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Ian Wedde's latest collection of poems are a complex mix of rhapsody, fear, and humor, and the prose explore the contradictions between life's pool-side surfaces and frightening undertows. Opening with a major new series of poems “The Lifeguard,” it concludes with another long sequence, “Shadow Stands Up,” in which a world of Platonic memory and tidal recurrence is observed from a window-seat in Auckland's conspicuously green-branded Link bus. Bringing together work from the past five years by one of New Zealand's most outstanding contemporary poets, this collection shows a master of the are at his thoughtful and surprising best.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775581918 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Lifeguard
Poems 2008-2013
By Ian Wedde
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2013 Ian WeddeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-191-8
CHAPTER 1
THE LIFEGUARD
I
You have to start somewhere
in these morose times,
a clearing in the forest, say,
filled with golden shafts of sunlight
and skirmishes. A little later
your itinerary will take you past
weathered churches on plains that stretch
as far as the eye can see.
Their horizons elude you,
not just because the earth is circular
like the argument you can't bite off
and spit out, but also
because of your restless
dissatisfaction with a status quo that,
more and more, reminds you
of everything you've been at pains
to forget. 'Return all that stuff you borrowed
when my better nature
was in the ascendant!' you bark,
but nothing ever comes back
once it's gone. To your left, out west,
a bitter coast of ghosts, shipwrecks,
vengeful expeditions, short rations
and lies, lies, lies. To your right,
on the suave east, are the glittering lights
of private properties as far
as the eye can see, pink palaces
of coral bricks and parades of people
you've watched before so many times
you know they don't exist
except as the repetitions
that fame and fortune fabricate.
Bleak indeed are the days
that smash themselves against
the galloping thighs of lifeguards
on the western flanks of this god-forsaken place.
But sweet the dawns that gild the shoulders
of giggling vacationers
up all night celebrating their windfall lives
on the eastern beaches
of islands whose tides come in
and just as smoothly go, like contented but
mediocre cover bands
from the patios of three-star resorts.
Here, among the useless, easy-to-please
recidivist idlers the lifeguard lolls,
but out west his counterpart
watches arms upraised
where the surf breaks against its own backwash
and the maws of hideous fate
gulp down every last gasp of air
the unfavoured sinkers ever hoped to breathe.
How can they meet, these brawny
brothers in arms, the gaze of one
running its tongue across
the sweat-glazed clavicles of celebrity,
the other's eyes averted
from redemption's hopeless odds?
There's always a middle ground,
a light-filled clearing in the gloomy forest,
where all the non-returns accumulate,
where arguments conclude,
horizons cease to recede
and a different silence falls.
This is not the silence that follows
the mediocre band's finale
or the silence
in the helpless lifeguard's mind
when that upraised arm out at the breakers
drops from sight
and the surf's arrhythmic roar
pours into salty gullies behind the dunes.
This is a silence you may not hear,
the silent silence
when it's too late for the lifeguards
of west and east to meet,
share a boast or two, a drink,
some platitudes, swapping yarns about
the shrieks of fear
and those of idle pleasure
commingled like the wrecks
of either coast,
nothing to distinguish them
as their phosphorescent glows go phut.
2
Of course it's always in the west
that the sun sets
and my endlessly recursive hopes
erect themselves
like scaffolding against
a verdigrised monument
to the lifeguard. How anomalous
this seems, how pitiful,
abject and irrational, how like the message
to inflate your life jacket
at the moment your jumbo jet
impacts at speed on the ice floes
of some southern ocean
leaking its consequential chemistry
into a fate minus the carapaces
of those minutely self-contained creatures
whose bodies will become continents,
the building blocks
of aqueducts, of upthrusting
mountain ranges down which
the off-piste daredevils
of carbon-fibre innovation
will plunge headlong into futures
we've only now begun to imagine.
What am I supposed to do
with this crazy optimism
that has been the bane and blessing
of my life, besieged on the one hand
by sunsets that throw apocalyptic
paint bombs against the
brooding monument of the lifeguard,
and on the other
by dawns that soothe
the languid limbs of budget revellers
determined to make their last
dollar count? Is this a question
that can be answered
from the grip of paradox,
tightening daily as things
go from bad to worse?
Julia Roberts embracing orangutans
in the rainforests of Java
remains a compelling image,
the 'Man of the Woods'
extending his tubular lips in a tender,
cooing kiss, his ferruginous pelt
gripped by Julia's conflicted
fingers-to hug or not to hug,
to leap to the aid of the endangered
'Man of the Woods'
whose upraised arm
has a querulous finger at the end,
curled over like a gentle
question mark? Even harder,
sadly, the decision to embrace
the thirsty children
who stand knee-deep
in filthy saline scum
leaching from salty shrimp ghers
into those packets of pre-shelled prawns
that adorn the pizza marinaras
of fast-food joints
whose products
are relished equally by surfers
risking their lives against
the west's black-fanged rocks
and those on the east
whose snacks arrive at speed
on scooters powered by palm oil
the 'Man of the Woods'
can't stomach. But I salute him,
the watchful lifeguard
whose warning voice rattles
my thoughts as the wind does
the rain-pocked panes of perception
through which I view
what must be memories
of mountainous rubbish dumps
across which children crawl
collecting rags and cardboard,
since what's really out there
is a garden flicked by rain
where, later, I'll stand as the sun sets,
in the roar of machines
from the nearby city,
my arm upraised in a defiant toast
perhaps, or the sinking question
I don't know how to answer.
3
The pool we entered blithely
with cameras held aloft
was someone's drinking water
but we didn't know that
and didn't care. Weather
leapt to applaud
the coast's fresh, modern architecture,
clapping rain against
the perfect panes of glass
through which we watched
a swimmer ruddy with warm blood
churn like a designer bath-toy
across the harbour. Languid yachts
wafted towards the sunrise.
Resembling almost becalmed thoughts,
their vacuity was kept moving
by isobars whose shapes
were no more purposeful
than the ribbed striations of sand dunes
or the wrinkles of never-say-die sun-worshippers.
It was then that I noticed
what looked like a mirage
on the far side of the bay, where a low
sandspit glinted in early-morning light.
Extruded aluminium sheets
buffed up, perhaps, the dull gleam
of gunmetal-coloured roofs
smacked by brisk new sunshine,
and, most perplexing of all, a candyfloss-pink aura
hovering above the whole thing.
This had to be desirable, I thought,
to be emanating
such effulgent confidence,
at once hard like valuable real estate
and soft, like capital surplus
oozing into gaping cracks.
This is what happens when you
let your lifeguard down, mistaking him
for the agent who only ever told you
what you'd already decided
to believe. The paradox is, this glowing mirage,
tinted by hopeful dawns,
utterly dismays me, nor can I tell
when the lifeguard's strong arm,
hauling me back up
from the depths of a decision,
will merely shake the water
from my ears so I can hear
the skanking rhythms
of another sales pitch.
Mass-produced postcards
of significant sites are hawked
along the promenade
where fame's louche profile
frames those artful view-shafts
through which light floods
the dreams of paparazzi. The waking dreams.
Their dreams that drown us
in the bewildering mirage
of a rosy empire across the bay,
its erubescent flush
rising to the undersides of clouds.
Be ashamed O Sidon, for the sea speaks,
even the strength of the sea,
saying, 'I have not been in labour,
nor have I brought forth.'
He's idling at the tide-mark, the lifeguard,
where early-morning bathers
blink at the sunrise that surprises them
every time they see it —
every time they beach themselves anew,
streaming warm brine
from bodies that feel their mortal weight
press footprints in the sand.
Bewildered by my own dismay,
I join them as we plod
like Galapagos turtles
towards our denouement,
tipping the lifeguard a generous
percentage of the fee
we've earned simply by turning up again.
And then it starts:
the clattering sound of
time's backwash up the beach
and the lifeguard's klaxon
yelling at the wind.
4
Theocritus: Idyll XI
Deep inside he bore a cruel wound,
the one-eyed lifeguard of the west,
half blind with salt the surfers
blink away, or is it tears
pushed out by the thudding damage
in his chest, whose only cure
is the high place where he sits
watching the surf break
for the first time, out where the sea
darkens with turbulent grit
and the rip sweeps curds of
yellow foam along the coast.
This is the song he sings,
the heartbroken lifeguard, blinded by love
for the mermaid who punishes him
with catastrophic hope.
'Why do you come
just as sweet sleep claims me,
why do you depart just as
sweet sleep lets me go?
You will see that life
can be just as good
if you leave the murky sea
to crash on the beach back there.
I wish my mother
had borne a freak with gills
so I could have dived down
and kissed your hand
and its slender stem
smooth as the kelp's wrist.'
O Cyclops, Cyclops, where
have your wits flown away?
Love is not the same as hope,
they mutate each other
so that each drowns
where the other wants to live.
In between is our coast of wrecks
where the ribs of boats
stick up out of the sand,
and the shrieks of gulls
mimic those of revellers
on the eastern corniche
teetering on brinks
as the sun comes up
over balconies that might as well
be those black basalt shelves
on the sunset side, the ones
awash with windblown foam
the lifeguard watches,
just in case his mutant Venus
strands there, his long odds,
his hope, his tolerance,
her shining kelpy arm
upraised one last time
in what might be a salute,
a question, a plea, a final wave
foreshortened by the lifeguard's
monocular hope:
that he will learn to see her
swimming in her depths
and learn to breathe again
the thick fluid he spat out
the first time he climbed up
to his high place and commenced
his vigil, which ends only
when his eye shuts.
A man waves from the window
of a sundown bus
as I push ahead through chilly air
towards the fish market
whose goggle-eyed produce
stares up through melting ice
and a pinkish tincture of blood,
whose hairy clumps of mussels
rattle into my bag,
and whose compliant tentacles,
slithering across my grasping hand,
are not the long cool fingers
of the lifeguard's dream
of going back to the depths
where he can be 'other than' himself,
'at one with' the sea
whose arm he waves
as if from an icy sunset window.
5
Ovid: Metamorphoses Book III — 'Narcissus and Echo'
Will the lifeguard of the vain east
live long enough
and live to see his children's
wave-blue eyes
that are the eyes of his water-adoring mother?
'If he shall himself
not know,' is the answer to that question.
It's what the infatuated
pool-side loafers gossip about
while they watch their tanned dream
ogling his own reflection in filtered water
whose iridescent sheen
has leached from
the oily limbs of bathers
stroking the water's surface
where his reflection breaks up
just when he thinks he's real this time.
So may he love
and never win his love,
sinking his arms to clasp
the phantom of a mirrored shape,
an echo like the echoes
of the lovers he's disdained,
repeating himself in the ripples
that wash back and forth
from the pool's edge.
Beautiful in repetition, white petals
clustered around cups of gold,
spring's fresh flower-beds
nod under night's dew
and ranks of blushing mirror glass
echo the dawn's false hopes
as the day's first fitness freaks
eject themselves from revolving doors
and hit the beachfront running,
their showers of sweat
seeding the sand from which ranks
of sun-worshippers sprout.
It's that time of day when
dreams repeat themselves
and the spa's lifeguards get cracking,
clutching paper cups
of elixir as they sprint for buses
whose shining flanks,
bedecked with budget
vistas of golden sands,
themselves resemble
mobile flower-beds of narcissi
forever fresh, fated to
echo their schedules.
The shoe-of-the-week emerges
in a different guise today
but the same really,
branding the foot inside it
as a suitable breeder willing
to toe the line — either that,
or a dangerous bastard whose
wild blue-water gene
rides ashore in board shorts
under the rip curl, repeating himself
through some nymph who
sees her chance and takes it.
Livid jet trails rake the blue
as the day advances
past dawn's bleary
somnambulists in back streets
whose doors blink open and shut
on the DJ's last rites,
his surf-line forecast cut up
into recovery beats, metronomic
the way history seems to be
most days on this coast,
the lifeguard back on watch
at the mirror pool's edge
while clubbers poleaxed
behind thick, sunblocking drapes
sleep off the dance floor's
predictable sub-woofer thud
and that sense of déjà vu that always
hits them between the eyes.
Then spare a thought for lovelorn Echo,
fated to repeat
the clichés of conversations
she'd have joined in if she could,
only what was there to say
that hadn't been said already?
6
Sensitive in spite of everything
to heat and cold
the alert body reports
on the world's condition
and notices, for example,
as a general rule, that the sun
warms the earth when it rises
in the east in the morning
but cools it at evening
when descending into the western sea.
But the ancient of ancients, Te Mahuta Ngahere,
his head dreadlocked
with epiphytes and trailing vines,
his forehead suppurating
from knobbly cankers, irritated bees
whining from his armpits
and guano compacting
in the cracks of his great girth —
the father of the forest's oblivious
to the trivial diurnality
of creatures in the clearing
he's made for himself,
their endogenous or exogenous rhythms,
their crepuscular singing,
their nocturnal flitting– what
difference does it make
whether the sun rises in the east or not,
or even if it will?
Why would he bother to hope
for anything that repetitive?
Four thousand years is a long time
to keep noticing trivia
which is why the clearing in the forest
seems to empty suddenly
as a party of eco-tourists
wanders into it
wondering why their minds
have gone blank.
It's like a drug, the thought of eternity
flatlining in a space
where everything's motionless
and all bets are off,
the gummy nectar of time
reduced to blobs of amber
in which something you knew once,
like your credit card's PIN number,
is just another chronotype
you gaze at without recognition,
as you do the sunrise (or sunset)
that warms (or cools) you
whenever another day begins (or ends).
The morningness — eveningness debate goes on
and on, always the same
but always different
like the tour guide's rhapsody
as his captive audience nods off
into the space-time continuum.
For me, it's often about now
that my raptures and griefs
jam each other's signals
and the mere sight of someone
smiling to themselves
where they're stepping up
into a bus on Courtenay Place
at some indeterminate
time of day
is enough to make me
sob into my sleeve
and turn aside to the window
of Arty Bees Books where,
through teary eyes, I see the copy of Larks and Owls
I've 'always wanted'.
Like most people I know,
I've also always wanted to save the world
or at least that clearing in it
where I find myself at a standstill,
like Narcissus staring through himself
into a shop window
at a kind of visual echo,
the Zeitgebers of east and west
leaning their sunlit heads together,
brothers in arms, the lifeguards
of rising and setting, empty of hope
and full of it, swapping yarns
about arms waving or sinking
out there in the rip.
7
A buzzing in the ears as if bees
were swarming in my thoughts
or as if my head had become
a clearing in the forest
filled with the never-too-late serenades
of cicadas at summer's end
makes me long for the gritty obscurity
of the west's waves
or the suave silence of eastern lagoons
through which pouting fish
mutely swim. On the other hand,
if I listen carefully enough
to the sound of my own listening,
I might eventually hear something.
The hum of longing seems to fade at last
into a kind of aural impasto,
thick and bland, without apparent surface
but also without depth.
Neither meniscus nor void, without perspective,
not flat and not profound,
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lifeguard by Ian Wedde. Copyright © 2013 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
The Lifeguard,Help!,
Another bottle of oil,
Help!,
Harry Martens,
Mahmoud Darwish,
Oum Kalsoum,
Shadow Stands Up,