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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581581 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 58 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Spells for Coming Out
By Ian Wedde
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1977 Ian WeddeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-158-1
CHAPTER 1
SANS SOUCI
THE PROGRAMME
I invite you to an opening.
Who knows what could happen?
All you need is
faith, bread, & your due portion of hate.
What about later for that/
love is what is going to be revealed
if only we can get together some good teams.
O throats like massed trombones, knuckles like admired
flights of steps to the cathedrals of Europe,
skulls resonant as the blasting lids
in your bird sanctuary,
eyes which have become accustomed
to their skilfully lacerated blinkers, etc.
When the protocols
have been established & the stakes laid
& the people seated & the media got
to quick vantage points, then we whip
the covers off her, okay? &
they settle her record once & for all.
AUGUST, THE PAIRED BUTTERFLIES
August again, one year later.
'Dry & warm' the day you left for Italy.
In that park I wrote you about (Blake's headstone, 'De Foe's' memorial)
I ate one of Alf Nash's heimische cupcakes,
golden & lemony, prepared
by his loving wife for the foreign strange
& sometimes so silent young man
he has had tales to tell of through this
troubled summer, in which
at one moment a day out of Umbria
settled upon the park,
its pigeons, old men, Blake's headstone, the
young man beneath a late summer
lime tree slowly thinking & setting
slowly his teeth into golden cupcake.
LOSING THE STRAIGHT WAY
1
I lie down & take off my body/
I lie down letting my head drop sideways
losing my way.
Somehow at the centre of my life
& the seasons come into me
caresses waking into dreams.
Getting back into
ordinary summer / streets
grown fuller with the green
trees someone planted, left behind.
Giuliana, this miracle:
waking to dawn & birds
flocking past the bright window
like those fragments of messages
which flew off into other poems,
which return now to their season/
& no revelations, but
women known secrets in whose hair
sun spins like morning in the spokes
of a child's bicycle through the park
against that new green.
Men & women step
into each other fling open the shutters &
air their place.
Thus it all comes round
again, light green & love,
& now blossom & shattered sunlight
among the buildings:
these very rich hours
for which almost everything must change/
jade lodes press up
& veins to the surface
sweet sap rising through
280 days.
It sounds like more than a season.
At its close
pale streets
drawn back upon their bones/
This, Giuliana Mieli:
which I want you to be among the first to know,
who sleeps in that part of me
which I think resembles una selva oscura
a wood dark with growth.
So you may be among the first to bless us.
2
That autumn day suddenly broken into
by pale sunlight a hearse
glittered darkly across the intersection
between two buildings
which seemed to lean aside
as light drove between them.
& lately: atavistic dreams: flying/
water/swimming against the stream.
If I compound these images
I compound too much since
I know how we like to make dialogues thus
& thus, her voice floating
from her mouth, the bed full of
blood, the second heart silent,
the wave suspended, the
wave falling, the moment before
we cry out, our fires
licking into each other. I know
how we like to imagine this hiatus
endures like the process
it's only part of. Why
then does some vestigial part of me press &
press to believe
there's a price for everything.
3
I imagine the womb as a honeycomb
I imagine the womb as a kind of lung
& the child within breathed into
'part & not part' / stirring as if with
breath in the roseate glow of daylight
strained through blood
I imagine the womb as an early morning
in autumn filled
with the weary movements of trees
I imagine the womb as a city
where you might meet a friend or enemy
& be unable to embrace him or
make your peace with him because the crowds
moved on & moved on
I imagine the womb as a universe
& the child as an asteroid
travelling so swiftly it is motionless
across distances so vast it stops forever
I imagine the womb as a gourd
rattling against the house wall
I imagine the womb as a pod
which must rupture to ease the hungers of mankind
I imagine the womb as a kind of deep river pool
in which the river's currents become invisible
unless the eye can detect a dead gnat moving down the surface
unless the palate can taste the timeless alluvia
of what sustains us
I imagine the womb as the blank centre of a girl's eye
which the world
penetrates with its images
I imagine the womb as a honeycomb
as a lung
as an autumn morning
as a moving city
as a universe
as a dry gourd
as a bursting pod
as a pool
as the pupil of an eye
4
Their mouths crept together for comfort.
Their lips crept together for silence.
The mouths of their wounds
crept together for concealment.
Beneath white lips of scars
their blood ran on in silence.
AT DANTE'S TOMB
This will be the second poem I've written for you
Giuliana Mieli the second at any rate
which I recognized thinking 'yes, for her'
because it seemed necessary because I had
no choice because the voice that was speaking
was speaking to you was looking to you
to receive the words with that grave hot
attention in your eyes as though I really
had something to say. I have little to say.
This will be the second poem I've written for you.
The first got added to things happened.
Once again I left Sans Souci I may be back
soon I may be back already.
I turn & turn coming in & going out
with all the others believing that this time
I know something about grief about compassion
about love while the Palace welcomes me
& darkens like a mausoleum/
while your dark eyes wait for me to say
something. I have nothing to say that
you don't know as well as I. You say it.
This will be the second poem I've written for you
Giuliana because I had to break
the rhythm or because the rhythm was broken.
In Ravenna I paid a state visit
to Dante's tomb. I'd expected an edifice:
there was a mausoleum there but that
wasn't it. Instead a simple mound
overgrown with dull green ivy & covered
again with the common mantle of dead
oak leaves: the same which warmed the
Umbrian hills among bright flags of autumn
beeches & higher up interspersed with jade
evergreens the same proletarian colour
the same that San Francesco wore for poverty
& charity renouncing his father's wealth.
These are ironies you will understand who
live as an infiltrator in the sumptuous
rooms of your family writing your letters
to London. Will Pietro Valpreda be free?
The police took Pinelli's guts & lost them.
Great exiled Dante lies here in Franciscan brown.
Giuliana I wish you good luck with
all my heart: that you may soon
walk in simple shades & all the fire & jade
of those Umbrian hills
& bring down justice like a shroud of autumn
leaves upon the dark houses
where at present you must work & fret.
This is the second poem I've written for you
Giuliana Mieli for 'these very rich hours'
having nothing to say to you but coraggio!
Others will wrong you as I have.
Seasons have slipped by I've turned
& turned faster & faster. Then I stopped:
there you were a bright
beech-tree in the clear high air.
This is the second poem I've written for you
Giuliana because the season is burning
because in Assisi I saw San Francesco
diving joyfully skywards over the cold dome/
because in the end I am speechless.
OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN
TERAWEKA
where the sun rises
closest to where the sun
rises daily
the place closest to where
the sun has risen daily since
we came 'here'
since we left 'there'
& the inductive certainties
of despair
or love
from the particular
to the general that leap
beloved of suicides & lovers:
that parabola of faith
* * *
no I take nothing for granted
except that the hill Teraweka is there when
I am looking at it
& that when the sun is rising
the hill is the closest place to it
when I see the sun rising
& equally that I may approach the sun
by way of Teraweka
by way of looking at Teraweka
by way of looking at Teraweka making
the sun rise
make the sun rise
by way of looking at Teraweka
& taking nothing for granted
but keeping the faith
somehow
'here'
OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN
A good & wise & craggy friend 'I belong
nowhere because I belong everywhere'
The diaspora of our own hearts & hearths & cots
Cloud pours over the purple top of the mountain
beneath which I begin to live a quiet
industrious life These phenomena
amaze me! 'cloud pours' / 'quiet life'
Nonetheless my heart warms to its new adoption
If I lived alone perhaps shy birds
would come down to me from the misty mountain
* * *
– To be the poet of a place plumber of a place
The Old Man Of The Mountain Hermit Rock
The Forbidden Mountain Wedde's Folly
'Legend has it that ...' etc.
Am I exiled then from you
my friends my distant comrades my lovers?
You are closer to me than the mountain
I shall have to get to know its ducts
& fountains to be its plumber
Yours I know already in my lonely body
* * *
Meeting people is like studying history
How shall I remember all those names?
Yesterday I chopped wood
The day before I baked bread
Today I'm reminiscing about it
From the still inlet through the town
& down to the harbour & battered gaudy
fishing boats going nowhere few people
pass Not many histories come in
Odd ones slip out past the mountain's memorial flank
* * *
Last night I dreamt below the
dark shoulder of the mountain that she'd
perched obstinately in a different
blackwood pine from mine
She sat like a pale gull fearing storms
fearing storms & gazed & sang high up
in the top of the black pine's brittle upper branches
– I don't believe you
I don't believe in you
Old Man Of The Mountain
* * *
I don't believe in myself but I keep dreaming
& dream when awake
that I'll wake to find myself here where I find myself
for which I'm grateful since
it seems a gentle toylike place though of much
contrast stagnant inlet & fishing harbour & port &
the stormy channel & bald sunny Quarantine Island
& all its boundaries & perspectives circumspect enough
for the imagination to contain
I knead & whimper at the mountain
* * *
Explosions rock the house & thud like dumdum bullets
into deep hearts of surrounding hills
There's a quarry
on the far side of the mountain Sounds
whistle & veer back in my skull All we all
share limbs fuck it! & are planted in each other &
in earth & rock
Anyone who's seen harm done or has done it & known it
knows this that everything is touched
& moved by the least movement of each lonely one of us
* * *
These two are for a lonely & lovely man
toymaker gardener sailor kite-flyer poet
Ian Hamilton Finlay on the moors below a mountain
like a great blunt bannock
'What do you think?'
I was speechless Heading back to London &
deep trouble & damage all I could think
was to live among menhirs & put cunning
boxkites & Malay tandems & marestails of streamers
up into the yeasty updraught of a mountain's escarpment
* * *
The slow world flesh & stone sappy plants
& there also harsh spare verticals
of buildings thrown up in great haste unadorned
the evidence of their growth showing outward
only in spaces they have altered so
fast we believe we might almost fly
across them like the clean ascensive
angels those buildings sometimes
convince us we have become
O mountain o canny toy maker
* * *
Little yes a 'nothing' a gap for a brave whistle of breath
The mountain too is often invisible for days its dark
head is rapt
in wind & cloud
whose labour & heavings reach me down here in the toy town
If I can't see the mountain then it can't see me
I stub my foot on it & feel the pain in my head
Let the mountain come to us!
We who are about to exist salute you
cloudy myth-maker
* * *
Last night I was reading Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire-Kostrowitsky
who is no more
Guillaume Apollinaire is dead
Guillaume Apollinaire is dead
Guillaume Apollinaire is dead
Guillaume Apollinaire is dead
Guillaume Apollinaire is dead
Guillaume Apollinaire is dead
Ten lines just like all the others
Easy as whistling a misty mountain to heel
* * *
When I'm working well
my body temperature rises dramatically as
a hibernator's I pour sweat
My vision narrows until all the edges blur
I have to trot out constantly to the jakes
This is why communal working places
alas don't suit
much as I long for purring brothers & sisters about me
Imagine the day in high temperature & torpor of good work
– Wedde just shat a mountain
* * *
The television mast astride I know
but not yet the mountain it spurs at the millenium
& on History is myth not fact
That other kind of historian runs out of time the way
a poor man runs out of credit
the way hope & recognition leak fatally from the
Old Man when he forgets the mountain
is present & comes freely like love
like something riderless & unsubstantiated
– Is this the difficult way to know the mountain?
* * *
Hope where does it spring from
& does history tell us?
There are live human beings whom I admire
& dead yes whom I admire & love
& they are equally present in time &
if invoked present 'in fact'
The spring wells up through green lashes of ferns
& trickles down the mountain-face to the harbour's bitter waters
& the Old Man patient & lonely at the wharf's end
index-finger pausing on a line
* * *
What death grows under trees that trees
grow into
downward for their lives under mountains
that the earth staggers & slowly straightens beneath their weight
& goes on performing feats
hup!
with its beautiful body?
its beautiful overdeveloped body?
Plant groves of trees on graves!
Someone once nourished this fine mountain on ours
* * *
– 'living in a state of disrepair'
Another question loved companion faithful heart
that you are & have & have
also in me though I seem at times to stray
like a rogue sheep shying & starting up about
the snowline of the mountain another question
the last one if you can answer it
the last if you can muster me
the last if you believe any condition matters
'living in a state of disrepair?'
* * *
We are defined by the work we do
not so? So they say
So I
chop wood / bake bread / & I scratch these
here perplexed hopeful prospectings
as if I meant to be self-sufficient & one day strike!
clean through the stone cold heart of the mountain
– 'Iron Pyrites Wedde'
clean through the buried heart of the mountain
to its shining core
* * *
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spells for Coming Out by Ian Wedde. Copyright © 1977 Ian Wedde. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 Sans Souci,The Programme,
August, the Paired Butterflies,
Losing the Straight Way,
At Dante's Tomb,
2 Old Man of The Mountain,
Teraweka,
Old Man Of The Mountain,
Sleeping Indian,
Near Purakanui,
Who Cares,
Four Vectors,
Drought,
Those Others,
3 Moon Moth,
Narcissus,
Opening the Bed,
It Gets Dark,
Clouds,
Red,
Carousel,
Fever,