t make it right, and anyway
the name is false, like their Swiss passports.
Half of Auckland, Dominique argues, has taken their number.
She’s exaggerating of course. He refuses to panic.
A beautiful night. You can see the lighthouse light
on off Rangitoto, and an undercover moon
casual among clouds over North Head. Here come
the rubber boys back in their puttering Zodiac.
Remember, reader, poems don’t deal in fact –
this is all a bad dream in the Élysée Palace.
Now scatter – it goes like the Paris Metro, according to plan.
Soon you will hear explosions. Someone will die.
More than a ship will founder. And the theory? Ah, the theory!
Dig a hole for it with your English trowels.
Twirling an angry necklace on her fingers under the
lamp she was saying she couldn’t stand her
teachers or her mother or her life and on the other
couch her mother who she said had sulked all
afternoon was saying ‘Why hasn’t anyone any
pity for me?’ and that she was so tired
she could scream and scream. Sorry for them both I said
nothing, knowing if silence wouldn’t help
it couldn’t make anything worse. Impossible to read
while the air was so loud with their angers.
One channel upstairs was offering a Midland saga
of poverty and heart-break, the other
a Californian police drama with jokes and canned
laughter. Then the row stopped. They were gone each
to her room and I could hear a tap dripping, and the cat
snuffling after fleas, and a car cruising
down the Crescent, and what might have been stifled sobbing from
behind one of those closed doors. I know how
Passion always gets a good press and why it should be so
but have you ever thought of Reason as
the neglected child of our time? The cat has come to rest
on my lap and my ears are growing out
like vines into the spaces of silence beyond the pear
tree in blossom between the dark houses.
The tomb of the unknown soldier, le tombeau
du soldat inconnu – London, Paris, and I guess
Arlington and elsewhere, but this guerrilla fighter
nameless in a check shirt, there’s no tomb for him.
In a million stills he flinched from the levelled revolver
of the chief of police. Last night on television
he died again, falling back in a sitting posture,
then toppling sideways spilling blood on the street.
He’s been dying like that in public for more than a decade.
And the ones with back-to-front collars they’ll tell you
‘He’s in heaven now, he’s with God his Maker’ –
and the ones with shaven heads and saffron robes
they have their mysteries too – ‘This world’s an illusion.
Everything is spirit.’ I say the poor bastard’s dead
and what’s more mysterious than that?
Gone. Dead
and no bugles. What if that tomb burst open
and out the Unknown marched at the head of a column
soldier after soldier down the Champs Élysées
proclaiming the end of war, the end of a world –
would he wear the face of the guerrilla fighter?
To be stuck on this twig in the universal wind
whining for answers! Listen out there – you hear it? –
that silence beyond the silence of the stars?
Ludwig had a face like mine. He thought that words
wouldn’t solve the mystery, they were the fucking mystery,
and you could thank God for it if God was one of your words.
I’d thank Ludwig for that but Ludwig’s dead.
I remember dark clouds banking up over Paris
and a beautiful face in rain that wanted to speak
and I too wanting – we were silent as the stars.
It was something that didn’t happen, like the gun that wasn’t
deflected, like the rope not cut from the wrists
of the man in the check shirt who didn’t walk away.
In words these things that didn’t happen happen.
I see him lead his column down the Champs Élysées
past a café where I sit with the beautiful woman
who didn’t say a word, under a louring sky.
Notre Dame sets sail down the river Seine
on l’Isle de la Cité, biggest of Paris barges,
fired by a million candles, a million prayers,
a cargo of souls with one-way tickets to heaven.
God sings in the choir and whispers in the crypt.
He knows the name of the soldier in the tomb,
he knows the language of love she didn’t speak,
knows more than enough, that’s why he hides his eyes
tired in the mornings, looking out over the square,
limping on cobbles, sheltering under bridges
from this unseasonable rain.
‘Dulce et decorum …’
‘Mort pour la Patrie …’ I see them setting forth
in columns splendid to the north, and east of north
through wheatfields down the valley of the Meuse
through latesummer forests, across the crops of crosses
(black iron, white wood), through campsites along the river,
through village squares past monuments bearing their names.
My death sits at his table in the Champ de Mars.
The one who keeps his silence keeps his head.
A dream of Paris, someone calling his name,
dark skies, wide streets, the mansards glistening black
on the hillslope rising to the Sacré Coeur,
in Montparnasse a street-organ, a beckoning girl –
however it came to him Horváth woke up to answer
the call of his future and died in summer thunder
that cracked a branch down on his playwright’s head.
L’amour. La mort. City of love and the dead.
His unwritten words are locked away in marble,
to rise at a signal, a thundercrack, a bugle,
to march in columns, watched by our silences.
Here now’s your bed, flowered paper, windows opening
to a narrow balcony over the Rue Madame,
rain still falling on the yellow gravel
of St Sulpice. Turn off the light, shake up
your pillow, imagine this sleep to be your death,
this room your tomb, this rain falling for ever,
the Seine flowing, traffic on the Boulevard Saint Germain
endless, the cafés noisy. A bullet in the brain
is only the end of a story. It starts again.
You know of course the saddleback’s a kind of bird
the hatchback a style of car. Things known to us
and things not known are equally often surprising.
Suppose it’s true our planet and sun are on course
to vanish in a black hole and still you’re refusing
because of something said on Thursday. Will it be loud
as we rush to the last implosion? Will it be long?
This is a lecture on darkness O dark dark dark
I will take you into the dark. Turn down the lights
while I project my slides of paintings of darkness,
umbrageous monochromes. Listen while I read
poems of the night. I tell you light falls from above.
I tell you we all come out of the dark of the womb
and go back through shadow to the darkness of earth.
In the caverns of the ear you’re attending to my silence.
In the black of your brain the light of my life burns clear.
Professor Moon is walking on the face of the waters.
The quick brown fox jumps over the over. What
a lazy dog. Clean bowled. Looking down the vista
of the Vistula I came up against a cliché. It was
squinting into the sun where the brown fox had run.
Only Clap Cleanser will scour you a clean bowl.
Now is the time for all good moon to come to the aid of …
Moon? Did you say moon? Hurry up please, it’s time.
In this photo the Squad in blue metal and visors
are gathered around like wasps. That’s a wrist they’re breaking.
At the picture’s edge that’s me, waiting to be next.
Whoever dislikes disorder must like the Squad.
When they break a wrist it’s always for the best.
At four-thirty he rested elbows in sunshine on the sill
of his office window. A woman walked down the drive
and another walked up and both of them were pregnant
and they smiled as they passed like craft exchanging salutes.
The poetry room has no doors and they’re all open.
You can’t get in by applying or asking for a ticket
but once inside everything’s as it should be. Marvellous.
And you never open a book. Remember that character
in a French novel who thought so much of England
he never went there – just dined on beef at Cherbourg?
How could real England match his imagining?
The poetry room’s like that. You walk home whistling.
married one
fathered three
travelled far
wrote (say) a round
dozen
died and
*
mangroves
moongroves
salt on a light wind
rattling
cabbage trees
blinds
and on a bland night
broadcast
a dog
two moreporks
a nameless night-shriek
a million-piece
insect orchestra
*
green dark
green
and the moon still
in water
on water
in a glass by the bed
shakes at a
ghost-step
*
all this sounding
silence
nothing changed
fifty years
turning on itself
in sleep
*
such a long way
to come back
was always
that
summer
even in rain
on a sack
stock-still
astride
the grey pony
above
the brown dam
*
what lays the stone
stare
down
thunder
and a bitch of a
non-existent
backward dog
go bite your tail!
*
and all the time
it goes
greening down slopes
trees a decade taller
a decade broader
and yourself
one fuck nearer your last
rising to look at
a white cloud’s lovely
satisfied / self-satisfied
trailing
over its earthly mirrors
*
along a ridge-top
threading
among sky and cloud
(who rode to heaven
on a horse?)
young head-in-air
astride the grey
pony
above
the brown dam
*
*
breaks as always
all over
another sunday
here is heaven
take off your
clothes and
lie down
prepare for
(again)
takeoff
The dead don’t write
poetry have no need of
it no matter who
it was spoke through
the grills of the night
sky when no breeze blew
out the candles
of the stars you were
alive it was one
incandescent
airy arrow over
the city and out to
sea all lights and
engines and the roar of
waters and I was away as
ever over
seas in my flying
chair taking my pre-drink
drink writing on
the head of a pin good-
bye again. Goodbye.