Every Dog has his day
but this one taketh the Prize
therefore buy Him a deserving collar,
feed Him and walk Him.
His Yap in the high country
driveth home the sky-flocks,
his clattering Feet
are the claws of the pelting rain.
A distant quake is his Growl
in the deserts of Kadesh,
his Whine warneth Lebanon’s leaves
of the burglar Time.
Dog the heavens call him
whose Bark and Bite alike
shall be praised for ever
in the temples of man.
Bristol University, 12.7.01, with thanks to Andrew Bennett
My life in summary
and only nice things said
it could be my funeral
except that
vertical in scarlet
I’m listening to it
velvet hat
to go away home
with family and friends.
‘You were a callow youth
Curl Skidmore’
the Orator quotes
my other self
saying of another
self – thus proving
he’s read my novels
and meaning I suppose
to suggest
distances
travelled, obstacles
overcome. Rewarded
(and glad of it)
only for being myself
I confront
Zen’s other
and unfamiliar
hand-clapping puzzle –
not what is
the sound of one
but the meaning of many.
Summer arriving late
your poet’s remembering takes him
where marbled Lincoln looked down
and you and he, Cynara,
walked and talked three days
over that hallowed ground.
Let me tell you something you know:
while satellites were reading
the innocence of your lips
Caesar in his White House
was enlisting yet more legions
for memorials in stone.
That was the heart of Empire
which Time, in time, must teach
the flavour of defeat.
So remind your poet, Cynara,
he has no need of brass
nor the brashness of marble.
Libitina will crush him,
but words outlive the mind
that sets them free.
Forced to resign the Button,
his staff assembled,
a helicopter on the White House lawn
waiting to shuttle him
into the five o’clock shadows,
the Quaker boy who became
instrument of America’s will
to be world policeman
world judge
and world executioner
makes his farewell speech
about love of mother for son,
father for daughter,
and how from the deepest valley
stands forth most clearly
‘Ask not
what your country can do for you
but rather
what you can do for your country’ –
how it rang in your ears
Caesar’s worthy wank
before Fate grew bored with it
and cut him down to size.
They say the habits of vice
are hard to break
but so are the habits of virtue
especially those
of the faithful dog.
Here, therefore, Catullus
to cure that malady
is what you had better recite
each morning at sunrise:
‘Strong gods
if you value me at all
teach me to bark after passing cars,
to bite the postman’s ankle,
and especially, nightly,
to howl at the moon.’
Allen Curnow, 1911–2001
‘Home’ for the boy had meant
somewhere between England
where God was still living
and the ground under his feet.
and seldom bought his round.
Not Prospero, but like him,
he made words work and had
‘an abominable temper’.
His project was to catch
the heron’s deliberation
lifting itself over mangroves,
or on that opposite coast
the careless way a gull
could be tossed in an updraft.
These were his annotations
on a world that exceeded
all it could say of itself.
He fished for the brown cod
and had a name for those
who thought it inferior eating.
He summoned his dog by car horn,
looked hard into sunsets,
and called himself ‘an old man
who wouldn’t say his prayers’.
Stubborn, still owing his round,
he was towed at the last
headlong into the westerly,
tottering, leashed to his Dog.
and the straw-headed children
of the children of the Vikings
go nearly naked into
the nearly saltless Baltic.
They find wild strawberries
among grass at a wood’s edge
and thread them on a stalk
to be eaten after herrings
with coffee black as tide wrack.
Thatch is spiked against witches
and tumbled stones remember
an invasion of Danes.
This island of ruined churches,
abandoned farms and windmills
is Stockholm’s secret playground
where Lars Ardelius built
his theatre in a barn
and every summer’s drama
opened like a wildflower
attended at the wayside
by butterflies and moths.
No record, no reviewers –
such stuff only as dreams are
made on, rounded by a sleep.
Zac’s dead
buried with his brother Wallace
beside the carport
under the ponga.
Zac of the goldfish eyes
and nice-smelling fur
who when I had a problem with a poem
slept on it,
who lived to put his paw-print
on a valued citation,
who in his dying days
jumped to swipe at a passing moth
and missed.
Zac the radical,
Zac the bed-crowder
the window leaper
the lateral-thinker,
Zac the head-first rat-eater
is dead,
is ‘laid to rest’,
has met his match.
Frater, ave (etc.)
Black Zac
Zac the Knife.
Angels are never average and seldom avenging
but was it a kindness to whisper
a victim and a victory over Death
in Mary’s marvelling ear?
The light creeps crab-wise over a sky it paints
in blue-eyed blue, and it’s we
cousins of the fur and the stalk must write
an End-of-Term to be delivered by
that silence behind the silence of the stars.
In the beginning was indeed the Word
and it wasn’t ours. Ours will be simply the last.
Whitman and Nietzsche we watched
dancing together in a high wind of Self
‘Oh the great Noontide,’ they sang.
‘Oh the warm South of the Future!’
We were looking back at them from that very Future.
God was dead, but so was Zarathustra.
What ‘came next’ was always the problem.
If there was life after death
there had to be somewhere to go.
We called it Heaven
and made it nice – then ‘nice’ became the problem.
Who wants bad guys fighting over the hammocks,
damaging the palms?
Another place was needed. We called that Hell.
Really our wars were over the sorting process –
wheat from chaff, sheep from goats.
If signals from Headquarters had only been clear
there need have been no burnings.
Faith showed faint cracks. Downstairs engendered
anxiety, then rejection – and even our Club Med in the Skies
began to lose trade. Who’d ever been there
and come back to report? – apart from the One,
and look what happened to Him!
It’s been a hard road.
But hell! – who ever said it was gonna be easy?
By e-mail
two below-the-belt
digital pics
one full-frontal
one between-buttocks
and the message
‘Remember me?’
He imagined it
circling the globe
stopping among the stars
a cunt on the move,
a cunt in space,
in heaven!
‘Holy Mother!’
(is what he said)
‘This might be anyone.’
He messaged back
‘Send me your face.’
There was no reply.
In His Museum of the Universe
Dog has everything that is / was / will be
in exact replica
even the passage of time.
Things (stars, for example, bugs)
are born, grow up, grow old and die –
imagine that!
In the long lovely lonely
heavenly afternoons
(each one lasting for ever)
He strolls in the galleries
watching the fall of heavenly rain
on heavenly gardens
but pauses sometimes to listen
for the yells from Hell
which He’s told are loud
though out of earshot.
He thinks of inviting them up
but there’d be no end of trouble.
He plans a new universe
– more colourful, various –
but He’s a lazy Dog, and jealous:
people disappoint Him;
Time is unstable.
He needs another medium
but He’s at the end of His rope.
Jesus claimed he was the Son of God.
He was not. I am.
Only through Me is there access
to my Father’s chain of Mansions
called ‘the Life after Death’.
This is known as yet
to hardly more than a dozen
(and Dwayne will betray me).
After my Death and Resuscitation
we plan to change the World.
Stillness came to the garden –
so many greens!
and it occurred to him without beauty
there would not be much to speak of,
much to love.
A face, stars, islands,
a vastness
of darkness and light,
a few wrenching bars –
these made sadness possible,
compelled regret.
Last night
straining to make his ears
attend to the silence
he heard it in the distance –
a dog barking,
and then a half-asleep voice
(his own) with laughter in it:
‘Dog, are you there?
Dr Johnson kicked a stone
Bishop Berkeley sulked alone
Swift went swiftly mad, or so
it seemed, so bad his vertigo
Reason earned John Locke’s applause
Hume the doubter doubted Cause
Kant knew Reason on its own
can’t account for Johnson’s stone –
that turned on a light for Goethe
to write The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Our skein is paid out by the Fates
the Dog Star guards the Pearly Gates
the Roman Church upholds a proof
that God is there, although aloof.
I dreamed I met a man in space
he had a brain and not much face
he used a small machine for talking
it said his name was Stephen Hawking
I said ‘I know that Space is bending.’
He quacked ‘It’s worse than that. It’s ending.’
Old girlie Brother Ignaz
who liked the swish of cane
on bent-over buttock
in that long-ago classroom:
‘Boys, please – some flightless birds. Bernard?’
‘The emu, Brother.’
‘The emu, yes. Michael?’
‘Ostrich?’
‘The ostrich. Thank you. What about you, John?’
‘The kiwi, Brother.’
‘The kiwi, of course. Vincent, any more?’
And Vincent, pausing, holding his eye:
Here’s another grumbling letter from Wittgenstein.
‘No reason of course,’ he writes, ‘why you should give thought
to my thoughts of you, and indeed, I know you do not.’
‘Indeed’? He ‘knows’? What kind of ‘knowing’ is that?
‘When I gave you lunch on Tuesday …’ He calls that lunch? –
a pot of tea and a bun? Didn’t he know
I’d have to go off, find myself a loaf of bread,
a plate of ham, and thou beside me chatting in
the Gardener’s Arms? ‘You call my practice “a theory”,
but it’s not a theory precisely because it’s a practice –
a habit of mind, a way of conducting oneself
in relation to language.’ The bread and ham were delicious.
It was raining. Across the pub yard I could watch
how water runs through thatch, along a stalk then down,
along a stalk then down, and finally out at the eaves,
half the thickness of the thatch still dry.
You’d dropped off in your chair, and Yes, I thought,
what a fuss he’d make over the phrase ‘dropped off’
and nothing at all of the thatch. ‘I think it better,’ he writes,
‘that we do not meet again.’ He thinks he means it.
Remembering Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’
The gods of weather who dislike this town
cast their cold shadows over its hillside graves
and in the damp ears of suburban dwellers
whisper that death is just around the corner.
A neutered tom fed hormones for eczema
curls and uncurls himself on a threadbare carpet
hearing, as I do, in the rain-choked gutter
The hot pipes grumble and a clock strikes chill.
I’m tired of playing patience with a pack
that smells of landlady’s soap. Darkness comes down.
Listen! The rain has stopped. Now you can hear them –
the Jack of Hearts and Queen of Spades exchanging
sinister gossip about their long-dead loves.
Low sky
spiked,
rain in sheets
followed at once
by High Blue –
and bright!
Then murk again.
I think it in headline:
ANOTHER SHOCK DOWNPOUR!
Doused
silver and green
the city glitters.
We burn in the gaps.
Still jet-lagged
our visiting Poms
are pinked in a day
their rug-styles ruined.
Remembering James K. Baxter, 1966
Evening where Taieri moved
between dark McCahon hills
fog threatened. You were back
in your aquarium town
wearing your flesh and blood
as if it belonged to you.
Would I get out? Would
it close on Momona?
In the womb we were all
fish. Once was enough.
Any bad-coloured sky
I’d have risked climbing,
scaled any barnacled chain –
yet there you went, at home,
submariner for God
telling the squid and the skate
‘Open your gills, my brothers.
Enjoy the life of the Deep.’
I see you
flanked by two women
one smiling, in green shoes
Admonitory (unfair?)
you once reproached
my curling lip
your own wit
the Celtic kind, oblique,
leaving its object
uncertain whether
the nip he’d felt was wound
or caress.
Scholarship Scot
among the Simons at Downing
you took
bookish London
by the back door
making space for yourself
who could construe
ahead of time
Heaney’s invisible
mending no less than
the magic of Gazza’s
dancing steps.
Last week I dreamed
you’d married Rebecca
West and lived at
H. G. Wells,
a confusion you at least
will comprehend.
Karl
in those dingy precincts
of U.C.L. as in the
‘for which much thanks’
and to my namesake
these birthday greetings.
‘B = T, T = B QED’
– John Keats
1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
111 x 111 = 12321
11 x 11 = 121
1 x 1 = 1
Apollo was a god
with a golf course,
Hyacinthus a Greek kid
from the Valley,
then Venice Beach.
They met on Santa Monica Pier
and for the billionaire
it was (as he put it) ‘a broken heart
at first-sight – Wham!’
The boy caddied for him
(meaning for money),
learned to pilot his helicopter,
and was taken on a world cruise
crewing and (the word was) screwing.
I met Apo some years after
at a pool party –
a Hollywood crowd,
Dustin, Clint, Meryl,
the usual suspects.
He was drinking hard
but seemed contained
wanting to talk to someone
who wanted to listen.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
When I told him Ovid
he said he liked my scripts.
‘As for my thing with Hy – ’
(had I asked?) ‘It wasn’t sex.
No. It was Beauty’ –
which I write with a capital B
because that’s how he said it,
frowning, intense,
precise: ‘Beauty!’
No one could quite believe
the official story:
two guys, one fit, one flabby,
throwing a discus
on the old boy’s ranch.
It split the kid’s skull.
By the time an ambulance came
he was in heaven.
The local police were puzzled
by that flower
with the letters AI
fingered in blood.
To them it was Greek –
Apo was a known big-hander
to their Holiday Fund
and they let it pass –
which makes it a story
let’s say for Elmore Leonard
or one of those noir movies
of the 1940s.
But I come back in my thoughts
to the old aesthete
in the deck-chair that evening
by his Brentwood pool.
I’d been looking at his collection,
stunning things
mainly in steel and glass,
and such elegant spaces!
‘Not sex,’ he insisted
squeezing my arm.
‘Sex is nice, my friend,
but it’s everywhere,
ordinary. What Hy had
no one else I’ve known
(and I’ve known some
believe me) has ever had.
I call it “Beauty”.’
And then, in one of those
transformations
by which booze can put
iron filings into the voice
and gimlets in the eyes:
‘What will you call it
Mr big-time pisser
in other people’s beds
when you write about it
in your next shitty screenplay?’
Bald Caesarion
among the hairy Caesars
trailing your gown or your coat
in the groves of academe
at Rome’s far-flung remove
no one would ever guess
you rode once hell-for-leather
bareback, bees in your hair.
He was twice your age
and smelled of horse
that beast of mythic proportion
you rode to the gate for the meat.
Oh indeed the sun shone down on the dark green scrub,
the white road, the brown dam water.
It shone on you!
It had never seen in our region
two such in such disguise –
a boy and a horse.
Reaching for meat
wrapped in newsprint twisted about with rope
you saw too late
bees had swarmed in the box.
Can we say it was then
wheeling, flying homeward lashed by stings
you learned your horse had wings?
What if next day your face waxed like a moon
and your eyes, half-closed,
half-saw indulgent smiles?
You had trailed a plume of demons over the land.
Pride with an indignity was joined
and bald Caesarion, lacking Caesar’s glory,
would gather to himself
a mythic story.
I think it came to me in sleep
that when at Anzac dawn parades
old soldiers weep
it’s not as they will say for fallen comrades
but for the young self full of sap and fire
as distant now and caught in coils of time
as one the bullets of a half-forgotten war
stopped in his prime.
On matters of food, Horace,
you advise a middle course
between Wolf and Dog. Wolf stands
for greed and excess, Dog for
scavenging meanness. Your friends
who dine on peacock because
its feathers are beautiful
you deplore; but equally
you disdain Aviedenus
who gives his guests five-year-old
olives, rancid oil, and wine
that’s turning to vinegar.
Measured, not frugal, pleasure
receives your thumbs up, Horace.
And now Ianus our once young
rebel against everything
especially Irony (that
compromiser of passion)
recovers his poet voice
silent almost a decade
by mimicking you, prophet
Big Daddy-in-the-Sky
your PR’s good –
we’re backing you to win
down here as you won up there.
Please feed us
and go easy on us
as we go easy on
those other bastards.
No honey-traps –
we want to stay out of trouble
because you’ve been
the Big Cheese always
and likely to remain so
for the foreseeable future
amen.
d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o
o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d
g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o
o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g
d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o
o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d
g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o
o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g
d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o
o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d
g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o
o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g
d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o
o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d
He’d tamed the Sun.
Death would be next –
Hine-nui-te-po
who slept at noon
legs open under ferns.
‘There,’ he told the birds,
‘is her unlocked door.
I will enter
and Death will die.’
The story doesn’t end well.
‘Someone at the door, Hine’ –
that was twittering Piwaiwaka
who prided herself
on having the ear of Death.
Hine squeezed her thighs.
Some say no harm was intended –
it was her shudder of pleasure
killed him pushing headlong
into that Darkness, as once
into the World of Light.
Summer has come. It’s time for the national act.
This year Prime Minister Helen’s returning.
We’re not to shout at her, we’ve had our warning –
one more display of traditional disrespect
and she’s gone for ever. Off our mana flies
to Ngati Whatua, Waikato, or the tribe of the south,
Ngai Tahu, who often get the biggest bikkies.
In bush around the Treaty House cicadas
are loud – and that’s permitted. It’s their way.
Ours is different. Mike Smith, no chainsaw today.
Dun Mihaka, you must stay inside your trousers.
Tame Iti, no dancing about and spitting
Tuhoe style. Titiwhai, please guard your mouth.
Today we do it nicely. Bring your knitting.
Full of itself the tide floods the mangroves.
Unpainted boards, carved heads depicting anger,
reflect on stillness. The pied shag goes under
for a long count as if she has something to prove.
From lookouts on the hills the ti-trees sign
that everything is tika, everything couth;
that the circus is coming; that it will soon be gone.
Allen Curnow, 1911–2001
Grief – or if what’s expected and accepted
cannot be grief, then call it incomprehension –
has kept me from the company of the Muse
and the sweet children she bears me, Rodicus,
because my brother poet has taken his swim
this time in Lethe’s waters, and already I feel
his forgetfulness leaving me, leaving us all, behind.
Never again will I see him dragged by his dog
as if he wore the leash, nor wait for the end
of a witty sentence broken by the lighting of his pipe.
But something of his voice will sound in my lines
as the morepork, heard in a dream, tells us we’re home.
And though I cannot send you poems of my own
I offer this by my older friend Catullus
so you’ll know my boast of verses wasn’t idle.
Let it come to you, as it does in the Roman’s trope,
like an apple given to a girl, hidden in her clothes
and forgotten until it rolls to her mother’s floor
and has to be explained, and cannot be.