the ghost images of sedated depressives in the foetal position.
As I scrubcut my way around a backblock wilderness
as unknown as Europe it was I who began to crack not it.
The mountain ‘Egmont’ rained down its ciphers as I slept
until I entered the psychologically tropic world
of heat and fever, lava village of the last upthrust.
Dealing with the giggling mountain, walking it,
you felt you had seen one of the quadrants,
fundament and crotch scored
between the arched legs of the world.
This province began to experience happenings.
A two-headed calf was born at Stratford,
at Bell Block at evening an old-age pensioner
hung himself by his shoelaces in a Corporation bus,
Dow Chemical Plant mutated into a radioactive centre,
firing out supernovae.
Sacred sites became fictions and sensitised scraps
of computer card in plastic envelopes were irrevocably
drawn into the throbbing whirlpool of events.
A drudge in a hotel kitchen cornered the market
in replicas of credit cards by fabricating a deception
which played on the public’s mounting fears of eruption.
His prolific operation soon saw him zooming
to the top of the money tree.
Bizarre mission for a steamy morning, hunting
through the underbelly’s growth canopy
for signs of the tribe as showers sweep down
and a rackety V8 is driven from under
a dilapidated carport overhang with the rain seeping in,
the tribe collapsed like a rusty barbed-wire fence
in front of a wedding-cake house with soft pink icing
spelling out blushes and little tears of joy
in the happy hour.
Scrawny wetas skipping across cushions of green moss
on fallen old totaras. Neat, eh, to see
ragwort, cocksfoot, fennel, catmint growing
round a shagged dinghy on a rusted cradle trailer
as wraiths ascend supplejack and the beekeeper
is rooted to the spot with a curse.
And now with the art that goes through daily life
the fundamentalist preacher, like a page of old history,
speckled, damp with mildew spots,
his Brylcreemed waffle of hair catching the morning sun,
walks in the foreground of cones of gravel,
central and terminal.
Stained stacks of Truth newspaper in the skew-whiff shed
adjacent to the off-balance dunny.
In the wool shearers’ abandoned quarters
a few stained, bloody mattresses, stuffed with kapok,
have burst.
Cherubim perch on the shingle, ice-cream
types of gentlemen swing their partners
like candyfloss in a spin.
A bruised young mother,
with her mother in a trouser suit
and upswept wings of punished hair,
recalls knitting needles of the circle clicking
like train wheels
in the pink-wafer light that reminiscing imposes.
Quattrocento fanatics didn’t have it like this.
From them we borrowed cardinal red and pageboy hairstyles,
our larders and pantries stuffed with wholemeal loaves
on the rise, in ferment.
Beans swelling, sprouting out of their jars.
Nuts pouring from plastic sacks.
The stillness leads on into a chapel hush.
Grated carrot bristles.
The dinner guests shrunk
back from the gurgling wine like tarnished coins
thrown into a pocket
the questing forefinger seeks.
A Model-T Ford car hulk planted
in front of the mind like a zombie chariot before the cult of skis.
A battery of children
winding in a crocodile, candles aloft,
their seed teeth bared at the effort of the pilgrimage.
Those ropey arms and flayed legs are not
starved of sensation nor the sharp black/white
as the light snaps on.
Don’t knock yourself out,
Taranaki will be there in the morning,
the snow a gunky white blob of brilliantine,
an ornament, a gargoyle for Bat-Stud.
The town hall, pub, gymnasium, and squash court cluster
below, everything we have learnt reduces to a search
for the pyramid they burned down.
(1986)
C.K. Stead, ‘Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior’
In my game (and yours, reader) it was always the Frogmen
had clever theories. We did the dirty work
using the English language like a roguish trowel.
Tonight, two rubberised heads have set their Zodiac on course
from Okahu Bay. Past the Container port,
around Marsden Wharf, they’re ferrying a transitive verb
called Bomb. In a hired campervan a man and a woman
smoke, check their watches, and bicker.
Turenges don’t make it right, and anyway
the name is false, like their Swiss passports.
Half of Auckland, Dominique argues, has taken their number.
She’s exaggerating of course. He refuses to panic.
A beautiful night. You can see the lighthouse light
on off Rangitoto, and an undercover moon
casual among clouds over North Head. Here come
the rubber boys back in their puttering Zodiac.
Remember, reader, poems don’t deal in fact—
this is all a bad dream in the Elysée Palace.
Now scatter—it goes like the Paris Metro, according to plan.
Soon you will hear explosions. Someone will die.
More than a ship will founder. And the theory? Ah, the theory!
Dig a hole for it with your English trowels.
(1988)
Sexual Politics
Dinah Hawken, ‘The Tug of War’
Is a scene that rises in her mind. A long line of men, say 100,
facing north, holding a long rope. A long line of women, say 110
facing south, facing the men, holding the same long rope.
They are all dressed in late 19th century clothes, standing ready
on the shore-line of a long New Zealand beach. A long line
of surf is breaking.
The rope is clearly visible in the gap
where the first man faces the first woman. Here the starter also
stands. He is shouting into a megaphone:
‘Take the strain—get ready—go!’ So the tug
of war begins. Equal weight and equal strength on each
side. Centuries of struggle are rising
in the blood of each man and each woman and at the exact
moment that they judge the men to be at the height
of their physical and mental power, the women
let the rope go.
They love to let go and they love to get going:
they get themselves going and they let themselves go.
They let love go and they get love going:
they get others going and they let others go.
They let life go and they get life going,
they live to give love and they love to let live.
(1991)
Anne French, ‘The evader writes a lyric poem’
He might describe autumn in Princes Street,
or fishing at Karekare off the rocks,
or making love in a cave by the sea
to a woman not his wife, or a certain state
of hopeless love (with no one in mind,
however), or the condition of womanhood
<
br /> in general, pointing it neatly up
with Greek myth, to give the thing
a touch of real class. He knows what
he’s about. There are whole anthologies
full of that kind of thing, hundreds of years
of it stretch back through Fairburn, Yeats, Wyatt,
to Horace. It’s a literary gentlemen’s
club. He knows who the members are.
He knows what they say to each other.
Whatever he writes there’ll be no surprises.
(1988)
Anne French, ‘The lady fishermen’
Imagine Jane Austen in thigh waders perfecting
her rolling cast, or Miss Elizabeth Barrett
dashing off to the bush for a weekend’s
pig-shooting. Mrs Melville perhaps, at the helm
for the dog watch while Herman snatched
some sleep? Ludicrous. There’s no tradition.
We’ll just have to improvise (with improvements).
Take yesterday, for instance, drift fishing
in the dinghy off Rakino, five snapper in an hour.
Hauled up from thirty feet they screeched
as their swim bladders burst. Dead on arrival
in the bucket. And tonight I performed the graceful
act in my civilised kitchen: a sharp knife turning
one fish into two fillets and a pile of odds and ends.
Almost taken in by it, the poetry of catching
dinner, the magic of flesh turning white in the pan,
golden in its jacket of crumbs, decorated with a salad
of tomatoes and red onions as lurid as a paperback.
You might prescribe it as a known antidote to branlement
littéraire (that common affliction). Emily, pulling
steadily on the oars; Janet, slicing up the mullet bait.
(1990)
Sue McCauley, from Other Halves
‘Whadda y’ reckon they make of me?’ Tug was probing beneath a rock with a sharpened stick.
‘Who?’
‘Them. You know.’
‘I don’t know. Who?’ It’s outright laziness, she thought. Thinking’s too much effort for him. What if I refused to indulge in these silly quizzes? Would we live, after a time, in complete silence? Sign language maybe?
‘Course you know. Them. Your friends.’
She could see a spiky leg with cruel pincers. Two more and they’d have enough for dinner. All the same she hoped the crab would find a safe hole to back into.
‘I can’t remember what you were saying about them.’ She could, but he made her perverse.
‘Whadda they think of me?’
‘Oh, they approve of you. I mean they’re bound to, no matter what they really think of you.’
‘How’s that then?’ He sighted the leg and stabbed inwards. ‘Missed the bastard. I’ll get him though.’
‘’Cos Maoris are fashionable in these kind of circles, maybe because there aren’t many of them in these kind of circles. It makes you something of a treasure.’
‘Why are we fashionable?’
‘You’re s’posed to have an inborn instinct for nature and the land and all those things they’re into.’
He put his weight against the rock and tried to shift it. ‘D’you think I have?’
‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Maybe I get in the way of your instinct. Maybe I block it off. I mean you’re not exactly the mighty crab hunter!’
The rock turned and two crabs scuttled for safety. Tug kicked at them, landing one up on the stones. He grabbed his spear and impaled it with a guttural shriek then waved it still flailing in front of Liz’s face. ‘What was it you said?’
‘There were two. Where’s the other one?’
He went back to his prodding, leaving the crab in Liz’s upturned sunhat with its dead companions. Liz sat on her rock and thought about true words spoken in jest.
Was she estranging Tug from his heritage? Heritage had recently become a word of substance. Maoritanga, which she understood to mean Maori culture, or Maoriness, was a word that was cropping up all the time in newspapers and magazines. Her friends used it respectfully as if it had magical qualities; spokesmen and women for groups of radical young Maoris in the cities used it passionately and demanded its revival. She saw justice in their demands and sometimes she could even imagine a future New Zealand with fewer rules and sharp edges, mellowed by Maoritanga.
But on a subjective level the word seemed a rebuke. Implicit within it was the conviction that, severed from his own community and culture, a Maori was but a shell of a person. Should she then, as senior partner, send Tug off to discover a true and cultural identity? Was she robbing him of his birth-right? Were the two of them condemned by racial origin to be divided by differences that reached like a chasm into history?
He’d located the other crab. Watching him blocking off its water exit with stones she was reminded of Michael dispatching his troops. The crab edged sideways, his back end exposed and Tug had him, the shell grasped between finger and thumb. A big one.
Was Liz to believe that the satisfied grunt Tug emitted as he killed the creature was a reflex of generations? Was her involuntary shudder a product of her Anglo-Saxon heritage?
‘Poor little buggers,’ said Tug stirring the contents of her hat.
Maoris were different. Ever since she could remember, that point had been conveyed to her explicitly or implicitly by the people she knew. (Her own people?) Only in the last few months, feeling that for all his unpredictability Tug was closer to her—more like her—than any person had ever been, had she decided that difference was a fallacy. Yet now Maoris were saying it too, in the newspapers. We’re different. You’re different. And how could she, being different, have the presumption to dispute what they, being different, told her was true.
Yes she was different to Tug. She was different to Ken. And to Ailleen. And to her mother. Everybody different in ways, alike in ways. How could you measure and conclude about difference?
Tug had grown bored with crabs and climbed out to the end of the rocks. She could see him perched there looking out to sea, his legs dangling in the water. His hair reached halfway down his back.
And yes, a difference. He belonged in this bay—he fitted— in a way she did not. He was the beach, the rocks and the bush. She was the houses, transported and conspicuous. Take her apart and she was full of joints and angles and little dark corners.
They were living in a small bach with corrugated iron walls and no roof lining. When it rained—which had so far only happened once—the sound was deafening. The place had become available after they had been with Martyn and Pete for little more than a week. It was almost on the water’s edge and because that seemed such a bonus, and because Wai Bay was so altogether lovely, to find fault would have been churlish. True, some of the windows could only be opened by pushing the frames out of their surroundings and stacking them against the wall. And the toilet, up a track behind the house, was no more than a bottomless bucket over an almost full hole in the ground and the shed which housed it was doorless and rotting. But these were small matters, part of the adventure.
Enthroned on the bucket and its precarious wooden seat you looked out at the crumbling remains of a toolshed overgrown with jasmine and behind it two banana trees with the beginnings of fruit emerging in fat green fingers.
When Liz was a child their toilet had opened off the bathroom. It had shiny pale blue walls and the roll of paper was demure in frilly blue tulle. The seat was covered—for comfort or hygiene, she had never worked out which—with dark blue towelling gathered with elastic.
At Maling Drive the toilet had been across the hall from the bathroom. It had been papered by Liz, red and black flowers on a white background. On the back of the door was pinned a large diagram of a human body. Minus genitals, but the shape and face was male, Caucasian, and within the body’s outline, muscle and fibre in red and blue waved and swerved like anti
cyclones on a weather chart.
Considering the toilets of her life, Liz pondered their direction. Were they leading upwards to enlightenment or downwards to the bottom of the social heap? Wai Bay suggested the former, but Wai Bay might be only a passing hallucination.
In their first few weeks, the bay had exceeded even her glowing expectations. Tug, too, had been enthralled by it from the time of his first glimpse from the top of the hill. So Liz knew in her Calvinist heart there must be a catch somewhere. The place was too good to be true.
If Tug belonged to the place itself Liz belonged to the community. She had never found friendship so easy and abundant. She had never before felt so appropriate. Looking at these people she saw herself—not the way she was but the way she could be.
They were so confident. Continually they confirmed and reaffirmed among themselves the virtues of community, creativity and simplicity. They invest their poverty—for most of them seemed to be poor—with an air of achievement. Their homes smelt of incense, camomile and baking bread, and featured unlined walls and worn wooden floors with pride. The structural beams and mantelpieces and brick-and-plant bookshelves were cluttered with incense holders, tiny china bottles with stoppers, children’s creations, driftwood, growing things and crumpled packets of tobacco. Their walls were pinned with lengths of batik fabric and Indian cottons and sketches (many with Martyn’s signature).
An eager novice, Liz pummelled at bread dough, nurtured cuttings from other people’s herb gardens, tied her clothes in scientific designs and boiled them in dyes made from onion peelings. She read books by Christian Humphreys.
‘The uncle I lived with once was always on about hippies,’ said Tug. ‘Smart-arsed layabouts he called them, reckoned they were the worst kind.’
‘Are you trying to make a point?’
‘Not really. There weren’t many people he did like.’
Tug was fond of Pete and Martyn. The rest of their acquaintances he regarded without hostility but with a measure of suspicion. ‘They’re just playing at being poor. When they get sick of it they can run home to their rich daddies or go back to being teachers or whatever they were.’
‘You don’t know that. You’re just guessing.’
‘I can tell. Anyone can tell. And another thing, they all screw around, they’re all into each other.’
‘Well that’s their business, I guess.’ She had noticed. ‘Maybe it happens no more than anywhere else but they’re more open about it.’
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 110