Humour them.
They’ll sing his praises
better and together
in the morning.
Sir fox in the garden
lifts and directs his ears.
I’m silent, I’m still
but his nose
is telling him something.
So we face one another
in the dawn,
I wanting to affirm
a kind of kinship,
he with nothing to add.
Phoebus burning the curtains
pushing marmalade fingers
between the blind slats –
fuck off!
Must to thy motions
lovers’ seasons run?
(But that was in another
century, and besides
the wench is dead.)
Mrs Martin
(‘House’ to her friends)
wings in from Pinetops
to the summer structure
of straw and mud she’s stuck
almost at man’s reach
At the whirr of her
three yellow beaks
open.
I call them Gold,
Frankie and Myrtle.
All through lunch
she comes and goes
taking it on the wing.
Sunbrowned
among sunflowers
I’m fraternising
(as is my habit)
in particular with one.
Round-faced and
smiling into the lens
they’re looking
(as is theirs)
all one way.
A battalion! A host!
Yelloluiah!
I shedding tears
under thatch
at the Globe Theatre
not at sad stories
of the death of kings
but at beauty.
The grass withers
the flower falls
but the lordship of the word
is for ever.
Praise be to our God
we call Getaway
who made heaven and earth
and on the seventh day slept –
who will not answer e-mails
phone-calls, prayers
and will not wake
even at the Trump of Doom.
On turning 70, Hokusai
(or was it Allen Curnow?)
told his neighbour across the street
‘I begin to understand
the mysteries of my art.
Another decade will bring me
nearer Reality.’
On turning 80 he told his wife
‘Be patient, my love.
Beyond understanding
comes control. A further decade
will give me that.’
At 90 he told himself,
‘Understanding, control
have given me freedom at last.
Tomorrow
I begin my Masterwork.’
Next morning
as the sun rose, he died.
The dead man’s bach
goes for a price.
One summer I stayed there –
sent him a sketch
of the view from his deck
that made the valley
a glass bowl filled with ocean
up almost to the rim.
Would it spill over?
Can he see it still?
Down there’s the road
he walked in a poem
at evening, for mussels.
Those voices if you listen
may be the stream’s
quoting his lines.
Or are they saying,
‘Sold to the highest bidder!
Gone for a song!’
Even the cheerful ones
have a death wish –
or is it no more
than a craving for salt?
One here has created
a step-down path
with lingering glades.
Another, to meet it,
takes a long-fall short-cut
down a rock-face,
after which, joined by a third
beyond the road-bridge,
they amble as one
seaward through dunes.
Sometimes a wide lagoon
forms and disperses –
or the flow bears south
before turning again
and rushing the exit.
The moon has a hand in it
but the west wind is God.
The lower jaw’s gone,
chain-sawed off
and top teeth taken.
Some bogus ethnic bone-man
using electric drills
will carve them.
The black hulk
speaks weight –
forty tonnes
unsupported by water.
It presses into sand
wanting to bury itself.
Scarlet thins to pink
and spreads in shallows.
Blow-hole, anus, eyes
all are shut.
The fluked tail alone
answers to
the motions of waves.
Karekare to Whatipu
twelve lie dead.
What are they telling us?
Such a lovely day!
Crossing Cook Strait
going home to be
ordained in the
parish of his
father, while seas wished
by and the wind
had its say in the
wires, it came to
him there was no
God. Not that
God was sulking or had
turned His back – that
had happened
often. It was that God
wasn’t there, was
nowhere, a Word
without reference or
object. Who was
God? He was the
Lord. What Lord was
that? The Lord God. Back
and faded. The
universe was losing
weight. It was
then he threw his
Bible into the
sea. He was a
poet and would
write his own. Happiness
was nothing
but not being
sad. It was your
self in this one and
only moment
without grief or
remorse, without God
or a future – sea,
sky, the decks
rolling underfoot.
Janet Frame 1924–2004
So old friend you’ve come to it at last
(Ron Mason’s line, and now an echo of Yeats!)
How does it feel to feel nothing?
No one will ask you to read, no unmarked sheet
will ever again reproach you.
You can ‘become your admirers’.
Somewhere along the way your brain got sparked
but your hair stood up for you.
You wrote of shame without shame.
‘Madness’ was the house of your self, the house of cards
Remember the day of our disaster?
We sat in the hut and I criticised your poem.
Clumsy, literal, your junior in years and in pain
I’d thought it was what you wanted.
There were winged things in the garden, and wilting leaves,
earth smells, compost, beans.
You sat in all your radium intensity,
in the brightness of mercury falling.
The thing you’d wanted was love!
I remember the walk home,
the glass veranda, matting on the walls,
and the view to Rangitoto.
Sea lanes were open
all the way to the World, those dark rough paths
we knew we’d have to travel.
Histories of the hive, the swallow’s flight,
the archives of the ant, even an ode of Keats –
all, I know, confirm it: the thing that happens
dies when it happens.
The thing that doesn’t happen lives for ever.
and remembering one over the eight, Denis Glover
One who could sleep on horseback;
one who, invited to the Court of the Emperor
arrived with two flagons – his ‘contribution’;
one, a Prime Minister, big spender of public money
especially after the dandelion port;
one – young, rich, handsome, well-dressed –
who had everything to lose
and the determination to waste no time
in losing it;
one, a devout Buddhist who swore off all meats
but kept wine as his path to Enlightenment;
one a thirsty poet whose subtlest haikus
one a calligrapher who, for just half a flagon,
could do you mist, mountains, waterfalls
seen through the branches of a fir tree;
and finally a poor man, a man of no consequence,
whose eloquence in his cups was inebriation’s
finest flower –
these the poet Du Fu celebrated
as the Eight Immortal Drinkers
deserving commemoration
and eternal honour.
Let’s raise our glasses then, in salute to them all
and not forgetting our own unquenchable Denis
laureate of the grain
Nobel of the grape.
There are two poets for example
Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison
edited together
The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.
I call them A-Mo and B-Mo
but I confuse them.
One has a fruity voice,
writes biography
and addresses poems
to Her Majesty the Queen
and members of her family.
The other has written a book about his father
and a book about his mother
and a book about a small boy
beaten to death with a brick.
It should be easy.
One of these two I’ve met –
but was he B-Mo or A-Mo?
I’m not sure. I forget.
I can confirm I was not one of her friends –
never lusted after her red-gold hair
as she cycled along St Giles,
never talked about Sartre as cattle crowded our path
through the Port Meadow to the poplars at Binsey,
nor joined her swimming party and removed my clothes.
I was never privileged to see the squalid house
she kept with John, nor ever made use of the loo
with its encrustations her friends so starkly record.
As for her very last years, my sharing of those
was the anodyne cinema version.
John’s books about her dying I’m afraid I declined.
But it’s true – I can say I met her.
Once was a dinner at Auckland’s White Heron Motel
when, late in an evening of stammer and startling chat,
our linguist, Forrest Scott, asked her to dance.
From Oxford she sent him a friendly thank-you card
calling him Foxy Trot.
And there was that final meeting
thirty years on at a literary launch in London.
She didn’t know she’d ever been to Auckland.
Her back was pressed to the wall, eyes full of fear.
Her friends were tigers. Was I one of her friends?
My friend Miranda
who wrote about Robert Graves
was given the scarab ring
of poetry’s worst witch
Miranda’s car was stolen,
her dog put down,
her flat suffered ‘rising damp’,
her mother fell ill
and her husband decamped.
‘Is the ring safe?’ she asked.
‘I kept it outdoors on a twig,’
its former owner confessed.
Miranda has gifted it
to the Robert Graves Trust.
John banging on about the Beatles
and doing a Ricks
on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ –
I telling Iris
the green brooch at her throat
(knight killing dragon)
was on the jacket
of The Italian Girl.
No, she assured me, it wasn’t.
‘But you’ve seen a connection.’
And then she said something
I’ve remembered forty years:
‘Looking is the death of ego.’
‘Not the death,’ I corrected,
‘but maybe an escape.’
Aminatta Forna
Ronnie Someck
Marcel Beyer
Ghada Karmi
Raja Shehadeh
Aminatta
south London Sierra-Leonese
Ghada
north London Palestinian
Ronnie
Iraqui Israeli
Marcel
Wessie who moved against the tide
to live in the East
Raja
Palestinian Palestinian
who refuses to budge
Aminatta
whose father was hanged by his political rivals
Marcel
whose parents
must have played their part
in the great German silence
Ghada
whose parents were driven out of Palestine
by the Israelis
Ronnie
whose parents were driven out of Iraq
because they were Jews
Raja
whose father, a judge
was stabbed to death
in a street in Ramallah.
Aminatta is glamorous
Marcel glossy
Ghada beautiful.
Ronnie is large
Raja very small.
What they have in common
is language
a voice.
One recalls his mother
first-year immigrant
lacking Hebrew
sewing workers’ overalls
in the Rekem factory
One tries to imagine the rope
One wonders what his
father said to his mother
when Hitler said …
One speaks of her mother
creating Jerusalem
in Golders Green
even to the red-tiled floors
the meals, the talk
One remembers the knife
the body on the slab
the Israeli police
indifferent
because it wasn’t ‘political’
Together at
Eaglereach, N.S.W.
they become
walkers
wallaby watchers
picking golden wattle
listening to wind
up from the Valley
catching the scent
of eucalypt.
They laugh a lot.
Things go on.
Flying in
to read and sign books
I see the brown barren plain
spelling FLAT
in any language
and every direction –
and the long straight highway
drawn with a ruler
going all the way
to Shirley Nowhere.
And this
an immense graveyard
seen closer is a suburb –
nice houses
pale and tight as gravestones
Later, in the city
that is every pull-down push-up quick-fix city
someone says
‘This place was built on oil.
Nothing above ground
could have paid for it.’
to the late Lieutenant-Colonel John Mulgan, M.C.
I wanted to write you a poem –
twenty attempts and more
all dead in the water.
‘If poetry doesn’t come
as leaves to the tree – forget it!’
That (more or less) was Keats.
Courage may be a madness,
a disease afflicting the young.
Your work behind the lines
took lives, and cost lives –
and then you took your own.
Yesterday, a birthday
(my seventy-first) I climbed
the steeps and puff of a trail
to the top of a mountain.
A penance? Maybe a test.
Air was thin. Conifers
sighed and whispered
arcane intelligence.
Only chipmunk and squirrel
understood that language
of place and season.
I thought of you dealing
of the Pindus Mountains.
Was it there you decided
history wouldn’t dictate
the end of your story?
You don’t know me, it’s true.
We learned the same suburb
through the soles of our feet,
sat in the same classrooms –
but decades apart.
I’ve seen in you a self
time never taught me,
a shadow unexplored –
but if you decline to live
in lines of mine
I have to honour that.
If there’s a secret, it’s safe.
You are still your own man.
Be at peace, soldier.
Banff, Canada, October 2003
for Massimo Bacigalupo
Think sea
cypresses and saints –
this is what we sailed from
to invent the world;
this is where the world returns
to discover itself.
Like the seasons
Rome came and went;
like God
it issued large instructions
largely ignored.
I am history
banging on,
a broken shutter
hanging by one hinge
in a window
of the Hotel Villa Cristina.
Fishermen sailed out
and back at evening;
soldiers who marched west
marched east again.
Now it’s tourists
arrive and depart.
I see the storm
before it strikes;
I watch the violinist at midnight
hitch up her skirts
and change her shoes
before climbing the salita
to Sant’ Ambrogio.
Behind my back
sleep happens
and waking
and sex.
Between double cannon
and phoenix palms
a four-frog fountain remembers
the poet Pound
blessed and burdened,
a vision of the earthly paradise
locked behind blue
clouded eyes.
This morning
Vagabonda III
sails us out into
the horseshoe bay.
Puccini is a province,
Liguria a personality,
pasta a saint.
Flowers are politicians
promising the earth.
Ashore
Venus in a swim suit
rides pillion on a Vespa
and the marble Virgin
retires defeated
to her stone shell.
It’s the lesser gods survive
on hill-slopes
among grape and olive.
They are in the roof beams,
under floor tiles and altars;
they live in the wren’s nest
and the fox’s den;
they speak in the squeak of a bat
and the chatter of swallows.
The messages are simple
and ample:
obey the season
and the seasons of the blood.
Look hard.
Live as well as you can.
Quid dedicatum poscit Apollinem
Who asks the gods for glory
and that his books may be read
throughout the world, should recall
the one whose prayer was answered,
who lived ten years in hiding,
lost friends, family, everything
but fame itself and a fortune.
How joyful to have your words
say what they mean! Be content
with that, and that you write for
those who can read, and can rune.
Best wines for finest palates.
Look for no other reward.