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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781988531878 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Otago University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 562 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Birds
Flock at sunset,
message flung skywards,
shreds into the dark alphabet.
Time of the Icebergs
In the time of the icebergs –
big black baby buggies pushed by women in hoodies, denim and eff-off boots.
Crop circles on Google Earth say NO to Monsanto.
Boxy four-wheel-drives plane through the wet –
semi-amphibious barges, growling up and down,
piloted by yummy mummies, or tattooed property developers in cargo shorts, their tee-shirts emblazoned with Crowded House logos,
their capitalist warrior chariots splashing kerbs.
Buses pull out wheezing, puffing exhaust,
loaded to the gunnels with glaze-eyed tourists –
destination, Bliss or Damnation.
Glossolalia of the Undie 500 clown cars;
smashed glass of the student quarter glimmery as jewels;
detritus of bonfires blown hither and yon,
the shouty mouthy denizens of bouncy Castle Street wandering in fellowship of the sofa burns to the great forcing apparatus university,
glowing with self-declared enlightenment;
and death by chocolate beckons,
from Cadbury's vast lakes of cocoa butter,
to vulgarians who flog heritage buildings for parking.
Bringing frost, a flotilla of white blocks;
winter bloom of blue muffin-tops over low-slung jeans,
and gales in the face which smack like wet fish;
chill fingerbones that touch you from far away,
in the time of the icebergs.
The city at night one vast monastery under holy hush of snow;
and bent beneath their hoods they go,
like capuchin monks praying in cloisters,
Ngati Cappuccino or Ngati Bogan,
eye-sockets deep pits in snoods:
glaze-eyed jaded ones,
monkish, cowling the head for respect,
or to recapture the rapture;
and a hooded phantom runs,
breathing out steam,
a warrior monk who travels light.
Closer, you see her face,
ethereal as that of a novice nun,
beneath her hoodie,
in the time of the icebergs.
Warming
Up here,
seagulls float like kites on thermals.
Down there,
a car canters like a racehorse through pasture, towards Aramoana.
The giant wharf cranes of Port Chalmers stand like steel giraffes in a story book,
and time is reluctant to turn the page.
A fishing boat's wake is carving a V in the freckled salty skin of the sea,
furrowing its calm green translucence,
until the sun squeezes juice from quarter of a lemon onto the veiling, foam-white,
dissolved wings of a billion butterflies.
Pick up that foam, pick it up and drape it across the dry riverbeds of the skies.
Driverless Ute
Mist in fine sunlight, salting spray away;
cupboards of cliffs, cracked and chipped;
shadows cannot open clouds, but trail their tumble over waves strait-laced in pews;
an outboard's hard yakka under headland;
keen dolphins sky-larking and racing just beneath the surface of the mind;
as learnt by heart these contours,
the dark birthmarks of islands,
catch the sun, steadily revealing corrugated tracks stepping up grass to the farm, the hills, the Maoritanga, the town,
all bundled together with number eight wire,
and dumped on the tray of a driverless ute,
revved up on the last of the petrol,
and spluttery, like water tanks drained in late summer, leaving the taste of grinding peppermill dust and dry forest floor.
On Beauty
You, scarred wahine, lift pounamu profile,
wearing a cap of plumed indignation:
leaf tannins of creeks rush across your tongue;
smoke from burn-offs wreathes your sensual
undulation, pelvic girdle of volcanoes,
forest mists – your rivers that midges sing.
By katipo's kiss, shimmering black and silver,
we're held, but in an embrace distant and hard:
your whenua yearns to tides and moon's glow.
Matrixed with ferns, your surf's tow rips under,
as Anzac horses might, on war monuments, prance.
Gales through mountain rifts moan your praises.
Between deep fiords: landslips of slow footsteps.
Lakes dark eyes, you triumph in your screen test.
Visions of Michael Joseph Savage
Old centennial parades gather forest weight,
roll out settler floats, as dream code talkers once climbed from migrant ships, their mouths spawning a God who cracked open earth and ate.
The land rush was thunder cracking open heads of the tapu; tracts were slipped into ledgers of debt:
cargo cult pinnacles of a small green archipelago.
Diggers humped swags; prospectors rode horseback;
dairy herds tarantella'd through the Taranaki gate.
Now it's pig-stick martyrs in tartan bush-shirts;
axe-masters nailing light that nicks chain-saws;
tv show homesteaders who can communicate.
Taste of gumboot tea; sounds of coconut wireless;
baches bodged and poozled out of iceblock sticks;
enough pine trees to keep the Japanese in chopsticks.
Savage didn't foretell it, but to contemplate his photo over a dozen stubbies is not to glimpse a glorified mickey-taker smiling like the Pope,
but rather – not seen since Seddon – a visionary.
Pioneer hands, squeezing bagpipes of udders,
or streaked by greasy wool lanolins, helped hinge (on pintles) gates to the nation, while ladies bring a plate
was phased out by nouveau kiwifruit chefs garnishing cuisines of orange roughy with saffron.
January used to be dry, with soft, threshing grass;
across sunny canvas, chestnuts from shanghais flew;
lofty attitudes by windy platitudes were marked.
Each mountain then, an altar-table uplifted over half-pints of school milk in a metal crate.
Those out took it on the chin; and embarrassment was too many tea coupons, or else butterpats,
as, in honeyed memories of summer limbs,
one lolled or gambolled, followed a calling,
threw a sickie, or teased a go-kart into life,
watched a stubby Bristol Freighter carry its weight:
all the believers who sailed in Captain Cook's wake.
Now mellow whisky drinkers charge glasses;
now a free-range chill wind blows above the high tide margin of seabed and foreshore,
beachside's whip-crack towel and spilled lotion.
Codgers praise New Happyland with cries of: oh, mate!
Yes, Pukeko clowns troop in, upstage the Kea Party.
So korero Maori to the tamariki, to the kids,
to the hundred alpine kiwi calling by moonlight.
And a hoha to the iwi by the fireside, the beacons.
When the pounamu harvest that's in flax baskets bulges,
a kapa haka for colonial warhorses led to their fate.
The Five Cent Coin
A puddle of silver makes a tumbled host of tuatara,
spun on wooden counters, dropped five cent coin.
Whence the hikipene, tickapenny, for soap, candles,
matches, for the paper, the milk, dropped five cent coin?
When the whole world was the size of a gobstopper summoned with a rap on a glass top, dropped five cent coin.
Once it carried decimal weight and heft, handed down from sovereigns and crowns, dropped five cent coin.
Bob, copper, ding, electrum, shiner, tanner, zack:
passed on, pocket to pocket, dropped five cent coin.
Legal tender, put it where your mouth is, accounts due burn holes in pay packets, dropped five cent coin.
It filled a gap, that shiny dot, pitched or tossed acrobat,
stuck to the pavement by chuddy, dropped five cent coin.
Empty husk, a tiddlywink flicked to the end of the line,
the breeze light on sun-crinkled water, dropped five cent coin.
Escaping to roll, wobble, travel into corners, spiral once or twice, fall face down, dropped five cent coin.
And still you see it here and there, in dust, or else gathered and crammed into a jar for buttons, dropped five cent coin.
Graveyard School
Harpoon spires, coal smoke, iron rustbucket,
daylight's bright fine gold, cranny of the South.
Judgement's dungeon cell, lost hospital maze,
tiny ark with cabinets of curiosities padlocked.
The lone piper able to bring the young running the nexus of street veins to the octagonal heart.
Then submarine arcades, fleets of wooden shops,
sell-out sermons on oyster saloons ready to open.
But between pipe skirls and wool skeins stands a boil-in-the-bag city, whose teaspoon-tinkle stanzas announce fine china cups are running over absently,
populace gone in search of oats and possum stew.
Who'll buy clay chamberpots, a weighing machine?
If buildings are porridge-coloured, eminent stone,
go down into the catacombs: there the dead snore.
The gannet colony's a rest home, sounding out oracles.
Repeat the series of thirty-nine steps after Cargill,
from his named summit, street, monument, corner,
and watch last Century wash up in cinema lacework.
Ironmonger's nails swapped for a sack of earth that's sewn into a uniform riding through Canongate.
Under a shirt of frosty stars, the kilted hills.
An eight-sided poem spiders the crystal screen:
hail to the ears, the whole town gets up and cheers.
Ode to the Beercrate
Beercrate, part of landscape,
part of folklore memory,
staple of nostalgia.
Spartan, pragmatic, transient, expendable;
low-cost, mass-produced, abundantly social.
Assemblage knocked together out of a few short pine slats with nails,
sometimes with a logo stencilled;
used by breweries as a container for holding glass bottles,
simple, almost elemental, totemic box, airy crate.
Stacked at the back of a pub in storage;
resembling street junk, mute but everpresent.
Unlabelled, stacked wooden pyramid,
fragile, yet enduring.
Block-like grid of horizontals and verticals,
bearing resemblance to state houses of the 1940s,
which is fitting because they celebrate the egalitarian ethos.
Put to the purpose for which they were made,
heavy clinking crates that symbolise plenty,
initiation, a necessary part of hangi or wedding or barbecue.
Full of bottles, boozebarn accessories, macho,
but not as macho as an aluminium beer keg,
and ecologically more sound than plastic webbing and plastic wrap.
An empty receptacle, the second-hand beercrate drifts,
becoming a platform for a speaker to stand on and address a crowd,
an extra seat at a party,
a shelf supporting a vase of flowers;
then forlorn, ending up as scrap,
splintered to firewood,
fed to flames.
Barnes Dance, Queen Street, Auckland
Crossing at the crossing on Cross Now,
where crossroads criss-cross, you cross over crossing still, but lost to view in crowds crossing now; crowd joins to crowd in collective crossing, weaving madly addled webs of rhythmic steps;
crossing and re-crossing rapidly reversed;
finding a personal way of moving, we heel and toe it as it might be; trek to trot,
each foot as bulbs and root lifted up;
suits are jumping out of lifts to cross;
tripping, stamping, limping, we cross back with the flow; lean and slide we go;
on the verge of twisting to turn we rise to airy and delicate; make shifts of weight;
then dance inside our tubes of clothes;
do movement slivers, improv formations;
so break on through to pounce on up past bus, car, truck; unweaving gladly,
heads shaken like pebbles from shoes –
till we've moonwalked to some place other;
jinked ankle bells in temples pedestrian;
and wended ways with dervishes whirling.
Elvis and the Vulcans
Midnight's gate sings the hosannas of Osama.
Vulcans stuck in quicksands, tied to the axle of Elvis,
praise depleted uranium like it's manna from heaven.
An Elvis-shaped grease-stain wavers over Texas.
Loose nukes sink the trigger-happy righteous,
who might wake, bloated in a blood tub,
soaking with tyrants, awash with petrodollars.
People want undead idols of trash tabloids:
popes, queens, madonnas, princes, and Elvis.
Elvis impersonators live in a town called Elvis.
Homeless push shop-trolley homes, sandbagged with carrier bags packed with plastic collectables.
Aircraft carriers, stacked with choppers, sail for the Retreat of Reason, as flags snap, drums flail.
Vulcans stub cigars out on corporate foreheads;
empty suits are cut to ribbons to open Gitmo.
Holy Joes close down hot lines, freeing masterminds to roam across Uberstate as Vulcans. And signs of Elvis hang from their talons, amidst weird,
sow-eared guinea pigs, dog-tagged malformations of unknown known and known unknown situations.
Oh, these genetically-impaired raptor legends,
saluting flappily youth-oriented coffin fly-bys.
Hatched from an entropic planet's cracked skull:
a fatal, toxic, narcotic, alpha, human cargo of plasticised, sanitised, collaterally-damaged,
striding, hooting, gliding, scurrying all sorts;
peons, serfs, minimum wage slaves, one-legged,
one-armed, monocular, missing bits and pieces,
headed to eternity, but proud of their country –
all leatherneck soldiers, on parade with Elvis.
Varieties of Religious Experience
Amidst crowd hiss from the deflated globe,
enter world eaters, led by a psychic robed.
Beards of prophets shaved, binned and biffed;
a wasted Christ between skyscrapers crucified.
Where deserts grow only missile silos,
sandstorm devils test the fatigue of faces.
Ghettoised gods go out on the ebb tide,
as colonised hulks under rust subside.
Saint Frappuccino, New Renaissance Man,
takes book club tours round the Holy Land.
Jog-trot militias surround camera crews in muscle-flexed postures of twisted irony.
Dominos fall and raise panic of nations;
microphones launch funeral orations.
Thunderstorms of land mines dig mass graves,
while Google tells Google that Google saves.
All Armageddon replicas are logged;
all ends by disaster movies are clogged,
Empty thought balloons float over dunes:
Zen daydreams of a zillion hopeful sperm.
Some new planet finds the solar plexus centre,
its ocean arcs traced by an astronaut's finger.
Not Fit For Human Consumption
Molten metal smoke from cooking computer-circuit boards is drifting into a nostril's golden arch;
the climb to Paradise is vexed by carbon trails of footprints.
The Amazon has a Brazilian wax;
Atlanta fishes out a suntan oil slick.
Gastropubs extrude from containers.
Jellyfish plastic bag shoals float in surplus of redundant abundance.
Protesting at a five-star hotel, a goat eats a cardboard Kentucky colonel.
Foodies scenery-munch Antarctic ice-caps.
Barbed-wire cross-hairs, trained on aviaries,
seek accompaniments for whale savouries.
Supermarkets sell not so much frozen fish fingers, but fish arms,
fish stumps, as if answering to a need for what doesn't exist, quick as a wink.
Slow boats barbecue on burnt-out oceans;
bleached-out rainbows leap can canyons.
Hurtling globalisation's highway, an oil rig gets a blow-out, and flares like a sunspot.
Burn Rate
Their faces blob and run in rain:
electric rain that sizzles,
burns to a stain.
They are thin as phantoms,
and made of pixels.
A poetry book, whose greasy pages flutter – like wallpaper on a condemned building,
like ghosts gathering in a flurry –
begins to scorch and smoulder.
At night, dots climb from an oil well,
become dirt moving,
people moving,
a genome sequence moving,
points that glow like circles of hell.
What is the burn rate of a quantum of atoms that mushroom in explosion?
What is the burn rate of galaxies that wheel gaseous on a pin?
What is the burn rate of sweat that showers from the vaporous brows of God?
Red Meat Roar
Turn critical mass back to year zero;
enter your brand; the product is: yes, you.
Love seeps through cells, staking a claim.
Midway to locking, though, where all dots should come together, nothing quite fits –
take your skeletal state, your fur, your teeth,
said and done, just a mass of writhing insects,
we call this: before the time of the brand.
You can shop until the bomb, only your name isn't here, so throw your challenge down at an opening-up sale, where money begs to serve, then be traced to vanish point:
cash nexus in blood plasma screened by heat.
You might get to live in rarefied air;
travel in a bubble, surrounded by stalkers –
brands need suspicions, feel bereft without.
Counter-intuitive, nevertheless accurate,
speak to missing persons after the tone;
find your new ground zero; enter the fray;
stab a finger till it shoots from the register.
If south-east district is not in service,
flee the perimeter Business Class to China;
do battle with the burka; swarm up like rain;
attract opposites to where they contradict.
Jack up a false ending, term it exit strategy,
as toxic waste chews your ear off and,
heard in the shadows, it's all strangled speech;
the praiseworthy found on treadmills of binge,
salvation disappearing before you arrive:
pockets pulled out, gestures throwaway,
displaced, replaced, armed with nothing,
yet breath, puffs of condensation, truly buoyant.
Song of the Market Actor
Can we pick up the numbers,
overhaul all front runners,
skip on by the velvet rope,
memorise the right manner,
fool any iris scanner,
grease a tell-tale itchy palm,
unearth sacred ancestors,
rip out the featherbedding,
be ground beneath a guru,
help to ease those growing pains,
trip the wires of persuaders,
reveal mounting inner fire,
behold our franchise options,
slip away the silken bonds,
learn how to last a lifetime,
appear in the final frame,
stay in touch, venture, get more,
push to ultimate levels,
then with a single gesture blow in to chase down windfall,
roseate through sequinned night,
unforgiving at steel dawn?
Yes, till I take on too much,
toxic loss, your missing funds,
so that then come colder rains screwing over hoped-for golden years –
in the crash of collateral damage,
love me, love my emotional baggage.
Excerpted from "Time of the Icebergs Poems"
by .
Copyright © 2010 David Eggleton.
Excerpted by permission of Otago 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
Birds,
Time of the Icebergs,
Warming,
Driverless Ute,
On Beauty,
Visions of Michael Joseph Savage,
The Five Cent Coin,
Graveyard School,
Ode to the Beercrate,
Barnes Dance, Queen Street, Auckland,
Elvis and the Vulcans,
Varieties of Religious Experience,
Not Fit For Human Consumption,
Burn Rate,
Red Meat Roar,
Song of the Market Actor,
Kate Winslet Promotes a Credit Card,
Band Rehearsal,
Beer Cans,
Spent Tube,
The Zero,
Traffic Checkpoint,
Christchurch Gothic,
Night Patrol in a Psychic Shellhole,
Belief in the Pacific,
Suva Hibiscus,
Between Viti Levu and Tongatapu,
Nuku'alofa,
Drowned Volcano,
Steve Irwin Way,
Win Seven Days in Sydney,
Lines at Wharf's End,
A Nation's State,
How to Big Yourself Up,
Bards of Paekakariki,
Dada Dunedin,
New Chants of Ngati Katoa,
Jailbird at Momona Airport,
Soundings,
At Macraes Flat,
Koauau,
Aotearoa Considered as a Scale Model,
Landscape for Breakfast,
The Harbour,
Summer Hail,
Winter, She Said,
Cricketers of the Eighties,
The Tall Man,
Where the Big Rivers Go,
Paua,
Tarawhirimatea, God of Winds, Visits the Province of O,
Matariki from Takarunga, Devonport,
Winebar Waiata,
Kaiwhakaani, the Ventriloquist,
Taranaki Bitter,
Heraldry,
Twenty Second Century,
Notes on Poems,
Acknowledgements,
Index of Poems,