In The Poetry

Wittgenstein’s Dream

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,
I get so dreadfully morose at five,
I went in and put Nature on my hatstand
And considering the Sinking of the Eveninglands
And laughed at what translation may contrive
And worked at mathematics and was bored.

There was fire above, the sun in its descent,
There were letters there whose words seemed scarcely cooked,
There was speech and decency and utter terror,
In twice four hundred pages just one error
In everything I ever wrote – I looked
In meaning for whatever wasn’t meant.

Some amateur was killing Schubert dead,
Some of the pains the English force on me,
Somewhere with cow-bells Austria exists,
But then I saw the gods pin up their lists
But was not on them – we live stupidly
But are redeemed by what cannot be said.

Perhaps a language has been made which works,
Perhaps it’s tension in the cinema,
Perhaps ‘perhaps’ is an inventive word,
A sort of self-intending thing, a bird,
A problem for an architect, a star,
A plan to save Vienna from the Turks.

After dinner I read myself to sleep,
After which I dreamt the Eastern Front
After an exchange of howitzers,
The Angel of Death was taking what was hers,
The finger missed me but the guns still grunt
The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.

And then I woke in my own corner bed
And turned away and cried into the wall
And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.
I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,
I heard myself. ‘Tell them’, I said to all,
‘I’ve had a wonderful life. I’m dead.’

Songs of a Quiet Woman

lurching delicate as a snow queen down this street of greys
unfocussed exactly enough to miss the businessmen
goggling at my stocking deciding
(as I twitch primly into the tram seat my handbag
nestled on my lap like a puppy) deciding
this will be a day of minor survivals:
etching a bloody mouth in fluorescent mirrors
or idly lacquering a hand of claws:
small weapons for a small war

*

there is one streetlight which always
blinks off whenever I walk near it
coming home late and secretarial
to the hint of cats and cooking -
silently inside me something flexes
something unsurprised

*

men of course lately they are kind to me
although an acid starting in my sweat
erodes me like an argument:
snatched by hesitation in a shop
eloquent and secret with the smell of him
I feel sureness swelling like a bruise
forcing blood into lips breathless and reverent
this pearl in the corruption of my belief

*

(yes please no trouble thankyou mother
it’s been a pleasure because I do not know
how to be angry or ugly mother -
granny addled with sherry under bombs
in Winchester never raised her voice
or said a word back to your father
no matter what woman or what insults:
her eighty year old skin is white and powdered
and now she pisses in the basin mother
and I know the proper way to lay tables)

*

to other things I turn the eye of god.
the tv’s gorgon eye has glazed me over
and nothing touches me at all:
not famine fire fear or revolution.
only a shellshocked child in Beirut
firmly stroked to stillness by a nun.
he stared at her with eyes as black as hunger.
I wept then for the simple magic of hands

*

the routine of coffee the complicity
of cigarettes and gossip
this gentle leaning over narrow tables
into the sly glass of recognition:
I know I am dishonest in my dress
(she says to me) I know I am dishonest
but all I ever knew was how to lie

Pancho Villa

I once shook hands with a pawn-
broker in Chicago who claimed
to have the desert saint’s trigger-

finger cottoned in his fridge, and ever
since, each time I twist a lid of pickled
gherkins, lick the sweet vinegar

lizarding off my thumb, my mind
twitches to Chihuahua, like a tumble-
weed churning in the blue tequilaed

sun, lipping to itself Pancho’s
parting shots: ‘don’t let it end
like this – tell them I said something’.

This poem is called ‘Friends’ Photos’, and it’s about the experience of looking through old photograph albums.

Friends’ Photos

We all looked like goddesses
and gods, glowing and smooth, sheathed
from head to foot by a golden essence
that glistenes and refracted its aura
of power – the wonderful ichor called youth.

We moved as easily as dolphins
surging out of the ocean, cleaving
massed tons of transparent water
streaming away in swathes of bubbling
silver like the plasm of life.

Still potent from those black and white
photos, the palpable electric
charge between us, like the negative
and positive poles of a battery,
or the fingers of Adam and God.

We were beautiful, without exception.
I could hardly bear to look at those
old albums, to see the lost glamour
we never noticed when we were
first together – when we were young.

I live down near Hastings, and in Hastings there’s a guy there who’s got a pet iguana and when the weather gets really hot, he takes his iguana on a walk along Hastings beach on a dog lead. Sometimes the iguana sits curled up over his shoulder, they really do look strange, and when I saw them I thought I really must write something about them, and this is called ‘Walking with my Iguana’.

I’m walking
with my iguana

I’m walking
With my iguana

When the temperature rises
to above eighty-five,
my iguana is looking
like he’s coming alive.

So we make it to the beach,
my iguana and me,
then he sits on my shoulder
as we stroll by the sea…..

and I’m walking
with my iguana

I’m walking
With my iguana

Well if anyone sees us
we’re a big surprise,
my iguana and me
on our daily exercise,

till somebody phones
the local police
says I’ve got an alligator
tied to a leash.

when I’m walking
with my iguana

I’m walking
With my iguana

It’s the spines on his back
that make him look grim,
but he just loves to be tickled
under his chin.

And I know that my iguana
is ready for bed
when he puts on his pyjamas
and lays down his sleepy head.

And I’m walking
with my iguana

still walking
With my iguana

With my iguana…
with my iguana…
and my piranha
and my chihuahua
and my chinchilla,
with my gorilla,
my caterpillar…
and I’m walking…
with my iguana…
with my iguana…
with my iguana…

And there is a scene in the Bible where, many centuries later, the Ark is being brought into Jerusalem, and David is dancing as it’s being carried into Jerusalem, and he is described with the phrase “and David danced before the Lord with all his might”. When I read that phrase as a boy, I loved it, and then only in my middle age I realised that it wasn’t a figure of speech, it was believed that God’s presence inhabits the ark and so literally he was dancing before the Lord with all His might.

The shrine whose shape I am
Has a fringe of fire
Flames skirt my skin

There is no Jerusalem but this
Breathed in flesh by shameless love
Built high upon the tides of blood
I believe the Prophets and Blake
And like David I bless myself
With all my might

I know many hills were holy once
But now in the level lands to live
Zion ground down must become marrow
Thus in my bones I am the King’s son
And through death’s domain I go
Making my own procession

When I was at school, sometimes the teachers used to point out examples of historical personages that perhaps we should try and emulate in our own lives. Well, one of these examples was David Livingstone, and it was only when, much later in life, I read his biography I discovered, for example, that when he was in Africa, far from whole nations flocking to the cross, he only ever made one convert to Christianity, and that person lapsed. He blamed various things about this, and one of them was that the language that he thought he had to use was ambiguous, and some of those words from his notebooks I’ve used in this poem called ‘Fundamentals’

Brethren, I know that many of you have come here today
because your Chief has promised any non-attender
that he will stake him out, drive tent-pegs through his anus
and sell his wives and children to the Portuguese.
As far as possible, I want you to put that from your minds.
Today, I want to talk to you about the Christian God.

In many respects, our Christian God is not like your God.
His name, for example, is not also our word for rain.
Neither does it have for us the connotation ‘sexual intercourse’.
And although I call him ‘holy’ (we call Him ‘Him’, not ‘It’,
even though we know He is not a man and certainly not a woman)
I do not mean, as you do, that He is fat like a healthy cow.

Let me make this clear. When I say ‘God is good, God is everywhere’,
it is not because He is exceptionally fat. ‘God loves you’
does not mean what warriors do to spear-carriers on campaign.
It means He feels for you like your mother or your father –
yes I know Chuma loved a son he bought like warriors
love spear-carriers on campaign – that’s Sin and it comes later.

From today, I want you to remember just three simple things:
our God is different from your God, our God is better than your God
and my wife doesn’t like it when you watch her go to the toilet.
Grasp them and you have grasped the fundamentals of salvation.
Baptisms start at sundown but before then, as arranged,
how to strip, clean and re-sight a bolt-action Martini-Henry.

To reach Dante’s earthly paradise in the Garden of Eden, you must climb the nine circles of Mount Purgatory to the top. I’ve imagined the tor at Torbay, North Shore City, Auckland as representing Mount Purgatory. A local Maori myth has a young woman waiting for the return of her lover as she sits on the tor watching the sea. Paua is a New Zealand shellfish with a highly iridescent shell.

Beatus

There you are Beatus ―
grey star on a dusky scarf
the moon halved by a cloud
& us sun-bathing in your palm -
airy, toi-toi, blond feathers
staked like javelins
thrown to mark
a harbour – you are
the harbour & the yachts
in full light at full tilt – or

Orion, sword upside-down
spread-eagled on night blue -
you’re the ninth step
of the ninth circle round
the tor, where a girl plaits
& waits for sight of your canoe,
paua eyes on the masthead gleaming
up from under as do those
of swordfish or marlin
or of a sea-god leaping.

‘Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead’ concerns things I found on a local dump – where I shouldn’t have been because one’s not allowed to play on the dump but I’m a grown-up woman and I can go there if I want. I found a lot of personal effects and of course I couldn’t resist but look at them, and there were letters, cards and what have you – and they were addressed to “Mr and Mrs Scotland” and I thought, “Thank you God.” This is a sort of state of the nation poem if you like.

Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead

On the civic amenity landfill site,
the coup, the dump beyond the cemetery
and the 30-mile-an-hour sign, her stiff
old ladies’ bag, open mouthed, spew
postcards sent from small Scots towns
in 1960: Peebles, Largs, the rock-gardens
of Carnoustie, tinted in the dirt.
Mr and Mrs Scotland, here is the hand you were dealt:
fair but cool, showery but nevertheless,
Jean asks kindly; the lovely scenery;
in careful school-room script -
The Beltane Queen was crowned today.
But Mr and Mrs Scotland are dead.

Couldn’t he have burned them? Released
in a grey curl of smoke
this pattern for a cable knit? Or this:
tossed between a toppled fridge
and sweet-stinking anorak: Dictionary for Mothers
M:- Milk, the woman who worries…;
And here, Mr Scotland’s John Bull Puncture Repair Kit;
those days when he knew intimately
the thin roads of his country, hedgerows
hanged with small black brambles’ hearts;
and here, for God’s sake, his last few joiners’ tools,
SCOTLAND, SCOTLAND, stamped on their tired handles.

Do we take them? Before the bulldozer comes
to make more room, to shove aside
his shaving brush, her button tin.
Do we save this toolbox, these old-fashioned views
addressed after all, to Mr and Mrs Scotland?
Should we reach and take them? And then?
Forget them, till that person enters
our silent house, begins to open
to the light our kitchen drawers,
and performs for us this perfunctory rite:
the sweeping up, the turning out.

Fox

I needed fox Badly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a
triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she had run through
I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen’s courage in vixen terms

For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman

1998