The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature
Page 91
thrown yarrow stalks guide towards an eastern star.
II
We’ve seen cyclones while anchored six feet from coral
and played guitar to pitch-drunk sirens;
we’ve been battened night-long in shelter of islands,
we’ve seen water spew scum and weeds ashore, and emerged
as tourists to pick over debris of trees.
We sail three days, watching the compass in turns,
invent gadgets to make us millionaires
while a skinny barracuda dries, strips salted in the sun.
III
Under Venus, the night watcher dreams of sailors
as they lie day upon night, wracked by a yacht’s hard hammer
locked below and craving for quiet;
but here, in a mild gale
with steep grey seas curled by a knotted wind,
while riding the cockpit bench,
wheel lashed to ninety degrees,
sails reefed and halyards straining,
the rhythm of the sea burns cold salt hands—
there are only sailors here.
IV
Darkness lies over the deep
until dawn when footfall fills the mind.
Clouds castle the disc-horizon
and the vaults of night open:
here no tall sticks mark the rocks
no lighthouse sweeps the depth of the place.
Now quiet lies on the un-breathed water
and light changes
are fancies of wind on waves:
the sea is the same the day is the same
morning and evening are come and gone.
V
On the eighth day a cormorant
bespeaks calm waters and land.
Unaccustomed air is touched by
the wild
and within, that silent space holds
no fear.
(1979)
Kendrick Smithyman, ‘An Ordinary Day Beyond Kaitaia’
1
Cabbage tree heads, they nod,
profoundly confirmed,
towards a church’s new white paint.
About midmorning an elementary
summer breeze arrives from the coast
too late to alter. The township has
already dedicated this day, to usage.
An old disorder yields, to wise men
who come from the south. Where was a stable,
they made the Tourist Inn; for shepherds,
a public convenience of concrete blocks,
the kind that’s called hollowstone.
Fused with, confused as, memories,
assumed a means of tree pollens
or a shifty heat off the church’s
dazzling corrugated roof,
inconstant air implicates farmlands
in a conspiracy of nation, utility,
populist myth. You must change
your life, Rilke’s archaic Apollo urged.
They have done so. They have put by.
Between a sea and an ocean
the farmlands lie low
without a hill to comfort them.
A peasant people won hard
from waste, teaching their weird flats
a novel language, an old belief.
Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius
they pray for, but at the bridge
to the dairy factory at midmorning
those echoes which coil remember
a coast not broken or so far displaced,
just accommodated. You breathe
a last of ozone, of kelp iodine.
Like the popping of kelp on a drift
fire, you hear pods closer.
Between the soil, the sand, swamp
and sea, is an understanding.
To change your life you must understand
how your life goes, and where.
2
Like so many huntsmen
they move intently.
They have an assignation
with a wildfowl, garishly feathered,
a fowl of unearthly voice.
You have not seen her like.
Dear object, lulled in myth,
you may yet be splendid
as the firebird, birdwoman,
the snowbird, woman of white
fire
though here the quarry, much
harried, burns away through heavy
scent down to the burning clay
under an overburden of flowers.
The wreaths are already wilting
and they are not yet out of town.
Today a myth dies a little more,
a little less than kind.
We are aliens.
3
And the kin: tanned, earnest
Slavic Polynesian faces,
all the men wearing dark
suits. Perhaps they are going
to a wedding beyond
the dairy factory.
Do not think so.
You must change your life.
As of now, you marry conflicting wishes.
You also will progress
towards the sunbaked slope,
being contracted. Hedged about
with hakea, you go. Bitterns nest
in a raupo swamp beside, harriers
stiffly tread its edge.
Archaic Apollo, your people,
they taught the vine to grow
wild along their roads. Clay
like talc, mica-sharp grits dust
the grapes’ tight premature testicular
clusters. If the fruits will seed,
who will pick them over? They go
earth-borne. Hard, to discover
when they ripen. Hard to know,
the end due of their season.
On the west course to Tasman’s sea
pine stumps, insignis, broken teeth.
Alien forests, made quick
to accommodate, sicken
Go slowly, carefully, like those
who pick a path among stumps,
like the funeral cars in high
day, headlamps teasing on low beam.
My wife’s dark glasses reflected
cars, lights, unreconciled twin suns.
4
They have put by
an earliest type washing-machine
several lawnmowers (hand and powered)
tables deckchairs beds
a 1911 Montgomery Ward mailorder catalogue
wirestrainers spanners crosscut saws
shark-repellants surfcasting rods
lifebuoys and a mae west (with whistle)
an almost complete household physician
they have put by in a colonial junkshop
ships’ riding lamps,
verdigrised brass
horseless carriage lanterns,
bullseyes, hurricanes with bent
wires and no glass, their wicks
shrivelled, smoke blanked.
Fires banked, they see perpetually
nothing. Illustrate nothing.
Shelve them beside
fossil eggs by whale vertebrae
windwashed, seablown, beyond
whiteness hardly temporised
by the mere dust which they breed
or dust which is imported from their road
tending eastward to the Pacific
past garage, past creek
where fishermen compare. Turbid
weed congregates in the gut.
Changing, their lives’ style.
5
Their river decayed,
but their soil learned new tricks
of speech, for winds of hay paddocks,
a dialect fitting herds,
a stress and accent of flocks and crops.
Why, if intensely assured
by confident highlights every
where present to trouble exposure,
should I sourly
dawdle,
doodling mementoes, cryptically
muttering
I go, thou goest, he/she/or it,
and one (impersonally) goes
If we live,
we go. You go. They, a common gender, go.
I am a stranger. Too facile, to say
we are all strangers. The land is made
to our liking. Not far north
they are going, to offer.
To Hine, whose likeness still the swamp.
To Hine-nui, whose tumultuous hair the chattering
idiot cabbage trees mimic,
Hine-nui-te-Po, She who is darkness,
at the heart speaking of the land,
along the wind’s edge, at the sea line.
You cannot put by. I write in her dust
on the bonnet of our stationwagon
M A T E. That will do, for a time.
If we live, we stand in language.
You must change your words.
(1972)
Allen Curnow, from ‘Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects’
1 Lone Kauri Road
The first time I looked seaward, westward
it was looking back yellowly,
a dulling incandescence of the eye of day.
It was looking back over its raised hand.
Everything was backing away.
Read for a bit. It squinted between the lines.
Pages were backing away.
Print was busy with what print does,
trees with what trees do that time of day,
sun with what sun does, the sea
with one voice only, its own,
spoke no other language than that one.
There wasn’t any track from which to hang
the black transparency that was travelling
south-away to the cold pole. It was cloud
browed over the yellow cornea which I called
an eyeball for want of another notion,
cloud above an ocean. It leaked.
Baldachin, black umbrella, bucket with a hole,
drizzled horizon, sleazy drape,
it hardly mattered which, or as much
what cometing bitchcraft, rocketed shitbags,
charred cherubim pocked and pitted the iceface
of space in time, the black traveller.
Everything was backing away.
The next time I looked seaward,
it was looking sooted red, a bloodshot cornea
browed with a shade that could be simulated
if the paint were thick enough, and audible,
to blow the coned noses of the young kauri,
the kettle spout sweating,
the hound snoring at my feet,
the taste of tobacco, the tacky fingers
on the pen, the paper from whose plane
the last time I looked seaward
would it be a mile, as the dust flies,
down the dulling valley, westward?
everything was backing away.
(1972)
Hone Tuwhare, ‘Rain’
I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain
If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut
And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind
the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground
the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops
But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you
you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain
(1970)
Hone Tuwhare, ‘A Fall of Rain at Mitimiti: Hokianga’
Drifting on the wind, and through
the broken window of the long house
where you lie, incantatory chant
of surf breaking, and the Mass
and the mountain talking.
At your feet two candles puff the
stained faces of the whanau, the vigil
of the bright madonna. See, sand-whipped
the toy church does not flinch.
E moe, e te whaea: wahine rangimarie
Mountain, why do you loom over us like
that, hands on massive hips? Simply
by hooking your finger to the sea,
rain-squalls swoop like a hawk, suddenly.
Illumined speeches darken, fade to metallic
drum-taps on the roof.
Anei nga roimata o Rangipapa.
Flat, incomprehensible faces: lips moving
only to oratorical rhythms of the rain:
quiet please, I can’t hear the words.
And the rain steadying: black sky leaning
against the long house. Sand, wind-sifted
eddying lazily across the beach.
And to a dark song lulling: e te whaea, sleep.
(1974)
Sam Hunt, ‘A Valley Called Moonshine’
for Josh Andersen
The lights in the farmhouses
go out. The inlet is out.
An iron shack on the shoreline
floats its light on the water.
A grandfather up Moonshine
remembers the first daughter.
Dreams are easy. Wild horses.
(1970)
James K. Baxter, ‘The Ikons’
Hard, heavy, slow, dark,
Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea
Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later
When the heart has lost its unjust hope
For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket
Over the paddocks of young grass,
So delicate like fronds of maidenhair,
Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them,
Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots,
But they’ll do to add to the soup. It’s a long time now
Since the great ikons fell down,
God, Mary, home, sex, poetry,
Whatever one uses as a bridge
To cross the river that only has one beach,
And even one’s name is a way of saying—
‘This gap inside a coat’—the darkness I call God,
The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate
The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through
Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand,
Into something else? I go on looking
For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing
Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.
(1971)
Elizabeth Smither, ‘The Legend of Marcello Mastroianni’s Wife’
All summer in the shallow sea
She lay on a lilo waiting
Dangling a hand, primed to embrace
And bless the demi-god.
She would cook from the freezer
Breasts of pasta, sauces like milk
Spoon-feed him, flirt
Mountainously and save herself.
In bed while she ministered
Territories of herself she spoke
Into the darkness the litany she’d learnt:
Whales, dolphins, the dove-like sea.
(1981)
Ruth Dallas, ‘Living with a Cabbage-tree’
A cabbage-palm is not an interesting tree.
Its single trunk resembles a telegraph-pole.
Botanists say it is not a tree at all,
But a lily, grown exceptionally rampant.
This, I think, could happen only in New Zealand,
Where birds have left us skeletons as big as horses.
I did not wa
nt a cabbage-tree in the garden.
There’s plenty of room on the Canterbury plains
Where a tree of any kind relieves the eye.
Its life began as a little harmless flax-bush,
I thought a pot-plant—ornamental leaves
Someone had planted out for variety of foliage.
I had hardly turned my back when it soared up
Into a shape like a coconut-palm in a strait-jacket.
The flax-bush-part is elevated now, say fifteen feet,
And casts the smallest patch of shadow and the fastest
In the garden. It’s enough to cover your head;
But if you take a chair outside you must be prepared
To shift from west to east more quickly
Than you have ever chased the shelter of a tree.
I like the way the shadow of its bole
Moves like the finger of a giant sun-dial
Over the concrete; that’s rather romantic;
Reminding us that time is passing, passing;
And cats declare it without peer for sharpening claws.
But it’s a dull tree, inclined to fancy itself
As a musical instrument, when the wind blows,
Sometimes tuning up like an orchestra.
You listen expectantly. But nothing happens.
The wind drops and it falls silent.
(1976)
Domestics
Maurice Gee, ‘A Glorious Morning, Comrade’
Mercy tied her father’s scarf in a mean granny knot.
‘Now remember, darling, if you want the little house just bang on the wall. We don’t want any wets with the girls all here.’ And Barbie, gentler, but not to be outdone, knelt and zipped up his slippers. ‘You’ll be lovely and warm in the sun, won’t you? Just bang on the wall. No little accidents please. ’Bye daddums.’
They left him in his rocking chair on the veranda and he rocked a little, pitying their innocence. He did not mean to pee in his pants today. He had other plans.
Presently the ‘girls’ came, driving their little cars; and they walked up the path in twos and threes, dumpy women or stringy, the lot, in Saturday clothes and coloured hair. They stopped for a little chat of course, politely, and sniffed behind their hands to see if he had behaved himself today. They were good-hearted women. Mercy and Barbie attracted such.
‘Lucky you, Mr Pitt-Rimmer. Just loafing in the sun.’
He counted them. Ten. Three tables. There was Madge Ogden, a daughter of divorcees; and Pearl Edwards who taught mathematics at the Girls’ High School; and Mary Rendt who had wanted to be a nun but had lost her faith and married a German Christian Scientist and lost that faith and her husband too; and the three Bailey girls, with not a husband amongst them, whose mother had broken their hearts by choosing to live in an old people’s home; and Christine Hunt who had been caught shoplifting when she was a girl and lived it down and married the son of the mayor; and Jean Murray-Briggs, whose name annoyed him; and last the lesbians, though none of the others knew—Phyllis Wedderburn and Margaret Way. Charles Pitt-Rimmer, he knew. He winked at them and they blushed, but seemed a little pleased.