James K. Baxter

Often in summer, on a tarred bridge plank standing, Or downstream between willows, a safe Ophelia drifting In a rented boat — I had seen them come and go, Those wild bees swift as tigers, their gauze wings a-glitter In passionless industry, clustering black at the crevice Of a rotten cabbage tree, where their hive was hidden low. But never strolled too near. Till one half-cloudy evening Of ripe January, my friends and I Came, gloved and masked to the eyes like plundering desperadoes, To smoke them out. Quiet beside the stagnant river We trod wet grasses down, hearing the crickets chitter And waiting for light to drain from the wounded sky. Before we reached the hive their sentries saw us And sprang invisible through the darkening air, Stabbed, and died in stinging. The hive woke. Poisonous fuming Of sulphur filled the hollow trunk, and crawling Blue flame sputtered — yet still their suicidal Live raiders dived and clung to our hands and hair. O it was Carthage under the Roman torches, Or loud with flames and falling timber, Troy! A job well botched. Half of the honey melted And half the rest young grubs. Through earth-black smouldering ashes And maimed bees groaning, we drew out our plunder. Little enough their gold, and slight our joy. Fallen then the city of instinctive wisdom. Tragedy is written distinct and small: A hive burned on a cool night in summer. But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.

I advise rest; the farmhouse we dug you up in has been modernized, and the people who hung you as their ikon against the long passage wall are underground — Incubus and excellent woman, we inherit the bone acre of your cages and laws. This dull green land suckled at your blood’s frigor Anglicanus, crowning with a housewife’s tally the void of Empire, does not remember you — and certain bloody bandaged ghosts rising from holes of Armageddon at Gallipoli or Sling Camp, would like to fire a shot through the gilt frame. I advise rest, Madam; and yet the tomb holds much that we must travel barely without. Your print — ‘from an original pencil drawing by the Marchioness ‘of Granby, March, eighteen nine- ty seven…’ Little mouth, strong nose and hooded eye — they speak of half-truths my type have slung out of the window, and lack and feel the lack too late. Queen, you stand most for the time of early light, clay roads, great trees unfelled, and the smoke from huts where girls in sack dresses stole butter . . . The small rain spits today. You smile in your grave.

Summer brings out the girls in their green dresses Whom the foolish might compare to daffodils, Not seeing how a dead grandmother in each one governs her limbs, Darkening the bright corolla, using her lips to speak through, Or that a silver torque was woven out of The roots of wet speargrass. The young are mastered by the Dead, Lacking cunning. But on the beaches, under the clean wind That blows this way from the mountains of Peru, Drunk with the wind and the silence, not moving an inch As the surf-swimmers mount on yoked waves, One can begin to shake with laughter, Becoming oneself a metal Neptune. To want nothing is The only possible freedom. But I prefer to think of An afternoon spent drinking rum and cloves In a little bar, just after the rain had started, in another time Before we began to die — the taste of boredom on the tongue Easily dissolving, and the lights coming on — With what company? I forget. Where can we find the right Herbs, drinks, bandages to cover These lifelong intolerable wounds? Herbs of oblivion, they lost their power to help us The day that Aphrodite touched her mouth to ours.

(for Monte Holcroft) These unshaped islands, on the sawyer’s bench, Wait for the chisel of the mind, Green canyons to the south, immense and passive, Penetrated rarely, seeded only By the deer-culler’s shot, or else in the north Tribes of the shark and the octopus, Mangroves, black hair on a boxer’s hand. The founding fathers with their guns and bibles, Botanist, whaler, added bones and names To the land, to us a bridle As if the id were a horse: the swampy towns Like dreamers that struggle to wake, Longing for the poets’ truth And the lover’s pride. Something new and old Explores its own pain, hearing The rain’s choir on curtains of grey moss Or fingers of the Tasman pressing On breasts of hardening sand, as actors Find their own solitude in mirrors, As one who has buried his dead, Able at last to give with an open hand.

There was a message. I have forgotten it. There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything. But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof Of this old rabbiters' hut where the traps Are still hanging up on nails, Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease. The true dreams, those longed-for strangers, Begin to come to me through the gates of horn. I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life In which we crept sadly like animals Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women, And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape. Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton, A great reddish gourd of flesh, From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning— 'You are always—' Despair is the only gift; When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water; And so you also can share this emptiness with me. Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears. Even if I had forgotten them The mountain that has taken my being to itself Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.

Three dark buds for the Trinity On one twig I found in the lining of my coat Forgotten since I broke them from the tree That grows opposite the RSA building At the top of Vulcan Lane — there I would lay down my parka On the grass and meditate, cross-legged; there was a girl Who sat beside me there; She would hold a blue flower at the centre of the bullring While the twigs on the tree became black And then slowly green again — she was young — if I had said, ‘Have my coat; have my money’ — She would have gone away; but because I gave her nothing She came again and again to share that nothing Like a bird that nest in the open hand.

One writes telling me I am her guiding light And my poems her bible — on this cold morning After moss I smoke one cigarette And hear a magpie chatter in the paddock, The image of Hatana — he bashes at the windows In idiot spite, shouting — ‘Pakeha! You can be ‘The country’s leading poet’ — at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe,' To the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’— Yet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori And these daft English words meander on, How dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me Again by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind On the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length A muddy spring of poems will gush out.

The small grey cloudy louse that nests in my beard Is not, as some have called it, ‘a pearl of God’ — No, it is a fiery tormentor Waking me at two a.m. Or thereabouts, when the lights are still on In the houses in the pa, to go across thick grass Wet with rain, feet cold, to kneel For an hour or two in front of the red flickering Tabernacle light — what He sees inside My meandering mind I can only guess — A madman, a nobody, a raconteur Whom He can joke with — ‘Lord,’ I ask Him, ‘Do You or don’t You expect me to put up with lice?’ His silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn.

Hard, heavy, slow, dark, Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later When the heart has lost its unjust hope For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket Over the paddocks of young grass, So delicate like fronds of maidenhair, Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them, Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots, But they’ll do to add to the soup. It’s a long time now Since the great ikons fell down, God, Mary, home, sex, poetry, Whatever one uses as a bridge To cross the river that only has one beach, And even one’s name is a way of saying — ‘This gap inside a coat’ — the darkness I call God, The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate The blue calm evening sky that plane tunnels through Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand, Into something else? I go on looking For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.

About twilight we came to the whitewashed pub On a knuckle of land above the bay Where a log was riding and the slow Bird-winged breakers cast up spray. One of the drinkers round packing cases had The worn face of a kumara god, Or so it struck me. Later on Lying awake in the veranda bedroom In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea Reverberating, and thought: As a man Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh, But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po, With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.