Poems 1960-2000 (12 page)

Our throats full of dust, teeth harsh with it,

plastery sweat in our hair and nostrils,

we slam the flaps of the Landrover down

and think we choke on these roads.

Well, they will be better in time:

all along the dry riverbed

just as when we drove past this morning

men and women squatting under umbrellas

or cloth stretched over sticks, or nothing,

are splitting chipped stones to make smaller chips,

picking the fingernail-sized fragments

into graded heaps: roads by the handful.

We stop at the village and buy glasses of tea,

stewed and sweet; swallow dust with it

and are glad enough. The sun tilts lower.

Somewhere, surely, in this valley

under cool thatch mothers are feeding children

with steamy rice, leaning over them

to pour milk or water; the cups

tasting of earthenware, neutral, clean,

the young heads smelling only of hair.

The strong image is always the river

was a line for the poem I never wrote

twenty years ago and never have written

of the green Wanganui under its willows

or the ice-blue milky-foaming Clutha

stopping my tremulous teenage heart.

But now when I cross Westminster Bridge

all that comes to mind is the Niger

a river Mungo Park invented for me

as he invented all those African villages

and a certain kind of astonishing silence –

the explorer having done the poet’s job

and the poet feeling gratefully redundant.

Spilt petrol

oil on a puddle

the sea’s colour-chart

porcelain, tie-dyed.

Tap the shell:

glazed calcium.

Boss-eye, wall-eye, squinty lid

stony door for a sea-snail’s tunnel

the long beach littered with them

domes of shell, discarded virginities

where the green girl wanders, willing

to lose hers to the right man

or to the wrong man, if he should raise

his frolic head above a sand dune

glossy-black-haired, and that smile on him

Under the sand at low tide

are whispers, hisses, long slithers,

bubbles, the suck of ingestion, a soft

snap: mysteries and exclusions.

Things grow on the dunes too –

pale straggle of lupin-bushes,

cutty-grass, evening primroses

puckering in the low light.

But the sea knows better.

Walk at the edge of its rich waves:

on the surface nothing shows;

underneath it is fat and fecund.

Standing just under the boatshed

knee-deep in dappled water

sand-coloured legs and the sand itself

greenish in the lit ripples

watching the shrimps avoid her net

little flexible glass rockets

and the lifted mesh always empty

gauze and wire dripping sunlight

She is too tall to stand under

this house. It is a fantasy

And moving in from the bright outskirts

further under the shadowy floor

hearing a footstep creak above

her head brushing the rough timber

edging further bending her knees

creosote beams grazing her shoulder

the ground higher the roof lower

sand sifting on to her hair

She kneels in dark shallow water,

palms pressed upon shells and weed.

November ’63: eight months in London.

I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:

they float swanlike, arching their white necks

over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,

burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.

I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer’s jacket

and secretly test my accent once again:

St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.

First there is the hill        wooden houses

warm branches close against the face

Bamboo was in it somewhere

or another tall reed        and pines

Let it shift a little

settle into its own place

When we lived on the mountain

she said        But it was not

a mountain        nor they placed so high

nor where they came from a mountain

Manchester        and then the slow seas

hatches battened        a typhoon

so that all in the end became

mountains

               Steps to the venture

vehicles luggage bits of paper

all their people fallen away

shrunken into framed wedding groups

One knows at the time it can’t be happening

Neighbours helped them build a house

what neighbours there were        and to farm

she and the boy much alone

her husband away in the town working

clipping hair        Her heart was weak

they said        ninety years with a weak heart

and such grotesque accidents

burns wrenches caustic soda

conspired against she had to believe

The waterfall        that was real

but she never mentioned the waterfall

After twelve years the slow reverse

from green wetness        cattle        weather

to somewhere at least        a township

air lower than the mountain’s        calmer

a house with an orchard        peach and plum trees

tomato        plants their bruised scented leaves

and a third life        grandchildren

even the trip back to England at last

suburbs        retraction into a city

We took her a cake for her birthday

going together        it was easier

Separately would have been kinder

and twice        For the same stories

rain cold now on the southerly harbour

wondering she must have been why

alone in the house or whether alone

her son in Europe        but someone

a man she thought in the locked room

where their things were stored        her things

about her        china the boxwood cabinet

photographs        Them’s your Grandpa’s people

and the noises in the room        a face

Hard to tell if she was frightened

Not simple        no        Much neglected

and much here omitted        Footnotes

Alice and her children gone ahead

the black sheep brother        the money

the whole slow long knotted tangle

And her fine straight profile too

her giggle        Eee        her dark eyes

There were always the places I couldn’t spell, or couldn’t find on maps –

too small, but swollen in family legend:

famous for bush-fires, near-drownings, or just the standard pioneer

grimness – twenty cows to milk by hand

before breakfast, and then a five-mile walk to school.

(Do I exaggerate? Perhaps; but hardly at all.)

They were my father’s, mostly. One or two, until I was five,

rolled in and out of my own vision:

a wall with blackboards; a gate where I swung, the wind bleak in the telegraph wires;

Mother in this or that schoolhouse kitchen,

singing. And, in between, back to familiar bases:

Drury again, Christmas Days in grandparents’ houses.

Suddenly no more New Zealand except in receding pictures

for years. And then we had it again, but different:

a city, big schools, my father a university teacher now.

But, being a nostalgic family, we went

in a newish car, along better roads, where once we’d rattled

in the Baby Austin over metal or clay surfaces, unsealed.

And we got most of it – nearly all the places that seemed to matter:

‘Do you remember this path?’ and ‘There’s the harbour

we had to cross in the launch when you were a new baby

and a storm came up, and we thought we’d go under.’

Here and there a known vista or the familiar angle

of a room to a garden made my own memories tingle.

But nostalgia-time ran out as I grew older and more busy

and became a parent myself, and left the country

for longer than they had left it; with certain things undone:

among them, two holes in the map empty.

Now I’ve stitched them in. I have the fabric complete,

the whole of the North Island pinned out flat.

First my own most haunting obsession, the school at Tokorangi.

It was I who spotted the turning off the road,

identified the trees, the mound, the contours programmed into my system

when I was five, and the L-shaped shed

echoing for two of us with voices; for the rest

an object of polite historical interest.

And a week later, one for my father, smaller and more remote,

a square wooden box on a little hill.

The door creaked rustily open. He stood in the entrance porch, he touched

the tap he’d so often turned, the very nail

where sixty years ago the barometer had hung

to be read at the start of each patterned morning.

Two bits of the back-blocks, then, two differently rural settings

for schools, were they? Schools no longer.

Left idle by the motorised successors of the pioneers

each had the same still mask to offer:

broken windows, grassy silence, all the children gone away,

and classrooms turned into barns for storing hay.

The hills, I told them; and water, and the clear air

(not yielding to more journalistic probings);

and a river or two, I could say, and certain bays

and ah, those various and incredible hills…

And all my family still in the one city

within walking distances of each other

through streets I could follow blind. My school was gone

and half my Thorndon smashed for the motorway

but every corner revealed familiar settings

for the dreams I’d not bothered to remember –

ingrained; ingrown; incestuous: like the country.

And another city offering me a lover

and quite enough friends to be going on with;

bookshops; galleries; gardens; fish in the sea;

lemons and passionfruit growing free as the bush.

Then the bush itself; and the wild grand south;

and wooden houses in occasional special towns.

And not a town or a city I could live in.

Home, as I explained to a weeping niece,

home is London; and England, Ireland, Europe.

I have come home with a suitcase full of stones –

of shells and pebbles, pottery, pieces of bark:

here they lie around the floor of my study

as I telephone a cable ‘Safely home’

and moments later, thinking of my dears,

wish the over-resonant word cancelled:

‘Arrived safely’ would have been clear enough,

neutral, kinder. But another loaded word

creeps up now to interrogate me.

By going back to look, after thirteen years,

have I made myself for the first time an exile?

Scarcely two hours back in the country

and I’m shopping in East Finchley High Road

in a cotton skirt, a cardigan, jandals –

or flipflops as people call them here,

where February’s winter. Aren’t I cold?

The neighbours in their overcoats are smiling

at my smiles and not at my bare toes:

they know me here.

                                I hardly know myself,

yet. It takes me until Monday evening,

walking from the office after dark

to Westminster Bridge. It’s cold, it’s foggy,

the traffic’s as abominable as ever,

and there across the Thames is County Hall,

that uninspired stone body, floodlit.

It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.

You did London early, at nineteen:

the basement room, the geriatric nursing,

cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses,

and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office,

Spring 1955, on the rebound.

Marrying was what we did in those days.

And soon enough you were back in Wellington

with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records

buying kitchen furniture on hire-purchase

and writing novels when the babies were asleep.

Somehow you’re still there, I’m here; and now

Sarah arrives: baby-faced like you then,

second of your four blonde Christmas-tree fairies,

nineteen; competent; with her one suitcase

and her two passports. It begins again.