Poems 1960-2000 (7 page)

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 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.

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.

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.

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’ 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.

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.

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.

‘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 endlessly. 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. 

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?

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 grown:

high on its huge mound it soared, vast;

and God glared out from behind a tombstone.