Death, you clever bugger
who would have credited you
with such finesse!
Your shadow passed over me
and took instead
Clodia’s white pigeon
that used to peck her fingers
and warble obscure reflections
among her vines.
There he lies
dried out
feet up
weightless in summer grass.
And look at her tears!
Venus and Cupid
are moved to join her in weeping.
Congratulations Death –
you’re an artist.
You know just how to strike
and where.
Had I been the one
called down that dark road
no such flood
would have followed me into the night.
Friend Flavius
these breakfast silences
won’t keep you out of my report.
Nightly your squeaking bedsprings
her moans and your grunting
give me a ball-by-ball
on your performance.
Are you content with these
as spokesman for the team?
Speak up, Flavius.
My sports page goes to press
in half an hour.
Verania
mother-met brother-hugged
handing out duty-free packets
still jet-lagged and already talking
of your return
to Spanish lovers
the London theatre
hitching down the Rhine –
oh my dear
scatter-brained
clatter-tongued
Kiwi kin
Catullus groans
to see what a cliché
the world has made of you.
It’s an old story. Catullus just back from ‘overseas’
boasts the eight bearers are his who carried him into the forum.
He’s trying to impress that beautiful woman with Varus
who’s trying in turn to pass himself off as her lover.
The woman’s not trying to impress. She just covets the bearers –
but when she asks to borrow them for a jaunt of her own
Catullus mumbles they’re not his exactly – they belong to Cinna.
He’s angry now with the woman for causing him embarrassment.
Isn’t that the travelling salesman and the company car?
Human folly is constant. Only the bombs get bigger.
Calvus sends me his book
printed at his own expense.
He hopes for a plug from Catullus
for the jacket of his next.
I ought to fire it straight back
or write ‘Calvus
please don’t send me your arsepaper –
I’ve plenty of my own’
– but I don’t.
I write ‘Calvus, how kind –
I’m looking forward
to getting into your book
as soon as my desk is clear.
Aurelius, you big prick
if I complain to you
call you lustful
improvident, irresponsible
without honour and without restraint
I know how your presence in a room
the way you hold yourself watchful
and that Paul Newman grin
light fires in my Clodia.
I ought to name you rather
Father of Hungers
god of those appetites
without which there would be no
trouble among men
the earth would be silent
and have no need of my songs.
‘Young man,’ she used to say
‘you stay away from old Furius.
His hedge is a disgrace to the suburb.’
I tried to excuse it:
‘You should see the vegetables he grows
behind that hedge.’
‘That may be so,’
she said
‘but they say he doesn’t have a
washing machine.’
‘He always looks clean,’
I said.
‘He’s a great cook
and he lets me borrow his books.’
She wanted to know
why he didn’t cut his hedge.
‘He’s a writer,’
I told her.
‘He’s very busy and famous.
His books are published in England.’
‘What’s the good of that?’
she asked
‘if he doesn’t have a washing machine
and his hedge
is falling over the pavement?’
Remember, poor ghost of Furius
those Eliot lines
we used to quote
with ghostly relish:
‘What is that noise?
“The wind under the door …”’
Auster blew from the south
Boreas from the north
Favonius from the west
Apheliotes from the east
but that overdraft of yours
£1250
it blew
up through the floorboards
making the scrim billow
and the roof-iron groan.
Down here’s the Henderson Valley
up there the Waitakere Range.
Here makes wine
there makes water.
‘It’s all piss,’ says Postumus
filling the glasses again
but don’t let’s mix them –
I’m here for some serious drinking.
Large lunch
Clodia
one appetite
doing duty
for another
but it won’t.
Look
now there’s this
tree in my
trousers
and a fire
in your garden.
Don’t pretend
you don’t
under-
stand.
Just call me
in
apply your-
self
be my tree-
feller
I’ll be your
sure-fire
brigade.
‘It may not be God exactly’
Clodia tells me
lying back among sheets
in an unwonted moment
of unwanton wonder
‘but there’s something up there’ –
and why not?
But if there has to be a Big One
I choose for myself that goddess
daughter of Latona
born under an olive
among Delian hills
who sees to crops and hunting
– or in darker moments
when wars threaten and the rocks
shake underfoot
let it be that one
who turned over in sleep
closing her legs
on Maui’s trespass
and laid him to rest for ever.
I turn the light on a poem
and find you, Ravidus
inside.
What are you doing here?
Did you stagger in drunk
or is that just your burglar’s
cover?
Are you after some easy
Publicity?
And what’s that poem of mine
thinking of
admitting you?
Piss off, Ravidus
you critical nightmare –
find yourself a newspaper column
if you want to lift
that dog’s hind leg of yours.
That day you burned my book
because I’d put you into a poem
too true to be good
I called up my cleverest syllables
I can’t keep you at home
or call down the rockslide I’d like
on your lovers
Miss World –
you go your own way.
But here
in the parlour of words
I’m the boss.
Here
Clodia
you do as I say.
Trapped by my appetites again!
Sestius is such a good cook –
but after the meal
sitting over our glasses
with cheese and grapes
he offered to read me a chapter of his book
on critical theory.
I should have guessed
but how could I refuse?
It must have lasted an hour –
post-colonial, post-structuralist, post-
modern –
did his pole house
have something to do with its drift?
‘What do you think, Catullus?’
(his eyes bulging and glazed).
‘Solid,’ I acknowledged.
I suggested he call it
The Deconstructing Kiwi.
Driving home
I had to stop the car
and spill my guts in the gutter.
wrecked by bad writing –
it’s a metaphysical puzzle.
It took me two days to recover.
Clearly the literary life
is more dangerous
than we care to admit.
Today there’s something in the winter sky
signalling spring
something to do with light –
and the hand of the wind on our cheeks
is less rough than it was.
But my bags are packed –
I’m flying north
into the last of that hemisphere’s summer.
Goodbye Clodia
I don’t ask you to be faithful
but keep safe
remember my birthday
and never doubt I love you.
Travel is my vice.
Already it’s as if I can see
the first brown leaves
falling into the Thames.
My heart’s an anchor
my head a dinghy on the running tide.
Suffenia, feminist in fiction
and Tullius Tuhoe
walk off with the Book Awards
and Catullus chalks up another defeat.
like an All Black front row –
unstoppable!
Yes yes they are deserving.
Certainly they are the best –
as much and as truly the best
among our writers
as it is true to say
Catullus is the worst.
From that middle-class riverside garden
haunted early and late
by the garbling of pigeons
remember, Catullus, watching
through the little wall-gate
how stealthily she followed the streets
towards the mean heart of the town
where she offered herself
she said for money
really for the hell of it
and for stories she would tell
back in that warbling willow-hung arena
above the river
making you sweat and swell at the image
of her rubbing the hot husk
off the corncob
of a Hell’s Angel
rampant astride his Norton
outside the hamburger bar.
Clodia, when you haven’t
one more malicious lie
to offer the world
about Catullus
I’ll believe you don’t love me.
Likewise when my poems
stop making it public
that you’re a heartless whore
consider our affair at an end.
Seeing you weeping at the graveside
Calvus
while trucks rumbled by beyond the hedge
and the mountains stood so still and so silent
against a sky
that went away for ever
I wished I could believe
Quintilia from some far place
watched fall
those tears she had inspired.
The pain is in not believing.
Brother
I offer you no cheap consolations
only that the far sky is there
and the moths playing around the hedge flowers
and the trucks going by along the road.
Inside you
Clodia
a tired cock
subsides.
Mouth in pillow
whispers
to your ear
of a natural
disaster.
We sleep
in one another’s
arms.
An elbow of grass where the stream ran down to meet
the long arm of the sea, and on the headland
pohutukawa for shade – our campsite, Clodia
where earliest morning offered a great grey stretch
of level water turning to blue with the sky.
The stream was my path inland, deep into bush.
In a clearing there, listening at a gullet of stone,
watching for those small brown fish with transparent bodies,
I met his flat snout and tusks, his black-bristled shoulders
and mean pig eyes. His breathing seemed thoughtful
with just an echo in it of grunt and of squeal
before he turned and went, leisurely, among ferns.
That was four decades buried and long forgotten –
so why should he visit me this January morning
between sleep and waking, in all his particulars,
still thoughtful, still threatening, keeping his options open?