by Emma Neale
find appalling.
Called
It is October in Dunedin.
Rhododendrons fan out flounced skirts;
magnolias, magnanimous with their moon-cool glow,
light the path south so the sun stirs us early;
although the river, the creek boulders,
the city’s cinched green belt, still hold the cold
like an ice store’s packed-down snow.
The days shiver with filaments
of ua kōwhai: soft rain that dampens paths,
shakes loose carpets of white stamens, yellow flowers
bruised and trodden like flimsy foil cornets.
School holidays send out falling, silvery arcs
of children’s sky-flung laughter; our bodies drink it in
as if love’s parched ground sore needs this watering.
Yet the radio stays hunched in the kitchen corner
hard grey clot in the light’s fine arteries
muttering its tense bulletins;
and as if they sense this late spring still harbours
frost’s white wreck, or some despotic harm abroad
seeps too near, our sons more than anything want
their old games: secret codes, invisible ink, velvet cloaks;
hide ’n’ seek in public gardens’ clefts and coves—
and again, again, can we tell them again
the chapters of how they first appeared
in the long, blurred myths we are entangled in;
kingfisher-blue wells of their eyes a-gleam
as if they know how much all adults withhold.
They want us to go back deeper, to when
we both were star-spill, sea-flume, spirits,
only belatedly woman, man, climbing up from a shore
feathered in sand black and soft as ash,
driven by some gravid magnetism towards each other
in case we changed to birds, lizards, trees,
or back to sea-salt borne by wind;
an urge clear as hunger coursing the cells’ deep helix
to complete this alteration, half-bury and re-germinate
the fleet molecules of self, so we could run our mortal hands
the small, kind way along the children’s plush skins,
learn, pulse on pulse, their true, human names.
Yes, we must go back and back; as if to swear
even to this dread epoch’s wild, original innocence.
October 2015
The Belt
How could they ever love anyone else
after what he had done?
Listened to that woman whose voice graunched
like a spoon that tries to drag the pattern off the plate
when even the broth scrapings are gone.
Took them into the forest as if already
the appetite of wolves was merely sleepy milktime fable.
Tied a dead branch loose against a tree
so it tapped in the wind like the sound of his axe,
mimic of love’s vigilance labouring on,
seeing clear into a shared future
that it would build and warm:
icy gaps under the doors barricaded;
night fire singing like their lost blood-mother after wine.
But he had gone back to that other,
to sup with her, they guessed,
his mouth on her the way they had once glimpsed:
like a dog knocking its bowl across the floor as it drank,
the woman clutching along the mattress,
the pale loaf of her rising to him,
their father dropping back as if he was her windfall plum;
while the crackle and buzz of hunger in the children’s heads
turned them outside early, to nibble on leaves, bark,
even the boy’s brown leather belt,
which made them wonder and whisper
about rumours of magic: for week by week
the belt’s dark, parched tongue lengthened,
when all else around them waned, marked by famine.
Big Bad
She cried wolf but she was the wolf
so she slit sad’s bellyskin
and stones of want rolled out.
She cried lack—and she was the lack
so she stitched up sad’s bellyskin
but more wolf leapt out.
She cried wolf till wolf was all cried out
and up skipped those stones
like knock-kneed urchykins
to finger-feed her humble pie
smooth her voice like teacher’s chalk
soften her palms like baker’s flour
and those stones they smacked
their lips and sang,
yes, yes Miss Cat-skin,
you’ll do for the kitchen;
please, please Miss Wolf-skin,
won’t we all do for love?
The Local Pool
Turn a corner, into air tangy with chlorine. The smell removes memory’s stopper and an anxious genie swims out. What about the turquoise of a small town pool? What about concrete, dark with Rorschach marks that wet bodies left behind after boys egged on and watched?
Police, phoned by a passerby: the next day, when their own girls cried ‘See ya!’ over pop-radio falsetto, did the cops saloon-door from their bathrooms, half-Santaed with soap, then gruff up quick hugs, foam-chins hooked over their daughters’ shoulders, to hide fuel-lines of dread in their eyes?
The mothers of the pool-girl’s friends: did they slash open packets, shove cupboards shut, slam on about hemlines and torn black tights peep-showing lucky pennies of skin, because grown women can’t just wish-link pinkies, to ward off a suburb’s sons?
The girl’s friends, asked by social workers to tell when she skipped classes, because she had to get back on track, mustn’t let one summer dusk haunt her with that boy crisping her open, peeling her back like the winding-key on a tin of imported sweets—did those friends stop reporting because tears skirred free as she begged please don’t ? Or because they learned she’d agreed to meet the boy again, at a bus shelter’s cold bunker, and the red folded mystery of how a wound could drag her back to its own start was too confusing? As disorienting as the acrid smoke they heard about later, when a schoolbag, schoolbooks, stockings, wasp-striped school tie, were soaked in art-room turps and set alight, as
a girl prayed for flames to leap a pine plantation’s firebreak, hive for the new subdivision and one blue house, its yard junked with bikes and a boy’s outgrown clobber, slung into trash bags slumped limp as drunks.
Minor Goddess
With baby-tooth-marked wooden spoon and porridge pot,
her diadem of elastic band and tussocky, sleep-mussed bed-hair,
her nightdress hemmed in god-pups fighting fisticuffs,
our neighbour’s a lesser-known goddess
of the linoleum and cutlery drawer, of leftovers and small, fleet spurts of joy, which,
should you make the right fond offerings, might dart in you, too.
On these frost-moored mornings, she leans out from her warm, yellow cove of
homespun heaven, scented with coffee and cinnamon,
mucky with toast crumbs honeyhooked to rumpled cotton,
and above a street white with seeds of ice, she scoops scraps from the pot, spoons
them to a window-side perch, nailed on like a bird’s spare room;
fills a chipped china cup with sugar-water—
And lo, from snow-bitter air, wrist-warm oats and kitchen-sink nectar,
she kindles song-crop and wing-flicker: waxeyes, darting daubs of green and pewter;
tūī, sleek as puma, beaks noble as Horus, white poi throat-feathers proud Adam’s
apples.
Avid prophets, their high cascades, See! See!
summon up more wonder; they seed
this blended, jostling flock:
blackbirds, sparrows, finches, korimako, thrushes, starlings, k
ererū,
birds, birds, birds, all bank and quiver, ruffle and hosanna, as if they love,
how they love, her mothered-up, midlife, sleepily stove-singed mild oats.
ii
‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’
Harwood Beach Walk: Eavesdropping
A man says, ‘Do you know him?’
A woman answers, ‘Oh yes,
he was one of my first loves.’
The man laughs
his firm, dry correction:
‘There can only ever be one first.’
Yet the coppery flax plant rocks
its slim black seed keels
in the wind’s arms;
a cabbage tree practises arpeggios of light;
on the harbour’s roiling waters
white fire flares, then douses; flares again.
The peninsula hills sleep, leonine,
as the tūī’s aria marks and remarks
the arc of its territory.
In the mind’s ear, the sweet selective amnesia
of Lilburn’s ‘Moths and Candles’ newly beautiful
each time it’s played.
Like the roots of myth,
dark stones exposed by tidal ebb
bloom, uncurve their necks:
swans lifting from the creel of sleep.
Yes, hasn’t she caught it—
that we are wet clay
in the moment’s hands;
and so much more so
for each love’s
momentous admission
breaking, remaking us in its form.
Doorway
On the pavement outside the famous patisserie
a slender, chignon-haired woman sits inside her fortress
of backpack, tote bags, suitcases
which she arranges and rearranges
with the worn sobriety of a new mother
or a nurse in a recovery-ward hover.
Her palms rest on the luggage temples
as she whispers numbers: times or temperatures;
she fingers across pockets and linings
to check sutures, swellings, compressions,
now tallies the bags with the panic
of a teacher herding pupils because this is not a drill
and she is strained enough, painfully thin enough,
for us to halt our hurry, offer food, money, enquiries
but she grows fierce in her count, as if leucocytes, nebulae,
ghosts or tempests hinge on this, she chants charms,
colours and figures to hold the bristling bourrage
of our bodies, voices and faces at bay.
She pivots, moves and re-patterns the cases,
follows some complex internal schematics;
frets at her soapstone choker as if to lift the hex
memory’s shadow projects on tomorrow—
so we find we turn to our watches, mobiles, to check places
we said we’d be, friends we promised to see;
we mutter and singsong, draw our children as close
as the blue-skinned passports nestled at our hips;
repeat names, dates, flights: anchors, mantras,
bulwarks to staunch this internal mounting frantic keening disarray.
Mère-mare
Last night in my sleep
my baby’s father came
to take him away from me.
I had borne a boy
I was forbidden to hold
though his mouth was sere and sore
and golden colostrum welled in me
like the cells’ own cry for water.
I had done some terrible thing—
and as I slowly woke to it,
groping for knowledge as if for watch or lamp,
the baby gazed at me
with ancient desperation;
yet flat, dim shapes dragged me back
as my breasts wept runnels of milk’s white lava;
and the new father spoke
with the crackle of plastic,
swore the new mother could never
bear to see me; said I’d signed a pact
to render my child unto them
as if the body were merely an ice cube mould
that had only to heat and flex a little
to release its self-compacted pockets
of piquant, enigmatic sweetness.
When I truly woke
and both real sons crept in close beside me,
tousled heads bunting the crook of my arms, my neck
like young steers remembering their udder-honey,
even then, the scalpel of loss hooked deep, scored deeper—
even now, something naked, lowing and primate haunts here
terrified of what truths speak through dreams.
‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’
—William Blake
When it hurts, but she doesn’t say
When it dulls, but he still gives praise
When she bites, but he refuses rage
and he walks free, though she stays.
When they wait through blunt dismay
though they ache as the children play,
this is tread and bootgrind
this is hope’s hard labour
this is the heart’s ripe savour
this is the sting of healing
this is the rope of time—
and love is dust
ignited
in fleet, golden murmuration.
Tone Poem
The korimako descant | the fine white china lid of the sky | the pounamu twist pendant | on the hitchhiking librarian;
the sound of cars speeding | on wet tarmac in the distance |
the wide coastal state highway | sea-wrack strewn shore | stumbling grey knee bones of the rocks | all made it seem in sweet |
The fast angular electric guitar | the chartreuse lens of the unopened wine |
some Jeep parked in a side alley | the metallic tap of an office worker’s heels |
the coronets of fresh dew | held high on the ferns’ brows |
even the high thin whine of head cold | like a phone in a villa’s back corridor |
beneath the stained-glass soar of the bird’s tiny coloratura from power lines, trees |
together made the days carry | a sharp citrus tang of the real |
As if the man | so clearly branched with doubt |
about you | were merely incidental | and that low blood thrum |
(through tussock’s shudder, | through salt glister of damp sand, |
through fleshy slap of wooden spoon in batter, | through snug of lost in hand, |
through sun-pitched song strains, | through thick fog scarves round coastal throats) |
||: was the earth’s own cantabile | along time’s deep capillaries||
Resurrection
Remember the Magic 8-Ball fortune-teller toys
the other kids had in America?
You’d ask a question, then shake the water-filled black globe,
wait for the printed dice inside to drift up with its prediction.
Remember itself now mirrors shake and tilt:
first it brings an ink-dark blank, then up floats a looming, partial view.
Something agitates us: say, the pop-song cheese
in a hotel lobby that seeds restless irritation
then falls through chords that bend the day’s snow-dulled air;
so that soon, oscillating under the song’s surface, comes memory’s bright flotsam
back from when there was a father who was together with a mother;
a little, giggly sister; a rented house with Merryweather steamers on the wallpaper;
a rabbit called Erik the Red; roller skates with blue ankle boots;
a trust we thought as tough as the dimes we’d bite like gold doubloons.
Or perhaps a jolt comes while reading in a café, from a novel’s scene that hurtles
a grandfather’s war
stories to the fore, horror as visible
as that fortune-ball’s printed messages. It obliterates the lacquer
of civilisation over us, the gentle Sri Lankan waiter with garnet ring,
the coffee bill he presents with a grace and politesse
that the charge barely pays obeisance for. Or like that insult spat on screen
at a stranger who accidentally jostled another in a bus—
fucking sand-bunny, go back to where you came from—that has me fret,
then later turn, mid-work, to Google a name I’d not thought it possible to trace.
Her soft, eight-year-old face, white ankle socks, long skirt
sway up from the past; quiet ally in alien schoolyards, wrenched back to Iran,
moments, it seemed, before political crisis hit; no time to comprehend
nor pledge goodbyes; letters never arrived; days turned
to clotted buttermilk spilling, never unspilling, the confusion meant
I hardly knew how I came to stand up, bull-headed, white-fisted,
at yet another school: little antipodean transient,
bawling at a thistle-haired boy who’d replayed the parental hate
he thought to dignify as News; and though I scarcely understood the words shah,
ayatollah,
fury’s particles arced. ‘It is not all Iranians.
It’s about governments. I had a friend. Her name was Roshi.
‘She’s gone, but her family did nothing wrong.’
Her date-dark eyes brimmed with premature wisdom,
yet her smile travels decades unbroken; she the only child
to speak to me on my first day in migrant skin.
And now, dazzled, frantic, as if clutching rails on a plunging deck,
I’m scanning the streaming oracles of LinkedIn, Facebook,
crying out to time’s indifferent captains, Wait! She’s alive.
Roshi Givechi is alive!
Teen Genie
Against the solemn tiers of male choristers
dressed in waiters’ black and white,
red binders of their song sheets held aloft
so the scene serves a formal music for the eye,
one tall, sweet, lanky teen calmly queens it
onto stage; perches at the glittery drum kit;
invited to give these good old boys a rock beat