Tongues of Ash

by Keith Westwater

  Interactive Press

  Tongues of Ash

  Westwater began writing poetry in 2003 while attending the International Institute of Modern Letters’ Writing the Landscape course at Victoria University of Wellington. Since then his work has appeared in a number of literary publications and has received or been short-listed for awards in New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. Prizes for his poetry include an equal first place in the 2006 Yellow Moon Spirit of Place competition, first place in the International Tertiary Student Poetry section of the 2009 Bauhinia Literary Awards, and Best First Book in the 2011 IP Picks competition. In 2009 he completed a Master of Letters in creative writing through Central Queensland University.

  Keith currently lives in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Before joining the New Zealand Army as a Regular Force Cadet in 1964, he went to school in Northland and Auckland. During his time in the Army and after leaving it in 1985, he has lived in many places in New Zealand and travelled extensively throughout the country and overseas. His working life has centred on teaching and learning and development in the workplace.

  Interactive Press

  The Literature Series

  Tongues of Ash

  Keith Westwater

  Interactive Press

  an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)

  Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court

  Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152

  sales@ipoz.biz

  ipoz.biz/IP/IP.htm

  First published by IP in 2011

  © Keith Westwater, 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Westwater, Keith.

  Title: Tongues of ash / Keith Westwater.

  ISBN: 9781921869273 (ebk.)

  Subjects: Travel--Poetry.

  New Zealand poetry.

  Dewey Number: NZ821.4

  For Margret

  Acknowledgements

  Front Cover Image: from Dawn Poem for Taranaki (1,000 x 2,000 mm, mixed media, 2005) by Turi Park

  Jacket Design: David Reiter

  Author Photo: Photography by Woolf Ltd

  Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in Landfall, JAAM, Snorkel, Idiom 23, Yellow Moon, and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s 2006 anthology Tiny Gaps and 2010 anthology across the fingerboards.

  The author wishes to express his thanks to the many people who have supported and helped him in different ways bring this work to fruition, including his wife Margret, daughter and son, Haidee and Logan, and their partners Gregor and Jo; Dr Lynda Hawryluk, Kristin Hannaford, and Stephen Butler – staff at Central Queensland University; members of the writing groups to which he belongs or has belonged (Debbie Bax, Michal Bigger, Juanita Deely, Martin de Jong, Patricia Donovan, Trish Harris, Tim Jones, Jan Jordan, Keith Lyons, Fionnaigh McKenzie, Clare Needham, Heidi North, Kerry Popplewell); members of ASLEC–ANZ (Association for the study of literature, environment and culture – Australia and New Zealand) particularly Charles Dawson, Dinah Hawken, David Young and the late Geoff Park; Les Roberts, te Reo Māori[1] student, for help with te Reo herein; and finally Dr David Reiter and the team at IP.

  [1] the Māori language

  Contents

  Map of Places in the Poems

  Key:

  1. Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982

  2. Fragments from 1967

  3. Burn time, Town statue talk

  4. Rivers that feud with the sea

  5. Trieste Street Trilogy

  6. The goose egg rock

  7. Return trip to the Hawkes Bay

  8. The Snow-Sayer

  9. Coming back from leave

  10. Rangipo grounding

  11. Navigation point on the Desert Road

  12. The sinews of Ohau Bay

  13. Petone Beach

  14. The West Winds gang is back; The Stations of the Bucket Man

  15. Wellington Southerly

  16. What we were doing on Wahine Day

  17. My first big empty

  18. Camera Obscura revealed

  19. Papaitonga Reserve in the duck-shooting season

  20. Very easily worked

  21. River talk

  22. Yet another poem on home thoughts from abroad and gorse

  Map sources:

  1. Outline map of New Zealand – Dreamstime

  2. Wellington terrain map inset – Google Earth

  A basket of apple trees

  Memories of place

  Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982

  You clasp a shabby quilt

  of dun and brown.

  Memories from years before

  at first stay locked away

  like the snow water

  in your mountains

  marching north and south.

  No storms call to your Port Hills,

  which are as bare as the trees

  that trellis your sky.

  But then, they always did.

  Even as I enter the city

  of my first true love

  you get coy

  clutch up a skirt of fog.

  Once again

  I have to fumble my way.

  Poems to the West Coast

  Fragments from 1967

  I remember rain

  when the train

  came through the portal

  beech trees, trunks black

  as though licked by flames

  that never stood a chance

  Moana’s empty platform

  soft drops on Lake Brunner

  dark amoeba pools

  at Stillwater

  (or was it Dobson?)

  wagons awash with coal

  Burn time

  They say it always rains on the Coast

  but Coasters who have been away

  know they’ll not get as good a tan

  in Palmerston North1

  as they will in Hokitika.

  Town statue talk

  On mid-winter nights

  in Hokitika

  Robbie Burns, Richard Seddon2

  and the Unknown Digger

  get down from their pedestals

  and meet behind St. Mary’s

  for a Monteiths –

  except for Robbie

  who has a single malt.

  At first they talk about

  the eighteen-sixties

  when the town had

  one hundred and two hotels

  ten thousand souls

  and nuggets in the creek.

  They next discuss

  the West Coast rugby team’s

  last match.

  Aye, the best laid schemes…

  moans Robbie.

  What we need

  thumps King Dick

  is more resources

  and a distribution plan.

  But the Digger

  just takes a swig

  looks to the hills and says

  There’s gold inside ’em –

  we just need

  to work it out.

  Rivers that feud with the sea

  The Haast rages at the sea

  when in flood

  rips boulders big as trucks

  from the knees and feet of giants

  hurls them in the ditch.3

  The Waiho runs to the sea

  from the nose of a river of ice

  which very slowly pokes its t
ongue in – and

  out, as it bench-presses

  mountains of snow.

  The Grey races for the sea

  but, barred from its prize

  wins instead

  the bones of boats and ships

  and the tears of fishermen’s widows.

  The last word

  Don’t you throw rocks at me

  retorts the sea

  cuts up rough

  slings trees

  at the giants

  The goose egg rock

  A small rock, still smooth

  once white, now grey

  sits on my desktop today

  picked from a beach thirty-four years ago

  south of Kaikoura, north of Goose Bay.

  Jum said be impressed by the goose eggs

  laid down on the beach by the sea

  laid down in the sea by the Clarence.

  I may not have been so

  but you were away.

  In Central Otago we laughed

  when Jum said Look out for schist tor!

  But rock-spotting ardour

  is suppressed by the goose bumps of love.

  Our kids found more rocks for my desk.

  You are still my tor today.

  Trieste Street Trilogy

  for Steve Hobbs

  I

  Tall pines, gracelessly aged

  lived across the road.

  Their long limbs spun wind into sea –

  at night, waves laved us to sleep.

  Garages squatted under the trees.

  When the Manawatu gales blew

  people scurried to retrieve cars

  fearing falling trees.

  Cones pot-shotted our roof

  but no pines fell. We re-berthed

  in Trieste Street a few years on.

  Stepping-stone stumps stood

  where the trees once grew.

  The garages had been felled too

  but the wind still blew.

  Even now, I hear surf in that street.

  II

  The first time in Trieste Street, father-in-law Steve

  helped me put in a vegie garden, double-dug the bed

  lined the vegies up with string, marched them in in rows.

  I fed the Big Lizzie tomatoes 5 lb superphosphate,

  2 lb blood and bone, 2 lb sulphate of potash –

  a nineteen forty-six brew Steve used in his market gardens.

  When I cleaned and oiled the spade and hoe and rake

  and the Big Lizzies grew huge, I think he thought

  I showed promise as a son-in-law.

  On our return

  I put in a no-dig garden, planted equidistantly

  built a compost heap between straw bales

  watered everything with chook-poo tea.

  Steve breathed in the compost, said it was good stuff.

  We knew the tomatoes weren’t up to much.

  III

  paddocks beyond

  a corrugated-iron fence

  saw-leaved trees nearby

  Elderberries, said Steve

  you could make wine

  come autumn

  the hot water cupboard

  housed musts –

  buckets of black blood

  from plucked berries

  eight years on

  we pitched tent again

  three houses

  further west

  (no wine this time)

  Cassie, our sentry

  white labrador

  challenged every car

  that breached the street –

  except Steve’s

  Return trip to the Hawkes Bay, St. Valentines Day Weekend, 2004

  The first cicadas broke through

  the earth’s crust

  as we left home

  dopey, green, flying badly.

  Near Otane, on a low hill

  the bungalow bent time

  with its sentinel

  of phoenix palms.

  North of Dannevirke

  cabbage trees still lined

  the railway track

  presenting arms.

  The Bay was a basket

  of apple trees

  trailing wine-lovers

  naked ladies in the fields.

  They’re all lotus-eaters

  up there you know

  a friend warned us

  a decade ago.

  The storm broke coming back.

  When we got home

  cicadas chain-sawed

  the wind.

  The moon is lashed by trees

  Weather, seasons, water, light, rocks, planets, stars

  Winds and time

  Throughout our lives blow many winds and gales.

  Tomorrow’s forecast is for dangerous gales.

  Loved ones and their dreams are drowned at sea

  when storms cause ships on shoals to sail.

  At night, the moon is lashed by trees

  while men go mad from days of nor’west gales.

  Wind on sand makes seas of crescent moons

  and sand on winds of time all life assails.

  Take my hand, Margret my love, we’ll climb the tops

  lean forward, yell, push back tomorrow’s gales.

  The love of rocks and water

  You can see it in the way water

  with its many fingers, seeks to

  tickle the feet of mountains, then waits

  at the high gully and scree face for rocks

  into her arms to roll, tumble, fall.

  But her hard, cold sister, long

  jealous of rocks’ endurance and long

  life, takes revenge on water

  and at night contrives their fall

  getting under skins, driving wedges into

  the heart of rocks.

  So water saves her tears and waits

  to smooth rocks’ scars, take up their weight

  as they together start their long

  odyssey downhill. Then rocks

  in creeks and streams are soothed by water’s

  laughter, murmur, lilt, as the two

  entwined toward the sea do fall.

  At times, within their journey’s pitch and fall

  water sets rocks at rest, caresses, waits.

  The pair are troubled too

  by turbulence and flood, but not for long.

  Though finally, when water

  reaches sea, she releases rocks

  so the issue of their closeness and rocks

  themselves into the depths can gently fall.

  At last reposed, they start to bear water’s

  load. In the chrysalis of sea’s weight

  through echelons of time as long

  as time itself, they are reborn to

  form sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, to

  begin, with the patience of rocks

  that other tectonic feat, the long

  crossing through the passing fall

  of ages that presses, folds, lifts their weight

  as mountains above the oceans’ waters.

  Thrust aloft, they tremble and start to fall

  as rocks again, for they can hardly wait

  to taste once more the long embrace of water.

  Light and water

  diamonds dance on the sea

  ice crystals loop the moon

  day skies emblazon Noah’s arc

  and the aurora australis throws

  the mother of all soundless discos

  across the southern dark

  Song of the Climate Canaries

  melted permafrost, drunken trees

  reports of iceberg fleets at sea

  birds with GPS astray

  is there time? can you see?

  whitened bones of coral reefs

  expiring trees, rising seas

  incidents of phantom springs

  what to do? how to be?

  ozone holes, desert creep

 
polar bears all at sea

  lethal droughts, killer floods

  should we stay? should we flee?

  death of frogs, disease in bees

  poisoned land from dying seas

  global glacier demise

  what becomes of you and me?

  All in a day’s work

  The Earth walks the same route round the sun each year –

  quick, fill the vases up with water – here comes Spring!

  The Earth leans to the sun, pirouettes, calls it a day.

  It will do it again tomorrow. Let’s drink to that.

  Once a lunar-month the water in our brains is tugged.

  Stack the watch with police – there’s a full moon out tonight.

  We gather up the days and weeks and pool them into months

  and years – then they burst the dam as we wind down.

  The sun abseils the sky each day and burns out in the west –

  water the garden before it’s light and help it re-ignite.

  Astrological gardening

  The heavy summer night

  hung like velvet drapes

  from heaven. From our

  French doors I saw

  a galaxy of flowers –

  hydrangea moons

  comets of foxgloves

  an impatiens milky way.

  The astrologers ancien

  were sleepless shepherds

  who forsook counting sheep

  for stars. They planted leo, libra

  virgo in the sky – perhaps

  they were gardeners by day.

  The pattern of standing gulls

  I can tell which way

  the wind is blowing

  by observing each day

  the bevy of black-backed gulls

  gathered on the river gravels

  below the bridge that takes me

  from here to there and back again.

  They preen, splash about a bit

  squawk raucously

  but always stand into the wind