Poems 1960-2000
Page 6
of the country, not mine alone) I give them
all my loose change for their rattling tin
and my blessing – little enough. But now
to my tough Presbyterian ancestors,
Brooks and Hamilton, lying in the graves
I couldn’t find at Moneymore and Cookstown
among so many unlabelled bones, I say:
I embrace you also, my dears.
Richey
My great-grandfather Richey Brooks
began in mud: at Moneymore;
‘a place of mud and nothing else’
he called it (not the way it looks,
but what lies under those green hills?)
Emigrated in ’74;
ended in Drury: mud again –
slipped in the duck-run at ninety-three
(wouldn’t give up keeping poultry,
always had to farm something).
Caught pneumonia; died saying
‘Do you remember Martha Hamilton
of the Oritor Road?’ – still courting
the same girl in his mind. And she
lived after him, fierce widow,
in their daughter’s house; watched the plum tree –
the gnarled, sappy branches, the yellow
fruit. Ways of living and dying.
The Voyage Out
The weekly dietary scale
per adult: pork and Indian beef,
three pounds together; one of sugar,
two of potatoes, three and a half
of flour; a gill of vinegar;
salt, pepper, a pint of oatmeal;
coffee, two ounces, likewise tea;
six of butter, suet, treacle,
and, in the tropics, of lime juice;
grudging grants of mustard and pickle;
split peas, raisins, currants, rice,
and half a pound of biscuit a day.
A diet for the young and fit:
monotonous, but not starvation –
and Martha traded half her ration
for extra lime juice from the crew.
Their quarters, also, adequate.
So not the middle passage; no.
But not a pleasure cruise, either.
A hundred days of travelling steerage
under capricious canvas; Martha
newly pregnant, struggling to manage
the first four (Tom, Eliza, Joe,
Annie); to keep them cool and clean
from a two-gallon can of water;
to calm their sleeping; to stay awake,
so heavy, herself; to protect the daughter
she rocked unborn in the swaying hammock
below her ribs (who would be Jane).
True, the family was together.
But who could envy Martha? Sick
with salt meat; thirsty; and gazing on
a sky huge as the whole Atlantic,
storm-waves like Slieve Gallion,
and no more Ireland than went with her.
Train from the Hook of Holland
Not pill-boxes, exactly: blocks
of concrete, octagonal, serrated –
house-sized fancy buttons, roofed
with green turf. ‘Hitler’s Atlantic wall’
says the man in the corner seat.
On the other side of the train
lambs running, and, yes, a canal.
Then the low sun through a sea-haze
neon-red over – Maassluis, is it?
Some things, once you’ve got them,
are difficult to get rid of.
But we are happy, going somewhere.
Nelia
She writes to me from a stony island
where they understand none of her languages.
Time has slipped out of its cogwheel:
she walks looking at plants and insects,
thinking without words, forgetting her home
and her work and her callous, temporary young lover.
Her children play like cicadas among the hills
and are safe. She cooks when they are hungry,
sleeps at will, wakes and runs to the sea.
I remember exactly the colour of her daughter’s eyes –
glass-green; and the boy’s light blue against his tan;
hers less clearly. But I see them now
as blue-black, reflecting an inky sky –
pure, without motes or atmosphere – that extends
uninterrupted from her to the still sun.
Moa Point
At Moa Point that afternoon
two biologists were searching rockpools
for specimens. It was low tide.
I watched. They rolled away a stone,
fossicked in wet weed, described things
rather self-consciously to each other.
Then one of them put into my hands
a cold heavy jelly: my first sea-slug.
I peered gratefully down at it,
turned it over – did nothing, surely?
for them to laugh at. ‘See that?’
said the one with freckles (they were both quite young)
‘it doesn’t seem to worry her.’
‘Oh, well,’ said the other ‘these local kids…’
I kept my eyes down for a moment
in solemn, scientific study;
then said in my recently-acquired
almost local accent ‘Thank you.’
And firmly but gently (a vet with a kitten)
handed it back.
Briddes
‘Briddes’ he used to call them,
out of Chaucer – those cool
early-morning creatures
who tinkled in the elm trees.
Briddes talked us awake
and punctuated our childish
medieval loving.
All other birds were birds.
The Famous Traitor
His jailer trod on a rose-petal.
There were others on the stone floor.
His desk tidy; some lines in pencil,
the bible open.
Years before
he’d lived like a private soldier –
a bag of nuts and the milk ration
for long days’ marches. And under
the uniform a mathematician.
Puzzle-maker. After power:
which he got, this pastor’s son
turned agnostic.
The nature
of his ‘new kind of treason’,
his links with the Nazi high command,
the deals, the sense of mission,
are well-documented; and
beyond every explanation.
He died ‘with dignity’ some said;
some that he had to wait an hour,
died shivering in the bitter cold.
It looked like fear. It was fear:
or it was not. And he did,
or did not, shake hands before
that moment with the firing-squad.
Authorities let us down here.
His final audience, the ‘crowd of notables’, might as well
have been, as he was, blindfold.
We are left with the empty cell
like a film-set; the table
where the man of action/dreamer
made notes on his father’s bible
in a litter of roses. Enter
his faithful jailer, to record
just this. The rest remains obscure
like all that made a dictionary word
of his name; like what he did it for.
Script
‘Wet the tea, Jinny, the men are back:
I can hear them out there, talking, with the horses,’
my mother’s grandmother said. They both heard it,
she and her daughter – the wagon bumpily halted,
a rattle of harness, two familiar voices
in sentences to be identified later
and quoted endles
sly. But the tea was cold
when the men came in. They’d been six miles away,
pausing to rest on Manurewa Hill
in a grove of trees – whence ‘Fetch the nosebags, Dickie’
came clearly over. A freak wind, maybe:
soundwaves carrying, their words lifted up
and dropped on Drury. Eighty years ago,
long before the wireless was invented,
Grandma told us. It made a good story:
baffling. But then, so was the real thing –
radio.
My father understood it.
Out on the bush farm at Te Rau a Moa
as a teenager he patiently constructed
little fiddly devices, sat for hours
every day adjusting a cat’s whisker,
filtering morse through headphones. Later came
loudspeakers, and the whole family could gather
to hear the creaky music of 1YA.
So my father’s people were technicians, is that it?
And my mother’s were communicators, yes? –
Who worked as a barber in the evenings
for the talking’s sake? Who became a teacher –
and who was in love with tractors? No prizes.
Don’t classify. Leave the air-waves open.
We each extract what we most need. My sons
rig out their rooms with stereo equipment.
I walk dozily through the house
in the mornings with a neat black box,
audible newspaper, time-keeper and saver,
sufficient for days like that.
On days like this
I sit in my own high borrowed grove
and let the leafy air clear my mind
for reception. The slow pigeon-flight,
the scraped-wire pipping of some bird,
the loamy scent, offer themselves to me
as little presents, part of an exchange
to be continued and continually
(is this a rondo? that professor asked)
perpetuated. It is not like music,
though the effects can strike as music does:
it is more like agriculture, a nourishing
of the growth-mechanisms, a taking-in
of food for what will flower and seed and sprout.
On a path in the wood two white-haired women
are marching arm in arm, singing a hymn.
A girl stops me to ask where I bought my sandals.
I say ‘In Italy, I think’ and we laugh.
I am astonished several times a day.
When I get home I shall make tea or coffee
for whoever is there, talk and listen to talk,
share food and living-space. There will always
be time to reassemble the frail components
of this afternoon, to winnow the scattered sounds
dropped into my range, and rescue from them
a seed-hoard for transmission. There will be
always the taking-in and the sending-out.
In Memoriam: James K. Baxter
Dear Jim, I’m using a Shakespearian form
to write you what I’ll call a farewell letter.
Rhyming iambics have become the norm
for verse epistles, and I’m no trendsetter.
Perhaps you’ll think it’s going back a bit,
but as a craftsman you’ll approve of it.
What better model have we, after all?
Dylan the Welshman, long your youthful passion,
doesn’t quite do now, and the dying fall
of Eliot was never in your fashion.
Of North Americans the one you’d favour
is Lowell. But his salt has the wrong savour:
our ocean’s called Pacific, not Atlantic –
which doesn’t mean to say Neruda meets
the case. As for the classically romantic –
well, maybe it was easier for Keats:
I’d write with more conviction about death
if it were clutching at my every breath.
And now we’ve come to it. The subject’s out:
the ineluctable, the all-pervasive.
Your death is what this letter’s all about;
and if so far I’ve seemed a bit evasive
it’s not from cowardice or phoney tact –
it’s simply that I can’t believe the fact.
I’d put you, with New Zealand, in cold storage
to wait for my return (should I so choose).
News of destruction can’t delete an image:
what isn’t seen to go, one doesn’t lose.
The bulldozed streets, the buildings they’ve torn down
remain untouched until I’m back in town.
And so with you, framed in that sepia vision
a hemisphere away from me, and half
the twenty years I’ve known you. Such division
converts a face into a photograph:
a little blurred perhaps, the outlines dim,
but fixed, enduring, permanently Jim.
I saw you first when I was seventeen,
a word-struck student, ripe for dazzling. You
held unassuming court in the canteen –
the famous poet in the coffee-queue.
I watched with awe. But soon, as spheres are apt
to do in Wellington, ours overlapped.
I married, you might say, into the art.
You were my husband’s friend; you’d wander in
on your way home from teaching, at the start,
for literary shop-talk over gin.
And then those fabled parties of one’s youth:
home-brew and hot-lines to poetic truth.
Later the drinks were tea and lemonade,
the visits family ones, the talk less vatic;
and later still, down south, after I’d made
my getaway, came idiosyncratic
letters, your generous comments on my verse,
and poems of your own. But why rehearse
matters which you, acute observer, wise
recorder, don’t forget? And now I falter,
knowing your present case: those tolerant eyes
will register no more. But I can’t alter
this message to a dirge; the public attitude
isn’t my style: I write in simple gratitude.
To think of elegies is to recall
several of yours. I find, when I look through
your varied, eloquent poems, nearly all
frosted with hints at death. What can I do
now, when it has become your own condition,
but praise all that you gave to the tradition?
St John’s School
When I went back the school was rather small
but not unexpectedly or oddly so.
I peered in at the windows of the hall
where we sang O God Our Help thirty years ago
for D-Day, the Normandy landings. It was all
as I’d pictured it. Outside, they’d cut the row
of dusty laurels, laid a lawn instead,
and the prefab classroom at the end was new;
but there were the lavatories, there was the shed
where we sat on rainy days with nothing to do,
giggling; and the beech trees overhead
whose fallen husks we used to riffle through
for triangular nuts. Yes, all as it should be –
no false images to negotiate,
no shocks. I wandered off contentedly
across the playground, out through the north gate,
down the still knee-straining slope, to see
what sprang up suddenly across the street:
the church, that had hardly existed in my past,
that had lurked behind a tree or two, unknown –
and uncensorious of me as I chased
squirrels over the graves – the church had gr
own:
high on its huge mound it soared, vast;
and God glared out from behind a tombstone.
Pupation
Books, music, the garden, cats:
I have cocooned myself
in solitude, fatly silken.
Settled?
I flatter myself.
Things buzz under my ribs;
there are ticklings, dim blunderings.
Ichneumon flies have got in.
The Drought Breaks
That wet gravelly sound is rain.
Soil that was bumpy and crumbled
flattens under it, somewhere;
splatters into mud. Spiked grass
grows soft with it and bends like hair.
You lean over me, smiling at last.
Kilpeck
We are dried and brittle this morning,
fragile with continence, quiet.
You have brought me to see a church.
I stare at a Norman arch in red sandstone
carved like a Mayan temple-gate;
at serpents writhing up the doorposts
and squat saints with South-American features
who stare back over our heads
from a panel of beasts and fishes.
The gargoyles jutting from under the eaves
are the colour of newborn children.
Last night you asked me
if poetry was the most important thing.
We walk on around the building
craning our heads back to look up
at lions, griffins, fat-faced bears.
The Victorians broke some of these figures
as being too obscene for a church;
but they missed the Whore of Kilpeck.
She leans out under the roof
holding her pink stony cleft agape
with her ancient little hands.
There was always witchcraft here, you say.
The sheep-track up to the fragments
of castle-wall is fringed with bright bushes.
We clamber awkwardly, separate.
Hawthorn and dog-rose offer hips and haws,