A for Blog

1. What is the theme
of this poem?
Quote to support
your answer.

2. Why did the author
write this poem?

Atlantis
is about to sink.

Flatland
is on the brink.

Legendary Tokelau
sea it
don’t blink.

(for but not to Colin Miskelly)

Snipe.
You can’t imagine one.
Frail echo of kiwi
handful of feathers
with a darning needle handle.

Snipe.
You’ve never seen one
on its nest of dracophyllum
under tussock
on a chilly island rock around the south.

Hakawai.
Horror of the empty night.
Monster or ghost
not even the elders knew for sure
and nobody wanted to know.

Hakawai.
The rare roar from nowhere
loud as a jumbo jet
skimming
the roof of the tent.

Snipe.
Aeronautical acrobat
secretly fizzing and whizzing
is the hakawai,
makes the hakawai.

Supersnipe
changing in a phone box
from trembling toy
to boy racer of the skies.

Snipe.
Wrecking its feathers
for a moment of fame or fun
for a sound a thousand thousand times
its size.

Photo: James Fraser, NZ Department of Conservation

It’s lucky I’ve got wings,
otherwise my hands
would blow away
in the wind
and I couldn’t
hold your hand,
said Elsie.

Atafu is the Protestant atoll
with a strong sense
of fundamentalist
culture

Nukunono is the Roman Catholic island
with a normal
concentration
of culture

and

Fakaofo is the neutral island
with a split
between Roman Catholicism
and Protestantism
and a normal mix
between normal
and fundamentalist tradition.

How to get over get out of
a panic attack at 1 am:
get a book and a cup of tea.

At 2 am get arms overhead
and do best breathing.

At 3 am locate the panic —
top left, perhaps?
Put up a big red STOP sign
and turn to the place
where better thoughts await.

At 4 am get vertical:
meditate, make a list
or do tai chi.

At 5 am get up, get alive
get a jump start
on another marvellous day.

for Jan

For fear of dark water
you build a dam.
Rock by rock it rises,
paralyses. You stare and fear
a crumbling, a crushing,
a flushing of all that dark water.

Now you leave the danger zone
climb around the dam to study
dark water. It’s stagnant.
Algae clog the rim,
and is that the neck
of a monster?

Upstream a dazzle of sun
strikes running water.
It’s that old familiar river
and in no time
there you are again
splashing and paddling

cartwheels and bellyflops
midges and cockabullies
picnics on sand
king of the castle
and can’t catch me—
can so catch me

for there’s your sister
reaching for your hand.
You need to comfort her.
She needs to comfort you.
Sun lights water
shifting rock after rock.

You are a dancer.
You are not an engineer.
As you hold each other
dark water seeps from the dam
and finds a way
to meet the sea.

Gotta live
it’s my duty
morphs into
what if I die
then into
gonna die.

I’m alive
it’s my destiny
morphs into
life is good
I’m gonna live
I’m gonna live good.

Long live the old!
she cried
and everyone clapped.

Long live the old!
and nobody
got the joke.

Not an issue
but a problem.
Not addressing
but solving.
That’s not life
but this is living.

For Diana Neutze, on the 40th anniversary of her illness

What you write
is hard to take.
Which is why
you must make

what you make,
write what you write,
give what you take,
bite what you are.

One bright star
in the sludge
is the fact
that you write.

Standing on your hands
requires
white-hot faith
right-angled wrists
and a desire
to stand on your hands.

A poem about water
is a poem about us
chiefly tears saliva
blood and other juices.

Water runs washes gushes
so do we
or goes stagnant or goes dry
like this analogy.

Solomon sees people
as lumpy bags of skin
with holes that move
bags for holding maybe water in.

These bags of us make porridge
feed the cat and loom
scary and unwitting
over Solomon.

A fine silent sepia scene.
A mother crumpled by MS
in the bicycle basket
of her peasant son.

Both motionless in quiet love
faces raised to the noon above
glow on the road
in bubbles but as one.

World, sun, son, one
more day in paradise,
a memory baking
not making.

When God is just an abstract noun
we cram the floating word
with metaphors, provisos, parallels,
pro bonos, caveats, and dreams –

with fluff not concrete, yet
it tumbles right out of the sky.
When God means whatever,
God is a word to beware.

Tragic, really.
It worked, and then
it didn’t.

(For Diana Neutze, as MS advances)

You know how
you will die.
(Let others worry
when and why.)

Your tall ship
drifts north
sans sails
sans oars.

You forgive life.
You forgive death.
You are almost
jolly.

You do your work
of the soul.
You honour both
cats and sparrows

with all your lonely
lively
problem-solving
whole.

(for Diana Neutze)

You need Bach
to thread beads
on the filaments
of your sleep.

You need Mozart
to gleam
in blowaway bubbles
beyond the glass.

You need Haydn
to wrap you
in a firm and fatherly
embrace.

Words I can never remember:
laminate, locknit, perspex.
Words I can always remember:
mitochondria, Berberis Darwinii, tuvaevae.

Beware the day when you can’t recall
the word for toothpaste. Meanwhile,
talk with momentum or aim for the noun.
Do puzzles. Learn the young. Eat fish.

Talk about bra straps
and why they slip off
in a flying buttress
compromise.

The safety pins and loops
of yesteryear,
the plastic epidermis
and other jokes.

Conspiracies of
Look ma, no bra!
before the revolution
of ha ha, got bra!

Since when
a strap seen
is not a shame
and not obscene.

In fever the body
will not shut up.
You can shut down the door
and corridors of thought
but the clamour goes on
of gases and juices
going hammer hum hammer
and buzz bang buzz.

Giving your brain
a morning shower
giving your eyes a wash
so when the clouds

silk over the city
and Mount Victoria
pulls them up to her chin
like sheets, you see.

Once upon a time there was
a once upon a time
and it lived in a cottage
with its mother and father.

It was captured by an eagle
and married to a monster
and is living ever after
once upon a forest and a time.

The new bed is like no bed.
You might be rolling
on that denim cloud
beyond the evening city.

You might be floating
over a forest of kelp
that swings and lolls
and washes you passive and enigmatic.

You might be anywhere but in,
on, with, above a bed
and you wake to morning light
when flickers of eternity have fled.

I learned clean
is not well washed
or drug-free, but
taste gone quick from the front,
and hanging around the tonsils.

Martinborugh Vineyard
Pinot Noir 03
is like my new bed
supportive, balanced
and soft on top.

That cat is a capital cat,
a most satisfactory cat.

That cat may act like a mat
but she isn’t exactly flat.

That cat billows and flows
a cloud that grows and grows.

That cat is a regal cat,
a womanly cat, a curvy cat

But you’d better not call her fat.
She doesn’t like that.

So trousers are houses.

The baggy old villas
with braces and pleats
have their day,
make way

for the Karen Walkers,
two tight neat
new rooms
that fit.

Nice view.

I dreamed I won
the Book Awards
with my novel
“Humming”.

Lights, crowds,
clapping, cameras,
glitter, glamour,
handshake.

And I said to Helen Clark,
“My other work
does more to save
the planet.”

Do you like poetry?
Yes gets a postcard
No gets a sob
Love it a book
that is funny and free.

Board game in the Mall
where the generous win
and nothing accrues
to the what will it cost
and just go away.

Been there been
there been there
done
that done
that

Now where now
what where now
where
what know
what

Now then
now now
now where
nowhere who
not

(for Tana Umaga after the All Blacks-Lions test, Wellington, 2 July 2005)

His soul was wet glue on his fingers.
His soul was a skateboard under his boots.
His soul was a lanyard scooping the others in.
His soul was a modest mist exceeding his nuggety self.
His soul was an oven mitt over the microphone.

Spirituality is not a shop,
not yodelling, mazes,
crystals or church.

Reluctant noun, spirituality
would rather be
a private verb

a silent move
like go or flow
or sting or stray.

All I hear is do do do
All we say is do do do
Humans or domans?
Beings or doings?

Twin elves in Santa red
and grandma
striated with tired.

Slick legs in pin heels
slinging a briefcase
winning a world and why not?

Brave in bristles he struggles
to take his big ball-belly
for a waddle.

And all their selves are Friday
in Courtenay Place
today.

“Today was the worst day
in my whole life. Five
bad things happened.
I forgot my lunch - AGAIN.
I missed out on playlunch.
Celia hit me with a hat.
Then Celia hit me with some
nailpolish in a glove.
At soccer people stodded
on my head.”

Oh lucky, lucky Max
survived the worst
of 2,250 days.

May you live past 86
and have just 13 more
worst days this bad.

Four o’clock golds:
when your mind lights up
and your eyes stay closed
and sleep just drizzles

And you have choices
like chasing that notion -
that rabbit zig-zagging
over paddocks of gold -

Or recalling a dream
without verbs or nouns
just muscle and shapes
that grab you, told you

And the moon is a medal
beyond your room
so new, so known
and it’s all pure gold.

I’m trying to forget
my cellphone got wet.
It’s a goner, I bet
but I won’t think about that
yet.

Perhaps when I die
my me, my who
my one, my I
distills in minds
and memories
of those who stay behind.

And when we die
perhaps our spirit
pixillates,
the I of we
splits and scatters
into the we of I:

specks of sun
in wraparound sky
singing tough
calling rice to grow
and people to share
our plenty, our enough.

Here we struggle
to free the God within
and an old man speaking
for the God without
says OK to kill your wife
with AIDS but not OK
to block the path of a cell
that could have been
half a baby. Well,
paradox is nice but here’s
a poor poem, I tell you.

Tomatoes, Onions, Dates, Vinegar, Sugar,
Corn Syrup, Salt, Spices, Soy Sauce, Corn Starch,
Oyster Extract, Kombu Seaweed, Shitake Mushrooms,
Sake Lees, Amino Acid, Caramel, Xanthen Gum,
Licorice

The leaks of yesteryear
have left their spoor:
bubbles in plaster
cracks in scotia
hole in the wall
stains on the floor.

But now when autumn pours
cats and dogs and reservoirs
and hills slide
and roads close
my roof doesn’t leak
any more.

A small soprano cries high
the Passion of St John.

Sad story,
rhymes with glory.

Plainsong is lonely and relentless.
He died again, you know.

The almost empty pews
punctured by wooden pegs.

The tears you cannot plug,
knowing what you know.

Let’s not pretend that
stuff in a blog
is poetry.

A blog is a diary
upside down, a silo
where notions wait
for processing or better times.

Crammed tight they twitch
in the dark
they long to sprout
and see the light.

Let’s spill them out and set them free
forgotten grains of you and me.
At worst the birds
will feast.

(In memory of Di Oliver who died suddenly on 10 February 2005)

You’re climbing the stairs
and you notice
they’re shallow or deep,

they’re easy or steep,
you notice the landings, the corners, the rails
and you wonder where they will lead.

You take it for granted
each separate step
will be there.

Di was a dazzler, a doer, a doll,
top of the tree
and queen of the stars.

But for many and many
and more than we know
she was also a stair

saying “Heave ho, up you go,
now don’t be scared,
I care and I’m always here.”

I am squinting at death
but death pixillates
into cubes
of coloured light.

I am looking for death
but death hides
her white eyes and bitten nails
behind my shopping list.

I am listening for death
but the voice of death is muffled
by a toddler stumbling
on her cousin’s name.

Friendship slips
out the window
when lovers shout
and part.

It may knock on the door
later, later
when neither wants
nor waits nor hurts.

A small and jolly
coffin shop
family on the footpath
watching

traffic on the riverfront
splashing like
a many-levelled
waterfall.

Seven people
pour
aboard
a single bike.

Family.
Liquid.
Phnom Penh.

Squash a sonnet
to a pellet
with a mallet.
Did it!

Habits not haphazards
are needed
for the next decade.

“Keep desk tidy”
is not a habit
and you know it.

“Tidy desk daily”
might do the trick.

The quites loll on your kitchen chairs
The veries gallop free on golden hills
The scarilies frill next week and bless next year
The formerlies buckle their plastic corsets
The newlies colour the eye and ear
The finalies and the verilies
are why you’re here.