After a night of storm
the right-hand buoy’s
gone. The sea’s
ruffled but
settling. Old Jim swims
as usual, goes home,
lies down as
usual, and dies – not
usual at all, but
at eighty-something
what can we
say? The veteran
wallower has done
his last circuit.
At Friday’s full
tide we have drinks
in his honour by
the sheds. Someone
brings a cake. Away
left the sun pulls
in its horns as
lights come on across
the water. There
goes a white cruise
wartime, and look,
great uncle Webb’s
paddling home from work
to Cheltenham in
the canoe he called
Topsy. That was
sixty years ago.
Tonight’s moon is
coming up big
over the Hauraki
Gulf. We agree
when the new
buoy’s anchored
we’ll christen it ‘Old
Jim’s’. We drink to that.
The plum tree is
white with blossom
and visited by
wasps (two sorts), monarchs
bumble-bees, large flies
and honey bees (just a few).
Do all these pollinate? Does it matter?
The butterflies seem to compete
with the bumble-bees
and drive them off.
I want plums of course. They come at Christmas.
It’s an old tree, capricious
unpredictable. Mrs Nature tells me,
The greenest green
creeps up against
the whitest white
which accepts defeat
and scatters
over the lawn.
Click smack snick
quick snack
another snail
is whacked
and tenderised
in the garden.
Enamel
the small plums
are the tree’s
green buttons.
Newly wed ducks
just in from the Wild
are quarrelling
on next door’s pool.
Our neighbour’s
confused.
Should he play
Tony Soprano?
On the swan plant
the monarch’s offspring
are illustrating Ovid –
soft into hard,
black and white into
A fledgling thrush
hurls itself at reflections
in my glass door.
Usually they’re stunned
and recover
but this one’s beak is broken.
All afternoon it hunches,
ruffles, shivers
under the hedge.
I can’t settle
or stand its pain.
‘What’s an axe for?’ I ask,
and put myself
out of its misery.
The Ovid story continues.
This one
shrugs off green and gold
not easily
and pumps itself into
orange and black.
On the bank, flax spears
convert to flowers
and the jet-feathered
tangata whenua
(white wobble at throat)
beaks into them.
Pick or peck?
No contest!
Either I gather early
or they do.
Between thrush and blackbird
I detect division.
Thrush considers me
beneficent cat-chaser
turner of grub-soil
provider of plums.
Blackbird knows
it owns the plum tree
and that I am a thief.
Lost in my head
I don’t think about
my legs until
they catch my eye.
There they are, feet, ankles,
crossed calves, up
on the desk like
a puppet’s, the strings
let loose. Someone
long white discards
in a hospital bin –
or on the
run through a dark
wood looking for the
rest of me to
carry as before. Legs
were always a
part of my
self – the jumper,
goal-scorer, the
middle-aged rambler –
and never given
a thought. I know
there’s a tribute
owed to them, but
shyness gets in the way:
they’re sportsmen
and we’ve never
talked. I feel we should
get together,
discuss things,
think creatively
about our future.
‘My neighbour tried to arrest me.
I was on his drive, under his tree
sheltering from the rain.
In the struggle I hurt his mouth.
It bled. He called the police.
‘When they came for me,
six of them, in three cars,
I was feeding the cat.
Puss had seen it all
but would say nothing.
The thrush said a great deal
(too much in fact
mostly about the rain)
and was not understood.
‘At the station an officer
two-fingered my statement.
He said my neighbour thought
I was poisoning his tree.
I said I thought
my neighbour was mad.
I was charged with assault.
‘I showed the judge how my neighbour
held his arms out wide
and chanted spells
to protect his tree.
‘My neighbour told the judge
his tree had been unwell
and lately depressed.
‘The judge wondered
whether it could be the spells
causing the problem.
‘I was found not guilty.’
‘Why was he crouching under my tree?
It wasn’t raining hard.
Couldn’t he have sheltered at home?
‘Every time he looks at my tree
a branch turns red
which are for the healing of the nations.
Either he has the Evil Eye
or a bottle of Something Deadly.
‘He says he is a writer,
but who is the Writer of the Book of Life?
I say it is the Tree.
‘I tried to hold him and he hit me –
hard, in the mouth.
He lied about that in Court –
said it was an accident.
‘The police had his measure
but His Honour was weak –
possibly influenced by Dark Forces,
who can say?
‘The Tree is also a River.
I fear for the future.’
‘My chances with the thrush are not good,
I know that, I’m a realist –
but after rain there’s what we in the bird business call
a window of opportunity.
I was keeping a low profile, getting in close
when he had his stupid scuffle with the neighbour
and that was the end of it.
They were rolling on the ground, scratching and biting
and of course the thrush took off.
‘Straight afterwards
he fed me tinned tuna, my favourite.
Guilt probably –
he’s so transparent. It’s pathetic.
‘I feel I was the meat in the sandwich.’
‘We knew that arsehole from way back.
He’d given us no end of trouble in ’81
and then wrote lies about us in the papers.
‘His neighbour may be a screw loose but so what?
You can’t go about poisoning plants
and punching tree-freaks
just because you’re an “intellectual”.
‘We parked at the top of the street
and marched him up to the cars,
all six of us
so everyone could see who was in charge
and that he was an arsehole.
‘It’s called “Law and Order”, isn’t it?
But what’s the use
if the Courts won’t back us up?’
‘It was raining.
There were worms
and snails.
‘Because my wings were wet
I was nervous of the cat.
‘The human was crouching
against the trunk
licking drops
off the end of its nose
when the other one came.
They coupled on the path.’
‘An interesting case
turning on the question
‘There was no doubt in my mind
the accused had the right
to free himself.
The neighbour was half his age
and somewhat eccentric.
‘I gave my judgment in writing.’
A grass processor
on a bone frame
with bagpipes underneath
fly-whisk at the back
and at the front
soft nose, beautiful eyes
and the breath of meadows.
A cow is also beef.
She is milk, she is meat.
The cow follows me
into my dream.
I like her hairy neck-ridge
under my hand.
This is a courtroom –
possibly a church
with green windows
and wooden walls.
Notice there’s no
bucket, and no cups.
Recall those wartime
draught horses pulling
carts around our suburb –
milk, bread, firewood – like
the record of something
irretrievably
lost, the way for example the
beast would stand, one
rear leg resting
poised on a hoof-point
like a ballerina –
or, square-foot, head-down,
nose in a chaff-bag,
or in the roadside trough
blowing through nostrils
before drinking, as if
to test by the ripples
that this really
was water – tail swishing
between shafts; the regretful
blinkered eyes
and lashes; the mane
like human hair but
coarser; the rakish tilt
of the cart, its iron
wheels grinding on the roadway;
the clop-clop
sent me with spade
to scoop from the street for her
vegetable garden.
It’s as if to return
reporting, ‘I’ve seen the past
and it worked.’
Patience, inwardness,
strength, a body warm to touch,
that smelled good, this
was ‘horsepower’.
Nothing with an engine
would ever so engage
feeling and thought,
the pleasure and pain of
planetary kinship.
Sometimes I climbed the aromatic tree,
macrocarpa I think, with close easy branches
across the road from the chemist while
my mother finished her shopping.
Life went on under the macrocarpa.
Women stopped to talk about the War,
trams lumbered by on their steel rails,
poles flashing at the junction.
My father was at work at the post office –
he had a book to write in, and a rubber stamp;
my sister was at school, my grandmother
at home doing the housework.
Now my mother and father both are dead,
my grandmother of course, even my sister;
the tram rails are torn up, and the macrocarpa
and I am there still, close to the sky
listening to housewives talk about the War,
watching the pole flash and the red tram
clank off into the future.
You used to mow your own lawns –
not any more;
you used to Hoover your own house –
now a woman comes.
When one car wasn’t enough
it was all you had –
now you have two and don’t use them.
As the bills come in you pay them;
as the rubbish goes out, you buy more.
In a hungry world you eat well;
in a crowded one, you have space.
It has cost a lifetime.
Enjoy!
Somewhere in a grave
in a coffin the size of a shoebox
lies my third sister
who lived one hour.
Irene she was called,
or was to be called.
I see her as a redhead –
something I was told
or imagined.
Suppose she too had been
a troublesome writer.
I see us together
a sentence beginning
‘Irene and I …’
‘I and Irene …’
She’s smoking,
tossing her red hair,
laughing at my
bad-taste jokes.
This space was meant for ‘Nana’
but she kept bursting out of it –
her shoes with holes cut
to suit her bunions,
her bandaged
unreliable knees,
her singing
(especially her singing) –
impossible!
I tried to make room for her,
provide comfort and entertainment
(especially entertainment)
but it was no use.
She’s stolen a packet of my father’s DeReszkes
and gone to the pictures.
‘Third finger! Third finger!’
That was the voice
from two rooms away.
I’d used second finger
That’s how it was
having your teacher in the house
while you practised.
Not that the note was wrong,
just the finger.
How could she tell?
I was her worst pupil,
her biggest disappointment –
perfect pitch
and some failure of hand and eye.
Never mind, Mum,
you trained my ears.
They’re listening still.
This spring my dreams are
nowheres, otherwheres,
places I’ve never been –
or if familiar
it’s usually childhood,
my father in his garden.
He has his back to me.
Something’s unresolved
between us.
‘Look at me, Dad –
I’m older by five years
than your final count.
Speak to me.’
Our friends’ wedding:
I’d lied, called it a funeral
to get army leave
so I could be with you.
It was a surprise, a present
and your blush of pleasure
cheered me like a crowd.
So here we are on the step
above ‘the happy couple’
who will one day divorce –
looking into the future
which is now.
Ten friends together
in that photograph.
Fifty years on
and four are dead.
Who will be next?
Who will be last
and put out the light?
It’s time to tell you again
how much I loved the girl
who blushed her welcome.
Forgive my trespasses.
Stay close. Hold my hand.