Step sideways.
Now look back
at whatever’s
left standing
in your shoes.
What looks
is reduced to the size
of a bird’s-eye
chilli, hot and salty
staring back at that bonesack
that functions as you.
This is
the split song that wells up
from the double syrinx
of the bird with blue-black
plumage, wiry white ruff
and cravat, its twinned
white commas dividing
utterance in two
self-conscious-
-ness dividing you
between curse aria
and lyrical tourette’s
83or stepping you back
from the action
to mutter sotto voce
from a perch
just out of reach.
They’ve put out wooden
troughs of honey-water
where you’ll alight
and briefly test
the taste and then take
flight.
][
Step aside.
But drag
that lazy eye
back over here.
It could still direct you
somewhere.
][
Children of the world
be glad —
of all the parents in the world you might have had
I was not one. None of you
had to be mine.
84The queen of oversight, I
might have left you high
and dry so many times
your tender leaves could not
survive, would shrivel
and decline. But
if not wired for God
or children, where’s
eternity? Well,
that’s a sentimental question.
Why not just stare at stone
in the mirror till it cracks
and the snakes go hissing home?
][
It’s been a week of rescuing
winged things —
moth in the sink, cicada
part-parcelled by a spider —
deus ex machina of insects, I,
a saviour from the hazards
of human habitation
and in me still the kid who wants to be lifted
out of the damp and sticky mess of her life
by arms that will bathe and dry and dress
her back to prettiness.
85The only arms I have belong
to the stick-figure I will make
for the hangman
and the raven.
They are not strong.
But the high-wire song
of the split-voiced bird
is also mine, his
graunch and trill
in which the wind sings
a sandpaper duet
with him.
][
Last words of Wittgenstein:
‘Tell them I had
a wonderful life.’
Who will there be
to say it to?
Face it:
disappearance in the mirror’s all
that waits for you.
][
86Does courage saved and staved
in notes add up, or is it just
mock battles between paper dolls,
last stands of midget revolutionaries
backs to the wall, waving tiny swords and singing
drunken, defiant anthems while the world
puts a tumbler over the top of them
and leaves them be
while it goes about its business
unperturbed? Is pluck
just this: admitting
you can’t ink your way out
then lock the box and walk
away into a fragile safety guaranteed
only by the turn of that
imaginary key?
][
And if there’s only one
of me what then? After amputation,
convalescence, will I ever
walk again? Even now
the words are reaching for a rhyme
to put a lid on it and paint it in bright colours,
Frida Kahlo, like you did,
painting your cast in bright
colours . . .
It’s an unglamorous trip
away from the fully furnished luxury
of internal obstacle course,
87from screaming in elevators, from
the pointless violence
of the mind, Jack Spicer, and expect no
credit either for houdini-ing your way
out of a strongbox made
to your own specifications, filled with
the glass and candyfloss of
insulating foam, for springing the locks
on the straightjacket your hand-picked staff
ever so carefully restrained you in.
Health, friends, is harder.
We must not say so.
][
I interrupt myself?
Very well, I interrupt my-
self: when I was a boy
there was none of this
shilly-shallying. I ran out
into the day without fore
or hindsight.
The trees were mine
as were the hills, neither blue
nor remembered, but bluntly
there with their ordinary
invitation, and the valleys,
not green but equally
inviting. When I was a girl
I learned to use my arms
to hold the hills at a safe
distance, and my hands
88to hold the pencils
that would colour
them in.
][
I wanted everything here
to be true. Naïve
as the humble bee
tentatively testing every
window in the room
between it and green
freedom this spring day,
its gentle repeated
inquiry. Still do.
And hence the need
to begin and then
begin again.
][
There was a time
when everywhere I went
I could smell sulphur.
89I looked for rotten eggs, rank flowers
too long in the vase,
until one day I realised
it was me (no, literally) —
a festering lily looking over the edge
with a nodding stem that
would eventually bend
and drop my head so
neither air nor water could get through
a useless straw
incapable of drinking
any more
of walking, working,
thinking. Flies crawled
across the slime-green
surface of the pool.
][
I have not fought the good fight.
Only the Lord of Ambiguous Virtue
could find a fly buzzing in a bottle
good. Had enough yet?
Yes.
And?
][
90The first person’s full
of holes, swagger, shit.
The first person derives
no benefit from her pole
position. The first person
is improved by being
someone else’s first
person when part of her
parcel is unstrung. What
everyone else can see
she’s always last to know
first person uncool
second person a disguise
for the first, third person
a costume party
thrown by a fool.
Repeat after me
répétez
s’il vous plaît —
repeat until
contempt provokes
a change of tune.
] [
Things to do with a capital I
on a rainy day:
91turn it on its side
make knee-capped goalposts
then practise kicking
without looking.
Or call it cavalletti
then saddle up and make
the pony trot.
Use it as dumb-bell —
develop dumb muscle
then decamp to the countryside
and go a-fencing with its
post and rail.
Pull off the head and foot
for toothpicks
use the upright to spear flounder.
Take your box-cutter
and split its back-to-back
square brackets down
the middle then step
through the gap.
And when you’ve had enough
of that, make a row of decapitated
pedestals topped off
with a coffin, climb inside
92and carve your skinny initials
on the lid, invidia,
then set match
to the shavings and go up
in smoke.
]…[
The drunks are finally quiet when
the garbage truck at 5 am
picks up the leaning kerbside bags
and flattened cardboard boxes from
yesterday’s inner city
business. Its lights rotate
across the ceiling. Last words
of Kierkegaard:
‘Sweep me up.’
]…[
And now it’s summer again, a long time
since this ramshackle began.
Pōhutukawa bookmarks
thread the pages.
Pleasures of the Japanese
nailhead teapot, a good crop of mint.
Wind chivvying the beach towels.
Parliament of birds.
93Barn-dance of sense and foolishness,
thwack and spin:
turn me out like a spanked kid
into the garden
turn again and let me in.
. . .94