872 Life poems

What’s geography? What difference what mountain it is? In the intimacy of this altitude its discolored snowfields overhang half the world. On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky, feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind spinning the blood-weighted body head downward. The mountain that had become a known profile on the day’s horizon is a gesture of earth swinging us above falling spaces, above a map of the world. Disturber of the unseen, provoker of the gusts in which we bend struggling against destruction gaping eastward. The wind fails. The breath held. The illusion of death. The resisting shoulder unopposed lurches west in innocent still air, as steep, as deep.

Some nights the rat with pointed teeth makes his long way back to the bowl of peaches. He stands on the dining room table sinking his tooth drinking the pulp of each fruity turned-up face knowing you will read this message and scream. It is his only text, to take and take in darkness, to be gone before you awaken and your giant feet start creaking the floor. Where is the mother of the rat? The father, the shredded nest, which breath were we taking when the rat was born, when he lifted his shivering snout to rafter and rivet and stone? I gave him the names of the devil, seared and screeching names, I would not enter those rooms without a stick to guide me, I leaned on the light, shuddering, and the moist earth under the house, the trailing tails of clouds, said he was in the closet, the drawer of candles, his nose was a wick. How would we live together with our sad shoes and hideouts, our lock on the door and his delicate fingered paws that could clutch and grip, his blank slate of fur and the pillow where we press our faces? The bed that was a boat is sinking. And the shores of morning loom up lined with little shadows, things we never wanted to be, or meet, and all the rats are waving hello.

my old friend I wonder how far north you travel? The road goes west starting two doors up from the Dog’s Bollocks ending at sunset. So many sunsets Facebook and Instagram couldn’t contain them. So many yellow lines, white stripes there’s hardly a Valiant left to defy them. Now the years overtake us. Visits as a boy to Uncle Bruce and Aunty Lindy in their K’Rd council flat led me to the greatness of  the great north whipping its dusty tail up to the skyline of  Reinga. Yet why do I see your darkness as silence my friend? You’re a sleek black eel pumping blood all the way to Karekare, to Muriwai, to Bethells, to Piha, and our vehicles surf the surges back to K’Rd, back and forth, LOL, rocking up our shock absorbers and surfboards. Keep bringing the waves Great North Road. Keep saving the whales! Keep the toheroas shining tucked away from spades in sandy bolt-holes. Smile in your cars and honk honk honk on the Great North Road.

for Anselm Hollo Go out into brightened space out there the fainter yellowish place it makes for eye to enter out to greyed penumbra all the way to thoughtful searching sight of all beyond that solid red both brick and seeming metal roof or higher black beyond the genial slope I look at daily house top on my own way up to heaven. * Same roof, light’s gone down back of it, behind the crying end of day, “I need something to do,” it’s been again those other things, what’s out there, sodden edge of sea’s bay, city’s graveyard, park deserted, flattened aspect, leaves gone colored fall to sidewalk, street, the end of all these days but still this regal light. * Trees stripped, rather shed of leaves, the black solid trunks up to fibrous mesh of smaller branches, it is weather’s window, weather’s particular echo, here as if this place had been once, now vacant, a door that had had hinges swung in air’s peculiar emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere, asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of linearly absolute black metal fence. * Old sky freshened with cloud bulk slides over frame of window the shadings of softened greys a light of air up out of this dense high structured enclosure of buildings top or pushed up flat of bricked roof frame I love I love the safety of small world this door frame back of me the panes of simple glass yet airy up sweep of birch trees sit in flat below all designation declaration here as clouds move so simply away. * Windows now lit close out the upper dark the night’s a face three eyes far fainter than the day all faced with light inside the room makes eye re- flective see the common world as one again no outside coming in no more than walls and post- card pictures place faces across that cautious dark the tree no longer seen more than black edge close branches somehow still between. * He was at the edge of this reflective echo the words blown back in air a bubble of suddenly apparent person who walked to sit down by the familiar brook and thought about his fading life all “fading life” in tremulous airy perspect saw it hover in the surface of that moving darkness at the edge of sun’s passing water’s sudden depth his own hands’ knotted surface the sounding in himself of some other. * One forty five afternoon red car parked left hand side of street no distinguishing feature still wet day a bicycle across the way a green door- way with arched upper window a backyard edge of back wall to enclosed alley low down small windows and two other cars green and blue parked too and miles and more miles still to go. * This early still sunless morning when a chair’s creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still out the window might be apparent night when the house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of immense empty silence and I feel the children still breathing still shifting their dreams an enigma will soon arrive here and the loved one centers all in her heavy sleeping arm out the leg pushed down bedclothes this body unseen un- known placed out there in night I can feel all about me still sitting in this small spare pool of light watching the letters the words try to speak. * Classic emptiness it sits out there edge of hierarchic roof top it marks with acid fine edge of apparent difference it is there here here that sky so up and out and where it wants to be no birds no other thing can for a moment distract it be beyond its simple space.

Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen sat down with me in the small tiled room of her family house I am unable to sleep. We shared a glass of cold and sweet water. On a blue plate her mother brought us cake and smiled her betel-black teeth at me but I did not feel strange in the house my country had tried to bomb into dust. In English thick and dazed as blood she told me how she watched our planes cross her childhood’s sky, all the children of Hanoi carried in darkness to mountain hamlets, Nixon’s Christmas bombing. She let me hold her hand, her shy unmoving fingers, and told me how afraid she was those days and how this fear had dug inside her like a worm and lives inside her still, won’t die or go away. And because she’s stronger, she comforted me, said I’m not to blame, the million sorrows alive in her gaze. With the dead we share no common rooms. With the frightened we can’t think straight; no words can bring the burning city back. Outside on Hung Dao Street I tried to say good-bye and held her hand too long so she looked back through traffic towards her house and with her eyes she told me I should leave. All night I ached for her and for myself and nothing I could think or pray would make it stop. Some birds sang morning home across the lake. In small reed boats the lotus gatherers sailed out among their resuming white blossoms. Hanoi, 1990

In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet. In goes the philosophy teacher explaining the theory of eternal return, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet, still owing money to Mozart. In goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten. Every river is Lethean, so why should we care if it’s not the same river? I hate how everything changes, tree to failing term paper, chatelaine to beheaded plotter, drug dealer to narc. The heart softening faster than cereal but then hardening to a relic which turns into another line of depressed poetry to recite to the next eager trainee anxious to be more than lint. Going up, you’re also going down, so either way, as your mother said,Be nice. When she went in, she was very thin. Earth, air, fire, water, mother. Fish pulse slowly under the river ice.

for Yehuda Amichai Though you live in a little country, crammed and crisscrossed with debris, the past oppressive many times over— where you buy your grapes David, pausing, eyes a fiery dark girl, a lusty song riding his breath, the old dance urgent at his body; where you buy your bread Christ, stumbling, stoops to heavy lumber— you insist on your own loves and griefs, on living your own life. So you love this city, but mainly as it goes on living its own life, across its roofs the lines flapping, not gaudy banners, but sheets and diapers, pants and slips, as if rehearsing private pleasures. And though you know you cannot win, you play the game with all the skill and love that you can muster, hoping to keep it, keep it going, whatever the fierceness in it, while you learn the repertoire of your opponent’s wrist, the repertoire your own commands, with every stroke surprising you, as in a woman’s glance the abundance glinting of her passion stored away. Those opposing roles, victor, victim both, when they require re-enacting, the moon as ever plays the luminous dome above your god-and-man-scarred rock, responsive to each nuance of the light informing it with this, the latest scene. The sweat you’ve shared between you, juices drying on your hands and moon- lit belly, swirls out of the rutted, stain- stiff sheets a fragrance stronger, more anointing, than the myrrh, the frank- incense the magi brought, a gleam that would eclipse their beaten gold.

Unfortunately happiness Depends a little more than less On undependable, and hence Absurdly charming elements.

When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought,That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark

On shanks’ mare Argyle talked to himself. Alone, he’d carry on whole colloquies en route to some poor corpse’s obsequies— these dialogues, the way he kept his wits about him, body and soul together, fit for the wretched work of sin-eating. Sometimes he counted words or parts of words as if they amounted to something more than sound and sense attuned between his ears, as, for example, how coincident: the way grace and gratis, wherefore gratitude partook a kinship such as cousins do, singing the same tune in different voices, much as grave and gravitas, then gravity kept one earthbound, grounded, humble as the mud— the humus, so-called, God wrought humans from. Or how from Adam’s rib was fashioned Eve— bone of his own bone, flesh of his flesh— whom he got gravid by implanting seed, in her unfathomably fecund Eden. The memory of a woman’s company would bring his ambulations to a halt to aim his gaping face due heavenward, the dewy air her touch, her taste, sweet salt.