New Vessels

The thread in the hand of a kind mother
Is the coat on the wanderer's back.

Before he left she stitched it close
In secret fear he would be slow to return.

Meng Chiao

The declining side of evening,
when light is trapped and bleeding,
and swifts' erratic scissors cut the sky
over the darking mangrove flat.
The hills as heavy as skulls.

(lines 1 - 9)

* From The Wanderer's Song by Meng Chiao

The thunderous moas of the night
grumble across the grassland.
They peer over trees, that have turned to coal,
go in fear of the hunting Moriori.

(lines 10 - 13)

* The Moriori were New Zealand's first inhabitants

Who thrusts her chin forward, to be sure,
and stands on tip-toe for the kiss?
I mark the pressure of your breast
on ribs as lean as the young pea's pod
although I sit here, am alone,
at the corner of a window's eye,
watching.

(lines 14 - 20)

A hull lies, black among bounders
The crayfish walks with exact toes
into the sheltering wound.
The gully that I cleared last year
is troubled with new growth.

(lines 21 - 25)

And now I try to understand
the vortex of the fallen leaves
whirling under water
from the grand Pohutukawa
to the floor of feeding harbour.

how the crayfish leaves her shell
how fortunate the hermit dwells,

(lines 26 - 32)

* A Pohutukawa is a tree native
to Aotearoa / New Zealand

the feeling of the almost grasped
that slithers in a poem,
the softening of the vertebrae
and how the mortals learn to pray.

(lines 33 - 36)

Wherever two or three are gathered
footfalls echo
down the passage we did not take,
towards the door we never opened.

(lines 37 - 40)

* "Wherever two or three are gathered" comes from the New Testament and is quoted from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

Two or three o'clock,
the strands of time
gather to a clasp.
        Dies irae, dies illa.

You start from sleep
with stomach turned queasy from fright;
like an axe cutting chunks from the standing trunk
anxiety chops in your chest:
a threat un -named, but like th’unresting dog
your troubled mind explores
the acrid odours of the street
at the corners of silent doors.

(lines 41 - 52)

* "Dies irae, dies illa" is the opening line of a Latin hymn which was part of the requiem mass until 1970.

Is it greed, or war, or the sliding apart of houses?
Is it the brimstone escaped from the chapel?
The odour refuses.

Somewhere the small boys are sniffing cocaine,
somewhere the rapist works in the rain
with his raincoat slapping his buttocks,
the flowers of evil turn to fruit
and the stench is choking repose.

(lines 53 - 60)

The bantam clucks in the scratching corn:
back in the run the white eats her eggs.
Old tyres on the rubbish fire
smoke in the greasy air.
Easy by little the creek turns foul;

dead fish glide past, the falling tide:
who can guess the first day
when the ocean starts to stink?

(lines 61 - 68)

I’ll never forget the muted fall of day
through the apricot drapes of the window bay
on the morning I told my first lie to my first lover
and how she smiled her gratitude
and let the light lie on her thighs;
never forget the smell of the moving crowd
all the helmets like china eggs,
and truncheons lift and drop quick
like chickens picking corn;
or the grain of the lovely Kauri
where I knelt for absolution,
and the granite blow of sunlight
when we, shuffling, reached the door
and the canon shook me by the hand.

(lines 69 - 82)

Easy absolutions, granted in the dark,
evasions, and pollutions, and the sliding apart,

the sliding apart of houses
and leaning into the dark.

(lines 83 - 86)

Lovers lie apart:
the night’s unrest apart,
breathing in and breathing out.
The cavity of the chest
aches under pressing stone,
the hills are as heavy as skulls.
Stressed bones constrain the hooked arch there.
In shadow, at the edge of night,
the keystone bleeds.
Anger’s geography, bedrocked in distance.

(lines 87 - 96)

Apart, the night’s unrest apart,
breathing in and breathing out,
while the heart’s stone shell in frozen action
is seen imploding perpetually in
and repeats
in mechanic looped sequence.

Breathing in and breathing out
we lie apart, slack-fleshed and far too sane
to start again to turn the boulder in the bed.

(lines 97 - 105)

Breath held ‘till the sternum burns
(the diver rising to the light
led by the bubble of his buoyant breast),
breath held ‘till the chest almost parts
gasps at last out
and the dust of the lungs goes too.

(lines 106 - 111)

" .. Each moment ...
Is but a quiet watershed,
Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed "

The geography of change begins
where change is barely visible,
a zone of shadow at the edge of night.
and the dust of the lungs goes too.

(lines 112 - 121)

* Matthew Arnold, Resignation

Between the shallow catchments
of the Amazon and Orinoco
the Casiquiare’s natural canal
trembles on a watershed
where any breath
in the breathless spongy jungle
could start the balance.

A hair-line in the black water
from which the current slips away;
one particular period in which
the great Casiquiare begins to slide
over the watershed and down
to its several waiting mouths,
like the python that lies digesting
motionless its meal until
at a certain critical level of repletion

(lines 122 - 137)

the eyelids rise and the great coils
begin to flow, beautifully
to a certain end.

Some kind of change has occurred:
one hair, laid on the water, begins to drift
and the watcher thinks of the sea.

Humbolt and Bonplaud continued their journey on the river by canoe as fas as the Orinoco. Following its course and that the Casiquiare River they proved that the Casiquiare River formed a connection between the vast river systems of the Amazon and the Orinoco. For three months Humbolt and Bonplaud moved through dense tropical forests, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes and stifled by the humid heat. Their provisions were soon destroyed by insects and rain; the lack of food finally drove them to subsist on ground-up wild Cacao beans and river water. Yet both travellers, buoyed up by the new and overwhelming impressions, remained healthy and in the best of spirits.

(Encyclopaedia Brittanica.)

(lines 138 - 166)

My heart - beat
is your foot - falls
in the hallway.


I cannot hear my
heart
beat.
I cannot hear your coming home.

Touch yourself,
above the collarbone.
Just there,
your palpable approach.

(lines 167 - 177)

What rocks, what islands, what drained flats.
Never weather-beaten sail
more weary bent to shore
than I on the high white bed,
garboard leaking, lean towards
what? A nurse to tend incontinence.
Whitecaps in the failing day like scraps of sail -
the eyes of the watch burn through.

The still Casiquiare
lies waiting, breathless.

Cushioned shoes on shining floors
and whispering in corridors
when these young visit.

(lines 178 - 190)

No worse, to have no flail to start
the pious silence, but strait memories
sour on a smothered tongue.
Some kind of change has occured -
talk of a new order, oriental names,
what shall I curse?
I fish for air with hooked breath
and heart all barbs.

My bones creak like hawsers under strain,
a voice like boulders, and a breath
that rattles like a running chain.

(lines 191 - 201)

(Leaves, whirling under water, form
the senseless litter of the harbour floor.)

Snow held, then, into November.
Trees, unfurling on the plain, whispered
while winter lay still on the high stone bed.
The heirs of spring are planning the planting -
these young have no sense of the proprieties.

Between Amazon and Orinoco,
the Casiquiare
trembles on a watershed.

Footfalls echo in the hallway.

Breathing in and breathing out.
Hairs on the water, straws on the wind.

(lines 202 - 214)

I was the bully boy then,
friend to men who grew great.
Betrayed, or were betrayed, or died.
Here at the quiet limit of the world
I look forward to nothing.
Blind words in the land of the long grave hearts,
what shall I pray?
Talk of a new order,
of hope, and new ships,
signs of a language impending
and names I cannot grasp.

(lines 215 - 225)

Casiquiare begins to slide.
The hermit crab in the mangrove roots
is scratching in the litter;
in the gardens of the ocean
through the door we never opened
the crayfish gingerly
disconnects.

(lines 226 - 232)

Nunc dimittis.

I look forward to nothing
forward to nothing.
Old claws in a borrowed shell.
(You, with the bottoms of your trousers rolled!)

Prayer rumbles down corridors.
Death, old captain, raise anchor.
Talk of new order, new ships.

I saw new ships come sailing in
come sailing in
come sailing in ...

(lines 233 - 243)

The breath of lovers
held ‘till the chest almost parts
gasps at last out
and the dust of the lungs goes too,
a Milky Way in a cloud of air,
our liberation’s constellations
gasping, at last, out.

And breathing in;
the air’s graceful portion of given oxygen.
Turn and find the loved - one’s back
is not, after all, of marble,
and change is always possible.

(lines 244 - 255)

And change is always possible:
why not slowly under skies
the wide world widely make our home,
raise anchor and set white sails,
leaving the anger-stone astern:
read from the waves’ one mesh
the liturgy of union.

The sea that tongues the estuary of Sumner
(and you, and I)
cleans industriously the cliffs of Dover,
curls ‘round Humbolt and laps Japan,
is one; the reaching, near, all -possible path.
Let us build winged feet and go
merrily on the globe.

(lines 256 - 269)

she turns, and sap
comes bombing out
in fuzz - buds
on the weeping willow,

and there’s calves
and lakes of milk
and creeping and crawling
under the stones.

(lines 321 - 328)