For Danny
Published by Otago University Press
Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street
Dunedin, New Zealand
university.press@otago.ac.nz
www.otago.ac.nz/press
First published 2019
Copyright © Emma Neale
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
ISBN 978-1-98-853168-7 (print)
978-1-98-859292-3 (EPUB)
978-1-98-859293-0 (Kindle mobi)
978-1-98-859294-7 (ePDF)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand. This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. No reproduction may be made, whether by photocopying or by any other means, unless a licence has been obtained from the publisher.
Editor: Anna Hodge
Design/layout: Fiona Moffat
Author photograph: Jim Tannock
Front cover: Nick Austin, Travelling Envelope #2, 2012 (detail), acrylic on newspaper, 575 x 785mm.
Courtesy of the artist and Hopkinson Mossman
Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks
CONTENTS
To the Occupant
i A Room that Held the Sea
Courtship
Wild Peregrinations
Wedding Kiss
Morning Song
A Room that Held the Sea
‘my mother in this way mixing me wings and tongue’
So Buttoned Up
Memorial Service
Cut Price
Will our small joys be only their ancestors?
Warning
Called
The Belt
Big Bad
The Local Pool
Minor Goddess
ii ‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’
Harwood Beach Walk: Eavesdropping
Doorway
Mère-mare
‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’
Tone Poem
Resurrection
Teen Genie
Tag
Two Birds Billing
Desire
It Goes Without Saying
Aubade
Sheetweb Spider
Blue Rubato
Trainee Emo
Sonnet for Mr Ponting, HOD Maths & Economics
Distance
Small Wonder
Bilingual
Dark Glass
My Aunt’s Story
Still
Camellia Trees
Withdrawn
The Appointment
Removal
Slander
Turn
Swarm
Pivot
iii Selected Letters
Underneath the Fridge Magnet
Affidavit
Letter from Hamelin
Letter from tomorrow’s tomorrow and tomorrow
Dear Friend
Dear Adversity
Unlove
Blindsided
Long Distance
The TastiTM Taste Guarantee
Dear Old Diaries
Joy
Chain Mail
Dear Future, I’m afraid this is how I begin to lose you
Postcards Just Won’t Cut It
Economy of Style
Envoi
Acknowledgements and Notes
To the Occupant
A body, such a ponderous thing
to drag along a life in
the mind-candle
push-pedals around
and such tiny perforations
to peer through
at the drip-drop
greeny-diamond world …
But you, still new,
mind wide,
lick it, taste it,
lollop through it
blithe as a rabbit
a-whiffle at berry canes
show us again
how lightly to shoulder
these old bone crates,
remind us we are wrong
when we long
to lay them down.
i
A Room that Held the Sea
Courtship
He wooed me many ways: tried everything from lending books to night-dancing, blood starry with lager. We talked, yet it wasn’t working. So he left the country, asking if he could keep in touch.
His letters—handwritten—soon arrived. He laughs when I say this, but it was seduction by punctuation. As if each semi-colon was someone leaning forward, head bubbling with the future; or perhaps an athlete, leaping for the catch. Such elegance and rhythm.
Bud and stalk; sun and moon; hook and sinker. A bottle that’s popped its cork. Or even egg and ecstatic sperm, pre-fusion.
Wild Peregrinations
From the look-out point
of sleep’s edge
the years spread back
with all the pinprick fires and dark clutches
of an old, uneasy settlement.
The thoughts watch themselves,
the way one falcon acts silent sentinel
to another across the blue whisper
of desolate distances.
Then—as if it believes
its moon-washed, grass-gold hide
will be ample camouflage—
a dart, a jink,
an erratic dash and back-dash:
hope’s wild peregrinations,
love’s blood-sweet liqueur
crammed beneath its skin.
Wedding Kiss
The four-year-old gasps
averts his face
scrunches his eyes shut tight:
love is an onion
desire the knife.
Morning Song
Gramps stole eggs, green seeds of song, from their nests
to show us wonder; hairline cracks ran
our sooky hearts as we watched the robbed mothers fly home.
He cradled fallen fledglings in his palm, quoted
Thrush’s eggs … like little low heavens, and
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang
then barked, ‘Who wrote those?’
When we didn’t know:
‘What d’they teach you these days?’
He kept army hours, was formal with our fathers:
hellos were handshakes as if manners
meant even sons’ love should be held at arm’s length.
Yet, his face a white wilted poppy,
he forbade the word hate
as yelled at brothers or sisters
over Yahtzee or Scrabble cheats,
at garden hoses poked down trousers,
or whose turn it was for more sucky chores.
He had seen hate. Had lived inside it.
Knew its cattle trucks, lice-run bunks,
its thorn-crowned wires, borne its hunger
over borders and weeks, stepped over its corpses
to follow orders, eaten its soup afloat
with leather threads, and, once, a donkey’s eye.
Taken prisoner, he’d doctored the war-interred,
separated off the sick for hospital camps.
Where the well were sent, he couldn’t bear to say.
All through his house and daily he whistled ‘Morning Has Broken’;
heard so often blackbird has spoken stopped meaning birdsong:
it meant Gramps and damp tea towels; thin coffee cups and saucers
glazed with flowers that could be owls; owls that could be flowers,
as in the Garner novel I doubt
he ever read;
his hours too crowded with the history books he scoured,
still on the trail fifty years later
for what drives human
to its own dread perimeters.
Praise for them springing fresh from the word
meant tales of war curtly turned
down byways of jokes, witty anecdotes:
for we were only the children of his children;
there was no translation from lived to tale
that could ever …
that gave us all his sun-speckled kitchen …
better not re-count them.
Better warble down the past’s wind
mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning.
We grinned, raised eyebrows at its no-fail return;
praise with elation, praise every morning
the tune all whiskered trill, all rheumy-eyed wink
as he’d pop a dishcloth over his shoulder,
a clown’s epaulette; praise for the sweetness …
But the bassline silence seeping
ominous as horizons blazing in the dark;
we heard that, too: the thrum of how our own luck shone.
How improbable the emaciated man
told by Nazi guards he would be shot at dawn
should have found this reprieve at all:
family banter in the kitchen,
tea towels flicked like circus whips;
retired GP, buffing crockery, fortissimo on key;
even at home smuggling single smokes
up his cardigan sleeve; admitting nothing
when they dropped at our feet:
just cocking a blackbird’s peck-quick eye,
slipping the cigarette back up his cuff
and whistling, piercingly, on.
A Room that Held the Sea
Over cocktails, perhaps, or card games, or at book club in the shared day-room
of the small port-town retirement home, although on a street with no view of
the sea,
a woman told my grandfather of the day she walked into the room
where her mother wept and rocked, as if on a deck on a wind-lashed sea,
half-crazed with disbelief, barely aware she was in her own living-room.
Living-room itself sounded almost crass, as its corners seeped with a red-blind sea,
despair’s deep tide staining mouth and mind so its curse fixed the image of that room
for good, for worse, in the young girl’s memory. Through it she could never
again see
this spring-kindled world; five words nailed up their own dank room,
they rang bitter-clear: ‘It should have been you.’ Her mother forgivably at sea;
yet cruel—unforgivably. Kinder to have denied entry to that plunging room
where she tried to drag back from shock’s current, treacherous as a rip at sea;
back from the news that sucked all light from the room.
One young daughter drowned while swimming in an easy summer’s sea.
The other stood, hair still tangle-damp, limbs glittered with tawny sand, a dozen
rooms
in the wish-castle of self slammed shut: turned dust-patina’d ghost embassy.
Even at 93, once-translator, ex-diplomat’s widow, her smile a tern’s quick tilt in the
sky’s vast room,
she swore her life story was, ‘My sister died. My mother wished it was me.’ Eyes
grey as wake on winter seas;
family love a lost Atlantis: anoxic as cold marbled rooms, undersea.
‘my mother in this way mixing me wings and tongue’
after Paula Green
Mint’s fresh breath on all its haka tongues marigolds white pebbles
battered wooden chair geraniums fruit canes lemon verbena
chives and thyme and from a blue jug on a red Formica table a waft of
memory rides on fine fragrance a woman says ah look
sweet peas darling you know though you are knee-high to a
footstool busy with your trike going round and round the clothesline
aware of something good and solid to your left that you are saving up to look at
later something as anchoring as bread and butter or a hand-sewn rabbit
in swallow-tailed coat that her voice somehow means wild enchantment
it’s sweet sorcery and milk spiked with fey beauty calls for pause soon
it will dissolve as elusive as the silver moths that cast quick shadow darts
on your skin with the cool sensation of water though see the sky is dry
So you stop and you plunge your face in and the scent takes you
somewhere like stained glass cream lace fountains and maze walks in towering
hedges somewhere like white picnic cloths and wicker baskets burnished ringlets
forest tangle centaurs sprites dryads a small elfin thing hiding under
nasturtium rangiora leaves written on with sticks, call it bush paper
barefoot topknot man with pounamu in his hand pixies suckling at
the flowers’ thin teats green tree shade tunnels careful leonine saunter
bird cry-cascade and it all melts down over the years
to white ankle socks scuffed sandals metal trike her brushed-cotton
green zip-up dress ample hold bare arms the full voice of
this brown-haired woman saying in that slow though urgent way ah
look sweet peas darling
So Buttoned Up
after Stephen Bett
First time in my god
damned life I forgot
my name and when
you said it, it went
sherbet-wise inside
the tiny wires
of each thought-capillary
every ringing filament
streamed like candy dazzle
lights in the rain
so how to maintain
equipoise on its leggy stems
without once thinking of how
the wine glasses we held were
modelled on a French queen’s
breasts and then nek minnit
as they didn’t say then
(we’re old-timers, baby)
you were asking me
and what do you do
for a living?
When the truth was
I’d been in some wise dead
until my name fled
and you chased it
while I feigned
not to know
certain facts such as
the very pulse of its note
had just been breath
warmed beneath where
those shirt buttons sat
obedient and still
as small bald monks
meditating
patiently
upon
detachment.
Memorial Service
Twenty years
of sorely missed;
I thumb your number
into my contacts list
so the new phone displays
your resurrection day:
Love’s Name—saved.
Cut Price
At the grocery store we choose the shortest queue.
On the conveyor belt sit five mini-tins of cat food
with two identical budget spice-shakers.
We’re behind a man whose skin is pale as lunch paper
and whose jersey droops from his shoulders
as if it’s still being knitted
from the needles of his bones.
He startles when the check-out operator says
there’s a two-for-one deal on that cat-meat brand.
The man urges us to take his place
before he shambles back
as fast as shuffle-can
to the pet food aisle.
But we can’t.
We wait�
��
because we do have a cat,
although today we don’t buy cat food
and the children have never
had to think so hard
about what taste might hunker
behind a mask of white pepper.
Will our small joys be only their ancestors?
That day, beside the sea’s sleep-rumpled sheets
the sun had leapt from to arrive on time,
there were chickens laughing as if they’d woken
to tell each other outrageous dreams;
there were bushes bursting to tell you their purple,
honeysuckle trumpets miming fanfare along the street,
a clam-white boat with blue-silk lining,
a shag drying its glossy korowai
on honeycombed, biscuit-coloured rock,
driftwood sticks like Bo-Peep crooks,
a wilding apple tree leaning away
from one small rātā’s red cliff-edge shout,
a flock of oyster-catchers tapping bullet points in the sand;
seaweed fronds like the hair of selkies
diving for taniwha gleam;
hills the sad colour of straw
though the cicadas urged on
the bellbird cabaret;
and at the watermark a black stone
like a carved ceremonial urn.
All of it laps at memory’s coves
like the lines of folk songs
our children might sing—
of the safedays,
from the bygones.
Warning
This item
contains images
an audience may
find distressing.
A thin child in clothes that don’t quite fit: mid-shin trousers and red short sleeves although the autumn morning is charity cold, his back swaddled in foreign air, face down against the white winding cloth of the shallows, cheeks pressed to wet sand like a baby burrowed into the scent trace of lavender only please won’t someone tuck love’s covers over his shoulders, don’t stay in that twist, little one, your back and neck will ache when you wake, the sea is an unschooled nurse to let you lie that way, the white hygiene gloves of the soldier such small care who lifts your drifted spine, he is trained not to weep so he can still see this shore hell, navigate the sink holes of all dread terrain, trained not to mistake you for his own son, to stifle the cries Allahu Akbar, grant forgiveness.
In his arms, horror’s answer.
This era
contains events
we must