The lake is happy when the sky clouds over.
It has nothing left to give.
The girl sings the songs that she is given,
songs that are held at the threshold.
Her gift is expected, or unexpected.
There is no other gift.
I closed my invisible book.
I tried to stand.
Rapture. Quiet canoe.
I was defeated, done with speaking.
2) An 80s phone is a crude device: plasticky, clunky, touch-dialling plink and whirring off as Kieslowski digitises a Kubrick 2001 amphetamine rush downline under the Channel like cliches of phoney voices, traffic, DNA, of lovers once-together now apart, same time, different places. The body unlike the narrative: same place, different times. Electrons! Passions! Cliches! There is melancholy behind each side-face shot.
3) Valentine is Red as Julie in Blue was Blue. The city laid out at night, its neon water on the surfaces is imagery on the story of the film/emulsion. Valentine is a card. She is another Kieslowski beauty of fresh-slate-and-face, of in-taken breath, a flower opening with here-and-now and naivete, her beauty and her angles, her moth to the viewer’s eye!
4) Interference whines up and down on her car radio. The static of the man she will meet after she has run over his dog while adjusting her station. Cause and effect. In stories of meetings in stories, yes to yes; if the dog’s blood seeps against theme as amazingly black she will of course drive it home, from whining wound and source – where red originates.
5) The owner is cursory, alone in his open house, so her creeping-in (and creepy) at night is shadowy but the corridor leads her to the tuner chirruping, and hidden beneath the radio receivers, listening, is the man. Her nervous cough before speaking as endearingly convincing as the dog called Rita she is bearing back to him (that he has no interest in). This Trintignant indifferent. But the innocent are so expectant.
6) When she returns his smiling dog, the old dog the ex-judge, lets her in, lets on, his unsmiling secret: it is his radio surveillance she heard: of his neighbours’ how and where as their voices shunt and whisper of adulterous love, and this time between men (but love in Red is innocent, as some is said and less is done) and so begins her judgement of the judge (you do what?), her counter/continuum of the bitter in him, if bitter it is. She worries, she challenges, he answers, we listen. A film about listening-in is an other-voyeuring of film.
7) So, a two-hander. My preferred two-timing. Two-siding. A Pure Formality, Sleuth, my personal bite of The Interview and very much of Hamlet. Dialogic and dialectic, interrogative stretch, both voices like-this and like-that hits for the intellect…
8) Tell the neighbours what I do, he challenges. I spy on them, I know what they do. A judge has heard all the stories. (He doesn’t say but K has let us know he knows and how else than sitting like God and the author on penalty-rates from The Fall. I fell, says Olivier in Blue, I nearly fell, says Valentine leaving the catwalk.) She is another innocent, her face is the sign of goodness, of want, she looks like goodness as the sign of faces. She is a card, she plays herself, her pun: she has none other.
9) The background story unseen by them, comes to us, behind their encounter is their future. Not the judge’s misanthropy, or doom. Her judgement hits through our senses.
10) At the bowling alley the music starts when the camera pans from Valentine, the particular bending and bowling, to the general, humanity bending and straightening. Strike! The camera’s third-person, God, the surveillance system, Our fate and our certain decline. Pointless mortality, he might think, old Trint, feeling barely enough for one … The lovers are different, though none are making love.
11) Her neighbour has passed his law exams. The law book he dropped in the street as she had driven past (before the dog) fell open at a passage set for his exam. As if and then, the author listening in before the scenes begin … Au-guste!
12) Films flatter us. He says, this ex judge: you can’t live other people’s lives for them. He might have said, it’s not a film. He stares at her as if at fate: out-of-time and yet in-place.
13) Good and bad judgments (as alien as babies) are immodest, he says, the ex judge. But audiences enjoy immodesty or we wouldn’t play off intellects of characters who impress us. Life and loss. Such is the nature of listening in, our dark-room selves who think, and feel, and seem to know, and make it seem some part of us is always ex …
14) When the young neighbour (and lawyer) spies on his girlfriend we see the quality of mercy is the quality of his bright-shone shoes as he stands on a bin beneath her balcony. A vantage point to judge… (she is beneath a lover) not crime, or punishment, but change.
15) Later, this late, the young lawyer’s name: Auguste! She calls her spurned Au-guste!
16) At Valentine’s modeling show the old judge stays behind (you came? she says). He tells her that he once dropped a law book over this balcony. It fell open at a passage they used in his exam. No! And he has dreamt of her happy, in love and older. A storm is approaching. His and her voices shift in time-warp rushing back or forwards into itself, the opening scene, the past wired into the future, or vice versa. His wife betrayed him. He never met another woman he could love. He never met – Valentine. This late, soberly, him saying it.
18) And later in the storm as the Channel ferry sinks which Valentine and Au-guste separately have taken the old judge – who now is Love – stares into his flattish television. No crystal ball, it presents the past, as a dream emerging from his pain he sees the rescued: Auguste and his Valentine, wrapped in the pixels of their hair, sodden, calm, their future there… Sharing oxygen and a blanket and the background red.
19) In profile Auguste’s nose is … like Trintignant’s. Valentine is the profile pic of her photo shoot: now poster of the film and the DVD, mouth open as she had posed, imagining the worst that could happen, the sad, or the sign of love between her lips.
20) At his shattered window the old judge looks out into the sunny day. His face is wet.
4
‘ … dichte und schöne Fenster.’
‘Well-sealed and nice windows’ are what Frau Merkel
the German Chancellor
thinks epitomise what’s best
about her country
its core value
the key performance indicator
establishing its point of difference
from draughtier places
or places where the cold gets in
as perhaps it did up north along the Baltic shoreline
when Heinrich and Maria were young
bashing the pump to get ice out of its spout
(I imagine)
while a warm breeze from the Pacific
pressed its dream to their chilblained cheeks
with an aroma of tropical coconuts
whenever the bread oven was opened.
It’s four in the afternoon
and already a three-quarter moon
floats white-faced like a seasick sailor
in the darkening sky
above the apartments across the street
where well-sealed windows
are lit from within like little dioramas
whose fragments of life
flit across the provisional warmth of the present.
5
Min Modersprak, wa klingst du schön!
‘My mothertongue how sweet you sound’
wrote Klaus Groth
(1819-99)
the founder of Plattdüütsch dialect literature
so I’m told
by the lowlands-1.net website
where my distant relative appears in a portrait
with wavy silver hair
which I imagine will be repeated
by the statue of him I’ve heard about
somewhere in Kiel
up there on the freezing Baltic coast
where his head’s been crowned with snow
in the home-town of his cousin
my great-grandmother
Maria Josephine Catharina
which I hope to visit when the weather warms up
and the distinguished locks of Klaus Groth
will have thawed to the auburn tint of bronze
as if henna’ed in defiance of time.
I arrived with little enough German in my kit
let alone the sort Klaus loved
as if language was a mother
at whose breast he’d drunk speech
which his friend Brahms made into songs
sung by Maria’s sister Sophie
who ‘cut some ice’ as a soprano
in the operatic world up there.
How much English
did Maria come ashore with
in 1876
and was it the Brahms settings of Groth’s Modersprak
that she sang while taking loaves from the oven
in the draughty kitchen
in Bute Street Wellington
while an icy southerly rattled the windows
weder dicht noch schön?
11
Regentropfen aus den Bäumen
‘Raindrops from the trees’
was inscribed by Klaus Groth on the 2nd of May 1856
in a copy of the third edition of his book of poems Quickborn
to which had been added the High German
Hundert Blätter: Paralipomena zum Quickborn
(‘One Hundred Leaves: Supplement to Quickborn’)
for his new friend Johannes Brahms
to whom he was connected
through the family of his wife Doris
who was modest about her musical accomplishments
but unstinting in admiration
for her husband’s poetry.
Brahms set ‘Regentropfen’ to music in 1871(Op.59, 4)
but didn’t publish it in his lifetime.
Groth’s ‘hundred leaves’ grew not from the Modersprak
for which he became famous
after the publication of Quickborn in 1852
but from the High German of Hundert Blätter
for which he was mocked
and soon forgotten.
The Plattdüütsch dialect of the composer’s childhood in Hamburg
‘is something different from language’
Brahms demurred.
‘I’ve tried it
it doesn’t work.’
But perhaps he anticipated the titters
of his sophisticated Viennese audience
rather than the grateful fervour of his home-town.
Even his one attempt
‘Da geit en Bek de Wisch entlang’
was first set to music in 1862
by the 18 year-old upstart Friedrich Nietsche.
The Brahms setting descended into obscurity
first published in 1889 or 99
and performed for Groth’s 80th birthday in 1899
and then
‘lost’.
Brahms already dead two years earlier
having earlier still
wounded the poet by declaring
‘You know nothing about music.’
The forgiving
and helpful letters of Klaus Groth
as well as the helpful
and affectionate letters of his wife Doris
which Brahms seldom answered.
In September 1878
at a rehearsal of works by Brahms in Hamburg
the Danish composer Niels Gade saw Groth
‘a ridiculous figure
a long thin person who was sitting silently by himself
and was in peculiar-looking clothes.’
‘…a sincere quiet man.’
Perhaps unable to know himself
among his own people
but I want to add
as a young schoolteacher in Heide
rumoured to have tossed poems
through the open bedroom window
of ‘dark-haired, brown-eyed’
Mathilde Ottens.
13
ende/anfang
ende/anfang
ende/anfang
On the programme board
of the anti-capitalist agitprop
Theaterkapelle at 99 Boxhagenerstrasse
next to the old graveyard
where young women wheel prams
so their babies can hear the birds
making an impatient racket in the bare trees
an abrupt announcement appeared
in mid-winter
a single word
lower case
repeated three times
in a column
ende
ende
ende
(it’s over)
but beside each word
a neighbourhood tagger had written
anfang
anfang
anfang
(start again).
The embourgeoisement of the neighbourhood
proceeds apace
and the Theaterkapelle is one of its casualties
as predicted in its last production
Die Kunden werden unruhig
The audience is getting restless
to which the Freitag salon blogger Peter Nowak had added
‘und vielleicht auch wütend’
and perhaps angry as well.
As the rents go up
and façades are scrubbed
dichte und schöne Fenster installed
GDR-vintage furniture
overpriced in the Sunday fleamarket
I find myself wondering
what kind of fresh start
I have the right to hope for
having come only this far
having barely tested my restlessness
let alone my anger.
And what kind of restlessness
let alone anger
drove my great-grandmother
Maria Josephine Catharina Reepen
to declare Anfang
beside a disreputable runaway sailor’s name
Heinrich August Wedde
at the end of the earth?
So often there is snow – how can there not be?
Random anxious flakes, then swirls, jackets
shaken in hallways, the brims of hats
scooping at snow like saucers – this is
winter after all, there is dark to follow,
there are footprints in snow to frighten
because never heard. One guesses so much.
Further on in the movie more snow is almost
certain, this is the kind of story
after all which intends you to shiver,
to say, ‘Out there, in the naked daylight
where worse things happen, worse by far.
There is nevertheless the luck of not
being prepared.’ With snow we are always
awaiting more, where the worst can be
itself: the ribbon of blood flowing
from beneath one’s cuff, the gasped map
on the hansom’s glass. Her beseeching, ‘Jack?’
I see you, I see you there with the family
in your mouth, your mouth is closed.
I see you floating down our river
in the guise of a log. I see you
in your office leaning on a shelf
with your eyes sewn shut
then a little to the right of that morning
staring from your own decapitation
into the distance like you’d seen game
on the horizon, like your family is the game.
You understand the collective.
Your body turns towards the heads
towards the faces and mouthparts
of your kin. You come here for water
you think I will offer you water. I crush you
while the dolphins in the harbour laugh.
A lot of tepid nothing goes on here,
during the day I walk to the secret beach
past the Dream Houses, manses of darkened
concrete that tower over the sandhills
and kit-set scrub, featuring coffin-shaped
architectural turrets, carports, copious
decking and their own three-hundred-and-sixty-five
degree sea-fog views.
Skylarks. It goes this far, and that much further.
Here are the people who have drowned in debt
in exchange for a glass box dream. I see them
getting out of their Subaru Maximus
toting their sacks of supermarket fast food.
They rarely walk on the beach.
I will admit, I am having a little
trouble with my own crazy cough etiquette
but when the moon swims across the sky like
a pearly fish, it makes me hold out hope
that many more of everyone can still
become their own significant slow-opening lotus.
I imagine his hand,
finger bulging against
wedding band, reaching
for whatever he wants
to feel in his palm.
Power is slippery
when clean. A tenacious
grip is needed to keep
hold of such success,
sweet as cheap shampoo
The ring slides knuckle
to knuckle in the winter
months. Mustn’t wear it
while forcing oneself
through frigid June waves.
This symbol is just
for dry land, cameras, off-
water matters. Mustn’t lose it.
Marriage is a sacrosanct
sign of normalcy.
all over the surface of the thick-set motel in the pool in her hair on the children’s breath in the sandstone cave at the visitors’ centre behind his larynx in the queue of planets in the muscle cramp in the fossil’s jaw drifting out of the lamp as they slept on the strings of the harp on the floor in the carton of milk on the casual brink in the astronaut’s mouth at the bowling club on her shoulders when the temperature dropped on the specials menu in the red bow-tie on the cask of wine on display in the fine arousal of trees just beyond the turn-off to the national park
A hot gust in the millionaire’s wattle tree and what we need is a good dousing
Among the unbalances in her story, the lack of mention of her other life
Sarsaparilla mixed with coca cola and it tastes just like Bonnington’s Irish Moss
‘You’ve got it right’ she said, ‘staying in your marriage’ and it felt like a blow to the head
The shining of Ellesmere, the kingfisher in the mud-flats, the water cold and rolling
To drive there and back, slipping through the lush passes of the valleys
A winding glen, a curved knife, the defect of bent shoulders
In the absence of rain the child says ‘rain’ and now look, it’s started raining
They were Wesleyan she was Church
after his father died (less dour) she let him run wild forawhile
His father had climbed up the mine shaft and turning for home
therewas a motorcycle spoiled at the foot of a wind
that was only ever darkness
there was punishment of several sorts
it was a furniture van sticks of a home burst on the road
this verse refers to that verse when we met in Keswick
they played violins by ear and called them fiddles Irish Manx is different to Cumbrian
Scots
He minded about things so destroyed photographs
in the front of Arabian Nights there had been a coloured pencil drawing of her
soft hair
everything he did was complex and tender and wrong like petals
smuggling rain
there had been a child before him who had lived a day
and she she too had hurried her dreams through every tilt of grieving
Like a bullfinch, after his cadenza, you stick your head out, to the open air
today the trailing straggling train of vowels
I like the undertows of contrabass before the sun works the crowds
in coats, in harness, the single moving into the multitude
fading signs of yesterday’s wards, asylums
along the up-down traffic of clatterring trams of gestures
You note the way a person ambles
but here, following my gaze, a youth, rising from a grey mass
simply steps in, crossing the door, into the foyer
like the first day of this city when one arrived
the City Road below shot through the ribcages
of a half-finished foundation
a whale of a construct wading in a gigantic open cut of silt and mud
in their helmets, ropes and suspensions, three workers quietly painted out the rust
from the rust-attacked concrete walls
the November sky shouted Vortex!
to the busy wild-west skinheads flitting tapping their platform shoes on the steps, along
the blazing doorways
In a room as if you’d owned, first sin of many, a full gulp of air on your untrained palate.
Entry for February 5th, 1798.
Wordsworth walks
to Stowey with Coleridge. She observes
some trees putting up red shoots.
And then, innocently, she signs off:
Query—What trees are they?.
In twelfth-grade philosophy class
you visited a Buddhist temple, somewhere
out Springvale way. One of the monks
—the Venerable someone—spoke
of the Buddha, of the Middle Way, and of monastic
life in the Melbourne surburbs: alms bowls
filled with chips from the chicken shop
or those wafer biscuit straws.
Two centuries after Wordsworth
comes Gary Snyder, who takes nature and boils it down
to Mother Metonymy: learn the flowers.
Learn them for your grandchildren, whose
nature is not the enclosure, but the enclosed.
Only by learning the flowers
may we invert the inversion, and live
to usher in the 22nd
It’s normal in art to laud
prolepses of woe. We hunger for them
because determinism—if we
conceive of will as external-bearing
(not like sea eagle or rat
might a parasite, but fully integrated
with rill and feldspar, orchid beds)—
is the nightmare proven true.
It’s true, we know it, we get on.
Dorothy might have learnt the name.
But who knows? That’s not crucial
to know. What’s crucial
is to arrange our conjecture
into clusters, figure those clusters as newborn
dogs, crazed for milk—
one swollen place to get it.
And no birds sing. You must change your life.
I have wasted my life. Learn the flowers.
Query—What trees are they?
At session’s end, you walked out astonished
how crazy, how dismal
the monks looked: their bald heads,
red togas, dumb alms bowls.
Notice how Snyder—a white monk, a man of influence
in the Buddha’s mission West—seems
to convert, almost precisely, the much older
query—blinder, too, as Wordsworth
cannot have known how loaded those five words, one m-dash and one question mark
would grow—into imperative,
a call to arms. Much as Wright answers
Rilke in converse fashion:
wastes, does not change, his life.
Flowers. The number you know by name
at sighting, roughly equal
to the number of times you’ve entered
houses of worship. Catholic churches, for instance:
Once for a second cousin’s wedding.
Once for your nonna’s funeral.
Once to see Gaudi’s handiwork
which happened to involve a cathedral.
You butchered Joy to the World on the bells once.
Most dismal of all: their hairy
white skin. You called them dumb
to their faces, your teacher
at reception giving the class’s alms.
It is, in other words, you
and your like must learn.
But you won’t, cant.
You’re in your own way.
That’s how it is with knowledge
as with seed: worthless to sow out of season,
on bad ratios of sunlight, water, nitrogen
and whatever else (you could kill a weed
with your brand of care) if
the thing is to take up as a living,
breathing, fruiting, perhaps
flowering enterprise.
Learning the flowers takes time.
Time, patience, tenderness, the fortitude
to linger somewhere
long enough to understand
(stay together/learn the flowers/go light).
Groping almost in the dark
as to your ancestry, beyond Australia
the land holding no significance,
all long-held attachments to place
having been sacked to make do, you
could never engage in
rites of faith called old-
ways, of a people.
And yet, you are the absolute
incipience of the last cycle
of indigeneity:
indigeneity to the planet Earth
and therefore of what names beam down
to the natives as life-giving.
With no prospect of learning
to know a tulip
when you see one, however, what does it matter?
What do you know?
Whose graves are you digging?
But there may be a lifeline.
Convert Snyder’s meadow,
Wordsworth’s tree into a budding grove
of trademarks. Cars, for example.
And the teat swells.
You can describe make, model, year, even name
of paint (Gunmetal Grey a favourite).
You have learnt every flower
taught you by the elders.
You are all the dearest
catalogues learned to the letter,
the seed. You project, you dog,
the history of the future.
Imagine—if everyone but you
were to perish from ignorance
tomorrow, you could recreate it all
from memory, like Koori elders
the Dreaming. This you know.
Play suspended for rest of day due to PJ Hughes’s head injury at 2.23 local time
A day as deadly as
the bulletin’s Cassandras
broadcast.
It hits home like
a windshield spidered
on the SE Freeway.
Macca’s sign erased/
lead lights
leathered.
PJ Hughes retired hurt
63 no (161 B) (9 4) (0 6)
strike rate: 39.13.
The pitch’s
Messerschmitt tracks
a counter attack
& a life collapses
quicker than a career
launched
Cape Canaveral
to pinch an away
series off the Saffas.
What? Do they know
of cricket?
(that) Cricket only knows.
A bat requiem
at the pavilions
& our gates.
& we try to understand
ramifications
of a hook shot
worse than
a dolly
even the clumsiest
fine leg
couldn’t fumble,
tea
just around the corner.
The premonition was that I’m asleep,
sleeping sensibly, believing it takes more
violence to wake us than daybreak.
– ‘The Premonition’, by John Mateer
Monday morning, another black death
in custody, the world emerging
from the misty firmament
her long, sooty howl
I step out onto the earth
and squint beneath the recollections
history’s page curling in the flame
a nation fattening on its own starch
I’m grumbling back to the pit
in the guts of a car at the lights
I slide into dream
(blasting eternity—the ugliest
word—into paragraphic scratches)
I grow larger than the waves and wipe out
suburbs by the sand
I sense nothing but I know how to fall
I bubble with curses and I freckle
and wilt under the shining blade
Country lost in promises of models
of melting worlds
I awake to see a body without flesh
your flags blending into my bones
as a wet splutter of current arcs
through my bed’s baked rock
you’re telling me, from across the paddocks
you’re telling me
you’re crammed into the coast
opening your arms and telling me
that a memory
is the epoch’s lonely fool
I should be working
I’m reading
in the State Library instead
it’s close enough
though distant
like the skylight
in the State Library &
decibels heard but barely
the author
would rather drink
(as I would
if Sydney was
a liquid spectacle)
I’d fill myself with liquid
to drown decibels
until the cold freezes me
now ice
now partially in this poem
I guess but
for all that
I could still be less cold
& just for a moment
resist interpretation
& further definition
that’d help of course
I’m not still enough either
& that poem about saying
‘I love you’
how love is a word
stretched over definition
how it becomes
—no is—
enormous
(too big for the poem at the time)
but I said it
& I wasn’t still then
nor my twitching mouth
& I said it then
& even as my eyes twist
lips move
time slips
goes
(all a first: ice
love)
the bed
wasn’t stuck in place
I wasn’t
you weren’t: ‘you love me
don’t you Dave?’
I did
I do
& I can’t say now still
at my desk
it was anything
that made me say it
maybe it is time
to adore reading again
(though I love clothes’
warmth more)
think of a red doona
where you’re awake
while I sleep
What do you think you’re bloody well doing?
It’s obscene. Let’s stop this monster exploding
right now.
Its glass throws up a sharp and cutting light
you know, colossal columns and monuments
and Money
to Remember Them.
We do remember them
wonderful old men
smelling like vinegar and gingernuts
crumbling alone
I’m fed up to the back teeth
with your expensive soup.
Just give those old soldiers a fork to eat it with
why don’t you
give them giant stylised poppies
columns quarried from red Australian stone,
ANZAC-ed right out of Ayers Rock
Warehouse and Woolworths, your fonts bigger
than diggers on your biscuits and tins
you make me sick.
Commemoration. Stop taking that drug
it’s bad for your heart:
politicians, corporations, institutions
your antiquated house of remembrance
is stubborn, you blue-arsed flies.
You weren’t even in 3 pin nappies.
What’s wrong with a poppy made out of paper
pinned on your suit and a bugler?
I
We bundle up our ulcers
accumulated in domesticity’s
damp and private grotto
& lug them dutifully on our frail backs
as we fly hand-in-small-hand above the Tasman.
II
The texture of this headland, as luxe as thrush at dawn.
The fractal bloom of unquiet thoughts,
garrotting the navigation of sky-tearing
peaks. The tent has become
a surgically constructed empire,
worthy of assembling and dissembling,
cavities and ecosystems.
III
Fossicking for an ethereal dosage
potent enough to mute memories
of all that has sprouted,
unwanted and wild
in the humid undergrowth
of years.
The book said if you wanted a cow
you drew the cow.
And if you wanted the milk
you drew the milk.
And if you didn’t want that snowflake anymore
you simply joined the points together
to make a spider’s web.
On the course, the advanced students would draw the sun
then smudge the edge of the circle
to warm up the room.
The same technique made a static star shoot,
then you could wish on it – for anything.
I sensed the power of what I was learning.
There was one rule: you couldn’t erase.
If you didn’t like something you drew,
if the elbows of that tree were stabbing birds,
you had to keep drawing.
‘Draw again. Draw better’ was the brand’s byline.
But if an online class has a back corner, then I was in it.
I was flailing in a whirlpool of my own sketching.
I had to draw my mum to get me out.
As she spoke, full of concern,
I drew some coins: soothing, repetitious rounds.
Mum recited my student debt (my age plus three zeros),
and lack of pitched roof, weatherproof shoes, dinner invites.
Boy, those coins were really mounting up!
I ran their coolness through my fingers.
Mum tested the metal with her teeth.
Every pencil in my pocket – HB, 2B –
well I threw them away like crutches.
Then I filled my pockets with my new wealth.
When I drew the river and walked into it,
those coins worked better than stones.
To create the impression of being raised from the background is:
I cannot relate the state of tension to a specific risk.
For a long time, because it had been a long time. So defence
becomes the chisel. A performance through circles and semi-circles,
beyond folding trees of grief. Long after the animal died,
the child continued to behave as if it were alive.
Because the background was left plain.
She’s no longer aware of “not looking.”
For practical purposes, it wasn’t a dream but a horse. It’s too much
to be stone, especially when ankles are the weak point.
It can’t happen to me. Such assumptions reduce fragility, so that observation
becomes more than participation.
To cover it up, it disappears? However, we were saved
from forming the back of the subject. I didn’t think about it because I didn’t need to.
he is coming
from the bone wish.
Gift, from the once ocean
he surfaces in a glory of bubbles
speaking in silver and iron
forged rust promise dirt-written maps and
quick cut of desire
he is a fern with luck.
Once, he is frozen in the swell of embrace.
always and exception fizz,
a childhood chemistry
a search inside leaves a trail of stars.
the boiling of rock breaking down –
same vision of flesh
he hears secrets. he is a tiny landing spore.
he hears long songs for long walks
beckoning
the golden hollow
the spectre of curiosity looms low
over a wet thing,
unfurling
*
a thousand years slow
in this cathedral of moss
quietness that is both the sky
and the
bottom of the ocean.
a caravan at dusk on a blue drive
a sick kiss, the haze settles
in the palm of dunes
a revelation sleeps beside
the blood’s tide
its cascade
temperate rainforest
where you fused to damp soil
and spores now nestle in the night,
he is a doll face
in the artificial black
and the hush of recorded silence makes the pattern of
a new dream
*
he rolls under a wave
sweet marrow and beads of salt in a glass forecast.
the future speaks of littleness – the word itself fitting in
the palm of a hand
of fingers enclosing hip bones
mouths making nests
the estuary goes out, reveals a body made of triangles
he is the forever-squaring pattern
of diffusing light
through mountain ash
Old bodies to the earth,
a spray of midnight blue fungi chattering in decay
he pauses in a bed of broken shell.
pieces of tounge scatter the stage
a self-conscious light descends
a veil of protein called
destiny
made of numbers and lines that intersect
cleaving great magma from below
he perceives through eyelids an arrow
perfect pink translucence of capillaries shot.
*
swansong of the kelp forest,
he looks up and sees an entire world of sunlight
anchored, taken out to cooler waters,
suspended in the amnion of the deep.
exquisite wrinkled fruit of the setting day,
fine gold dust to protect him
he is purpling, horizon bruised and churning
he tilts doll eyes open
and breathes a tiny carousel
nose tip to nose tip, in the morning.
sheds a second skin
to the orange glow of cityscape; lightning rods
and bird silhouettes
*
scumming over – a sundial
carved into the flesh of his hand
he is singing to
a floating anatomy its dark rot
and wraps a trusting arm
words fall like the swimming of his laughter
he rests
*
ashy riverbed, pink rocks risen smooth
coal sticks struck like piano strings
No music.
crown of grass tree;
it’s blackened petals in the dirt
the yellow prowl of headlights
alighting on a flash of tangerine
tucked away
*
eked out like safety,
a crease in the silt births orchid, lily
and fern.
he is here
There were animals. They came to me
with their bloodstained murmurs
choking the night, the weight of misery
a gloom in their throats. Beasts of all
shapes and mythologies scratching
at the soil around my grave, each one
driven by its own unique hunger
but all intent on writing my end.
I can almost run my fingers through
the sun-streaked strands of those days,
when I was nothing but a silhouette
disappearing into fog – just a sketch.
I could step into a crowd and never
resurface. No one would suspect a thing.
1
In darkness, redcoats marching out to the Pekapeka block. It cannot be true. But imagine for a moment it is. Two women stand almost in the same place which is the rim of an old volcano. One is remembering her father stepping out of the blockhouse when she was a little girl going down an Irish road wherever they were just then. The other is stunned by a memory of fruit falling in a dark garden, soft sounds in long lines or sweet juice over stops and starts. An orchard? A volcano?
Neither can be sure because the ground is shifting. They pick themselves up and go on, unaware of the jolt that has put them on the same page and will now tie them to this place, whatever it is. One watches the shadow of a long skirt ripple ahead of her in the afternoon wind. The other has almost reached home with her quire of clean white paper, walking uphill from the shops around the quay. There is dinner to get, the washing to be folded, but no children so there is time for everything connected or unconnected with the red jackets of the soldiers moving along the Devon road in darkness or in daylight.
I love him, she thinks. I vocate, says the other, haptic with risk. Each sits with her head in a pool of lamplight, mind and fingers flying over the mending of works and days, now and then, yes and no. They have torn up the pegs, they dispute the sale, they build a fighting pa on the ridge to the south west, Te Kohia, and draw fire from the valley running down to the bony sea. This is the beginning, a transfer of words for deeds with tails as long as kite strings in a clear blue sky. She folds the creamy sheets of paper and pulls red silk after the needle that pierces and pierces the fold, binding, stitching, tying together the new pages of a little book, a booklet really, pliable, plausible, something to fold down and begin writing. The valley in the dark, the ridge abandoned. The lamplight, the flashing needle, the words I will write from the orchard that is a volcano. For you have shown me the valley in the north and its river running down to the sea where redcoats, militia and volunteer rifles are landing to begin the work of destruction. One moment I am in a dark orchard. The next I feel the ground shake under my feet. I am a soldier’s daughter, fled away from my father over the sea and finding him again here in the new land.
What shall I write? Where should I bury my flashing needle with its red silk tail as long as kite strings in a clear sky?
I found it
in a dictionary
and look
it comes true
these days
with peaches
with intricacies
of step
and step
afternoon tea
with dancing
2
Prune plums bloom blue in the leaves. A holiday morning, the cutter making her way over the harbour towards Quail Island with a load of picnickers, bonnets and shawls and a row of bunting just visible under the billowing sail, high voices of children palpable to an attentive ear. The distal edge, a fingernail of sea and sky in this new place, late summer and the leaves of the orchard still thick with fruit.
My name is Dorcas Carrell and I was born in County Clare on the edge of the great western ocean. When I was nine we sailed with the regiment to Canada, when I was eleven I lost my mother and my sister there. Quebec, Sault St Louis, Montreal, back down the seaway to Halifax and out to St John’s, another edge. We were always moving, out and back, out and back, the sound of waves breaking on a rocky shore. I was eighteen when I married one of the gardener Carrells, twenty-four when we reached his brother’s acreage on Jackson’s road above the harbour in Lyttelton. We fell easily among nieces and nephews to whom I taught their letters and how to draw the delicate shapes of plants they brought for my herbarium. Seeing their pleasure in the folios on my worktable, I thought to make small books from butcher’s paper tied up with string in which they might draw and paint for themselves. We are gardeners, bedding down below the ferny ridges, looking south across the harbour to an island in the arms of an island, west to the rim of the caldera and beyond to the distant mountains. We are orchardists, bringing ashore the sea-wracked saplings, binding them to volcanic soil, making shelter against winds sweeping off the ice. I am a gardener of stars, I tell the children on clear nights. See, here is my garden and there are the stars, stellata, stellaria, stellissima. My pretty taxa.
It is afternoon. I see the children collecting sea eggs on the island, picking their way among the rock pools, squealing as the octopus shoots away from a hand that has come too close. The gaff does its work and they hold up the purple shadow still dripping ink and writhing, its three hearts salvo, salvo, salvo. Bodies lying in the fern above the Waireka stream, the beachwalkers under fire, regulars at the Whaler’s Gate turned and gone back to town, bluejackets after dark storming an empty pa. Who tied the notice to the gate of Henry Brown’s farm, clear cursive lines flapping in the wind? Whakarongo mai, whakarongo mai, e te iwi. A sign, a panui, a protection. Listen, listen all people. The road to the Minister and friends must not be trampled upon. White scarves. Aunt Dorrie on her hillside above the sea. The bows of the cutter lift as she turns into the wind.
plum under the blue
bloom
prunus
spaces
the sky came through
saying
the dark leaves
open
summer's
catalogue
we began
keeping
and can't
finish
3
Dear winter it is 5.15 a.m. I take the short line, snapped or cut but never broken. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking I follow the long line, a valley running down to the sea. But rocking has stopped and the ships, Erebus and Terror, are caught in ice. The dark rule of history skips a beat and it is winter on the harbour looking over the rim of the caldera at distant mountains. It is winter in the northern valley where the fortresses Onukukaitara and Puketakauere stare down the flooded river, asking for trouble.
Rocking has stopped and the ships, Erebus and Terror, are caught in ice. Slowly they circle the frozen islands, and their names are mountains as well as ships. Slowly they circle frozen islands that are not freed in spring by the cracking of ice that rushes downriver to the seaway. Slowly they circle in a sea of ice that holds them fast, Erebus and Terror lost to us whether mountains or ships or figures of dream circling just beyond waking. I heard the ice come down the river in spring, says one. I saw the snow mountains beyond the buckled rim of the harbour says the other. A body of water, says one. A sea of ice, says the other. Erebus and Terror at the bottom of the world. Erebus and Terror at the bottom of the sea. If I wake from my dream of winter, will I see the river in flood, will I see snow mountains pouring over the buckled rim of the harbour? Will I see my lost mother and sister?
Dear winter it is almost light and the guns have opened fire in the flooded valley, anxious to redress looting and killing on both sides. A garrison moves out and is split in three between the two hills, Onukukaitara and Puketakauere. But the defenders lie in rifle pits outside palisades that shudder under the impact of each new explosion. Onukukaitara the bait. Puketakauere the hook. The defenders lie in wait. When the trap springs it is too late to get out of the gully, it is too late to get out of the swamp, it is too late to retreat with the dead and the wounded. The black cross of Te Atiawa flies in triumph on the hilltop this morning. The river is in flood.
I am Dorrie in Lyttelton, daughter of a soldier, wife of a gardener. My mother is an armful of lilies, my sister a stone angel. Erebus mother, sister Terror, you pour over the rim of the flooded valley this morning.
darling the boat was a murder though I must smile and say it was nothing out of the ordinary the world turned upside down and beloved faces veiled behind ocean spray you won’t remember the voyage from Halifax but mama’s white face haunts me still and the rocking of a boat is the rocking of a dark cradle in my brain
4
So they are burning the villages. Manukorihi and Tikorangi north of the river. Kairau and Huirangi to the south. There was a sharp engagement near a large grove of peach-trees at Huirangi with some of the Atiawa under Hapurona. The bush and trenches which sheltered the Maori tupara men were raked with grape and canister shot. Cattle, sheep and horses are driven off, cultivations destroyed. Columns of black smoke rise over the coastal plains by day. Fires blaze by night. Manukorihi the singing bird silenced. Huirangi the food basket overturned. Only in forest clearings do the gardens show spring growth to the people of the river.
The same spring brings white blossom to the orchards on the hillside in the south. Foam she thinks. And the other almost immediately My lovely Salem, and they are out on the harbour with a cargo of saplings for Pigeon Bay, Okains and Akaroa. She forgets the dream of pulling the lifeboat over a frozen sea, forty pounds of chocolate, boxes of tea and tobacco, on oak runners as heavy as the boat itself. She forgets how they came to rest, a body in the bow much disturbed by animals and another in the stern. Two guns standing loaded against the inside of the boat all those years later when the search party found them. She forgets the papers strewn around the boat on its sledge, defeated in the outward journey, defeated now in the return to a place where the ships lie off an island that summer could not reach. She forgets the silver forks and spoons on the throats of those who watched the sailors die without asking for help. She applies herself to the surfaces of white pages covered in black ink. Sometimes they carry her own words and are very fugitive. Sometimes the words come from so far away she cannot be certain of an origin. Sometimes they fall on her ear in another language. And sometimes they are newsprint issuing Wednesday and Saturday from a shop on the quay, relaying the burning of villages by the force that marches out each day from the blockhouse at Camp Waitara. She knows about reprisals. About keeping the peace. My life had stood, a loaded gun.
But perhaps she is also like this, bows lifting as the swell at the heads takes her out of the harbour on a bright day in spring. Eyes of the mother look up from the bed of the ocean, this ocean or that ocean, watching the keel of the cutter pass overhead. Eyes of the mother looking into Paradise.
Kettle and Kickinghorse the rivers roar, Fiddle and Bow full of themselves full of snow full of us in blossom time and dangerous with melt, heading for a ferry at Shelter Bay. We salute apple trees, peach fuzzies, the drawing by all hands that words the question. When will I see you again?
5
Sweet briar, mignonette, lavender, honeysuckle and violets. At five o’clock on a beautiful clear morning the General’s column left the town. I am Dorrie, very earnestly digging in the garden of the old stone vicarage. A tear-shaped hill at dawn of day. The Reverend Mr Knowles wants his asparagus thinned, his new potatoes lifted from the warm earth, his runner beans picked from the tall frame over which they scramble towards the sun. The only sign of life a thin wreath of smoke ascending peaceably in the morning air. A kitchen garden may hold flowers and herbs. Sound of the surging sea. A flower garden may hold medicines as well as roses. Come inland and let us meet each other. I am Dorrie conjugating the southern seasons of flowers and vegetables, inflorescence and dehiscence, on the hillside above the harbour. Fish fight at sea! Mrs Knowles wants her borders weeded, her vines tied up, sprays of briar rose caught back from the shingle paths they festoon. Come inland and tread on our feet. The cool of the morning. Make haste! Make haste! The warmth of the day. A cart road cleaving the hill Mahoetahi. The cool of the evening. Dropped flat on the ground and every man followed his example. Who are these like stars appearing? The bullets went over their heads. Who are these of dazzling brightness? A Volunteer who had joined in the charge on the southeast end of the pah fell mortally wounded. My knees are parallel with the earth on which I kneel. He was the son of the Reverend Mr Brown and not sixteen years of age. My back bends over the hoe and the spade. On the Waitara side of the pa there was a great deal of mint and long grass. My arms gather up trimmings and clippings, my hair is full of drifting blossom. Now came the most desperate work of the day. A life curled in my womb is no assurance of the breathing child, but I may hope. A shell had a most beautiful effect, the natives rose out of the swamp like birds, and were shot down or bayoneted, as they would not surrender. Marrow, pumpkin, squash. Reddened pools of water. A kitchen garden. Throwing away blankets, caps and in most instances their guns for I did not see them fire one shot after this. A sanctuary. But set the fern on fire to turn out any skulkers. Who are these like stars appearing? At twelve o’clock noon, the bodies of the three chiefs and three natives who died from their wounds were buried in St Mary’s Churchyard, the funeral service (in Maori) being read by Archdeacon Govett. Who are these of dazzling brightness? The bodies were placed in coffins and buried in two graves. Violets, honeysuckle, lavender, mignonette and sweet briar.
grows wild grows
bees bleeding bees
heart
6
She is taken up with a length of baby. Weeks stretch out and she cannot hear the war in the north over the delicate racket of the double heartbeat. Lewis for a boy, Isabella for a girl, that Irish road passing her door again. When the sickness wears off she writes poems and adds watercolour drawings to the folders of the herbarium. She forages with the children over hills covered in tutu and fern. She is still Dorrie, beloved aunt, still centre of the world on the hillside above the harbour. But her eyes dream, her fingers fly invisible kites, she is not always quite on the ground when their voices break into her thoughts. I will go the length of it, she promises herself. This time the line will become the circle it is looking for. This time.
It is January when the redoubts begin imploding into her quiet. One, two, three, pushing across the plain. Then a long sap begins menacing the uplands. Four, five, six, and Huirangi falls to the sweating men in the trench that moves forward each day behind its enormous roller of supplejack filled with earth and fern. February, No. 7 redoubt draws a bead on Te Arei, the Barrier, and the digging and skirmishing begins again. Behold, No. 8 close under the pa near the precipice on the cliffs above the river.
Later on there is sweetness reported. Here, Jack, here’s wai for you. And shyacking. Lie down, Hiketi Piwhete, we’re going to shoot. Sometimes a request: Homai te tupeka, Tiaki. When in response a packet of tobacco was thrown over into the Maori trenches, back would come a basket of peaches or a kit of potatoes.
But hear Our Own Correspondent, from fallen Huirangi. These hills, which are covered with scrub, face the sea, and extend from the left bank of the Waitara four or five miles in a southwesterly direction. On the breast of one of them stands the pa which is our present object of attack. The hills occupied by the enemy were in front, a curved line of dense bush at some distance on our right, and the Waitara valley and river on our left. On the 12th inst., a force marched into the valley for the purpose of destroying such native crops as might be found. Nothing could exceed the wild beauty of the scenery on each side of the lovely river as it swept by banks alternately high and low according to the abrupt and varied windings of the stream. Along its banks were numerous little groves of karaka, peach trees, fern trees, &c., and no one could gaze on the scene without regretting the necessity of carrying the sword into a spot so formed by nature for peace and happiness.
eating big juicy Queens
with red hearts
quick blooded quick
tempered oh
quick save this
hurt
to the quick say this
they’ll learn patience
at last
losing or exchanging
juice
and hearts for stones
7
Their heads were decorated with white feathers in token of amity, and they would occasionally take out one and present it to an officer as a mark of respect. They looked very well and were remarkably cheerful. Some of them invited the soldiers to go for fruit. The two women look at each other, astonished. This orchard. That volcano. The rich earth that connects them. Their hidden words, buried, put by or not yet written. They listen. A few of the men went a short distance beyond the karaka grove to the right of No 6 redoubt, and saw a number of whares, all occupied, and surrounded by little plots of cultivation.
I looked at him and heard him say. Two 8-inch guns, two 8-inch and two 10-inch mortars, as many cohorns, one 24-pounder howitzer, and a 12-pounder, and one 9-pounder field piece. His voice is a cannonade. We put the horses in and start with the wagon before daybreak. Darkness on the Sumner road.
I looked again and heard him say. These, falling with a ponderous weight, bury themselves in the earth and explode like a mine, throwing up the ground on all sides like a little volcano. His voice is the bombardment it describes. I look for the hunter upside down in the sky over the top of the hill. Spaces the dark leaves open.
I looked at him and heard him say. Smoke from our rifles and that from the enemy’s muskets mingling together and mounting upwards in a common cloud which, ere it cleared the earth, was followed by another and another in quick succession. His voice is an altar for the hills wreathed in fire. We are below the pass, the sky lightens, the team snorts and sweats. We walk now to lighten the load.
I looked again and heard him say. It is so high, however, as to command a grand unbroken view of the wild picturesque valley of the Waitara, and of the rich country on both sides as far as the mouth of the river, where the steamers can be easily seen riding at anchor. His voice is a space the dark leaves open. We rest the horses as the sun comes up. It lights the drowned crater and those who stand on the rim of the old volcano, breathless, uncertain, hidden by circumstance. Stratagem, siege train, embassy. The white flag, the red flag, the white flag again.
Their heads are decorated with white feathers in token of amity. He is astounded. They are not. They take him behind the lines for fruit. We are dancing on the edge of a volcano.
there on the breast of Ocean little fascicle bound for the black island of sunrise vitreous distances announce you to the citadel clear across the stations of the amber route there she has her home and her dancing-lawns lift and fall small shadow on the breast without substance or moment you strike the shape of a sail against my living skin
Sources
Chris Pugsley’s ‘Walking the Taranaki Wars’ (New Zealand Defence Quarterly 1995-96), James Cowan’s The New Zealand Wars (1922-23) and the files of the Taranaki Herald and other newspapers 1860-61 supply historical background and certain voices here. Others, including Ron Silliman, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Fanny Howe, cut in from PennSound’s PoemTalk (2007-14).
The poems closing each section are mine, repurposed for their role in the imagining of a nineteenth-century woman writing on the outskirts of empire as bitter racial conflict erupts around her. We are connected (she is the sister of my great great grandfather). We are disconnected (there is no trace of her beyond a few bare dates). But she came to the place where my poetry begins. She heard about war in places I knew as a child. What might be chanced? What double binding of circumstance might produce one to (or for) the other? If ever you need to say something (the voice is Dickinson’s), tell it slant.
You looked over
just as I was looking up.
The trees were swaggering
amongst the clouds.
Your hand was upon my knee
and then not.
I pushed as you fought
against your own urgency:
Great surges of flesh
and then the heat
and then the smell of the heat.
The room was small
with the sound of us in it.
In the distance we could hear
dogs howling with their sound
for play.
Look how she looks
in the looking glass.
Fingers press
the sun
dust mouth opens
in an ‘O’
hair scratches
on the surface
her feet
kick at the floor
at the shift of backwards
as it carries on ahead of her.
* * * *
There are no answers
in the mirror.
No blueprint
of the girl
to store in the mind’s eye
nor any shadow
to fall in the light.
She must be
a displacement of time,
a confusion of dreams.
* * * *
They found her
in the garden.
Small girl of trouble
crouching in colour,
face buried in gypsophila,
breath heaving
with no tears.
* * * *
