‘Opinion is not worth a rush.’
– W. B. Yeats
Who cares what the poets think?
Shelley said they were ‘unacknowledged
legislators’.
He made paper boats of his thoughts
and set them sailing
on the Thames at Marlow –
much like writing a column for Metro.
Today a blast from the Pole is keeping
Dunedin city indoors.
It makes the Southern Alps
put on that postcard look.
It drives the Aratika
demands chains on the Rimutakas
closes the Desert Road
and puts a dusting of snow even on the Kaimais.
It climbs the Bombay Hills and unloads
cold rain on the centre-point of the world
where my Montana Book Awards Prize Pen
touches this sheet of paper.
None of this calls for thought –
it expels it
like used air from a lung.
When I was young
I needed allegiances
which needed thought.
There was my country
my political party
the community of writers.
I was weak then, I had no self.
Now I have one and shouldn’t be approached.
One day when the ache in my gut
or the pain in my head
has turned into a slavering lion
and eaten me up
someone will say, ‘This is what he thought.
He was right of course
but it’s no longer an issue.’
Then the poems will come into their own.
‘Listen to us,’ they’ll say. ‘The Odes of Keats
the cantos of Ezra Pound
Jim Baxter’s sonnets
were our brothers and sisters.’
I still have strong opinions
like to hold forth
but it must be the poet in me says
‘Thinking is what creeps up on me
when I’m not thinking.
The leaves on the tower
that was Hölderlin’s prison
are turning red
and gold.
Down there
on an island in the river
huge trees are giving up
their ghosts.
In a small tavern
of crooked beams and stairs
I eat one slice
of onion pie
and drink one glass
of frothy
Swabian wine.
Through the trees
dismantling themselves
looms the sculpted figure
of a folk composer
honoured by the Reich.
Out of his bronze pockets
from under his bronze coat
climb men-at arms –
the spirits or sprites
of Germany at war.
Mad Hölderlin’s ghost
35 years in his tower
looks down
celebrating
the lengthening shadows
and
There was only one Faber
but a second was added
for ballast. I am proposing
the firm should add another –
Faber Faber and Bleistein.
It would counter that cruel canard
about Tom and anti-semitism.
Faber Bleistein and Kwagongkwa
would be culturally sensitive
but perhaps excessive.
I remember back in the ’50s
Tom worked at home in the mornings
writing starchy plays about clerks
and martyrdom in Africa.
Afternoons he came to the office
in Russell Square. Young Valerie
was his secretary. He married her
and the Evening Standard headline
read ‘T. S. Eliot and how the Love
grew Younger than Springtime’.
It was Tom established
the Faber Poetry Principle:
‘Poets are not published by us
because their work is superior.
Rather, the work is superior
because it is published by us.’
Around in Queen’s Square
little Craig has maintained it,
and more recently, little Christopher.
‘Life is very long,’ Tom wrote
and so is the Faber list.
In the Trattoria Verdi
I sat once back-to-back
with Valerie. One of us bulged
a little, and our flesh touched.
I thought to serenade her
and hummed a tune from Cats
The Treaty of Waitangi
or Treedee
as our Orange calls it –
What is it?
the visitor asks
who hears it at midnight
in the next room
outside the window
under the bed
‘The Treedee!’
as in ghost-speak
‘Whooooaah. The Treedee!’
It’s a shibboleth
I tell him
a jackup that went wrong
a royal present
an exploding cigar.
It’s a mantra
a midden
a mistake
a line from an old song
come back to haunt us.
It’s a heaviness in the limbs
a very private
very secret
boredom.
When I call her at the library
‘Kia ora Kay’
I say
‘Kia ora Karl’
she replies
then we go out
to an Italian
meal or a movie.
Lovely for the long ago
child in the night
to hear the huge rain
beating on iron.
No fibre-glass muffle –
only that raw rough
sleep-inducing
din.
We’ve eaten the 12
jars of plums
I stewed and froze
at Christmas.
Now it’s the season
for early apples
autumn dowsings
and olives.
‘What have I to use?’
grumbled the poet
ugly and old.
‘What have you to lose?’
responded
the bodiless Muse.
‘Straw into gold’
she urged him –
‘straw into gold.’