GENESIS OF POETRY
Some of my poems seem mostly to be about the genesis of poetry. Occasionally I have an idea and I work on it over several days until I have perfected it. My poems The Aurochs, Boudicca’s Daughters and Blessing for Waikuia are examples of this process. Many of my poems however come to me as a blinding flash. I can’t scribble them down fast enough. My wife Gillian and my friend Quentin watched me write the poem To Marie in a couple of minutes on a napkin in a Thai restaurant in response to the waitress who claimed she could read characters through looking in a person’s eyes. The following are poems which chronicle in some way the way my inspiration drives me to write poetry.
The Palaeontologist I wrote while driving along in the car which was very frustrating because I couldn’t write it down until I reached my destination. Catastrophe I wrote down in half an hour as is with no revisions. I can only assume that my right brain had been simmering away for a long time before it deigned to pass the poem on to my left brain.
Perhaps the most representative poem of this inspirational mode is the poem Elusive, which came to me in my sleep and I hastened to write it down the following morning.
Genesis
They say I operate in
Unconscious visualization.
In the silent gallery of my mind
Masterpieces hang in dark halls,
Behind locked doors and windowless walls.
Poetry for me comes when I call,
Echoes from the deep well.
The stone plinks in the hidden depths
And the ripple rings rise up.
I trust the internet of my brain
To route my request to the right source.
I play the synaesthetic organ of my mind
Pulling out all the stops.
I set myself on auto rhythm, set the pulse.
I let the rhymes come unbidden,
Let the wild metaphors roam untamed,
Let the alliteration ricochet from wall to word
Until this poem writes itself
Unamended in two minutes flat.
The Palaeontologist
I dig fossils
From the matrix of my mind.
They are the bare bones of thought,
My petrified emotions.
I strip away the breccia
To reveal the skeletons
In their rocky cupboards.
They are poems deposited
In my sedimentary years.
Now I bear the white beard
Of the palaeontologist
And dare excavate
The Precambrian explosion
Of adolescence
When hallucigenia roamed
The hormonal tide line.
In my Jurassic dinosaur time,
My years of honest toil
And married bliss,
I discover mostly sauropods,
Ponderous thoughts.
But here and there
In Gobi Desert shale
I find a protoavian form,
Icarus trapped Ariel wise.
Delicately I peel and pare
To reveal the gracile bones.
I build up muscles
With sinewy metaphor.
I clothe it with a skin like simile.
I either down or feather its puny form
With iridescent verbal plumes
And inspire it with breath,
The kiss of life.
Released at last it soars
Mayfly like to wing singeing heights.
To Marie
If eyes are the mirrors of the soul,
Then I’m in Hubble trouble.
My soul will be beyond your scope.
Your vision will be blurred
By my cataract of words.
I have cried a waterfall of tears
With an iris of rainbowed spray,
That hides the cavern of my thought,
Festooned with blue-green blechnum ferns,
And sheets of leafy liverwort.
The silver curtain reflects your gaze
Beyond your reproof, beyond your praise.
Jackal Words
Poetry is the most ephemeral art.
It is based on vagabond words.
Those lean and hungry jackals
That feast on my entrails of thought,
Scatter to the four winds
And defecate in the desert.
My meanings sublime sublime
To chalky shards of shit and lime
Without the slightest scent of sense
Or odour of feelings once intense.
A word is a single mote of dust
Dancing in a beam of light.
My poetry, my rich emotion
Is simply random Brownian motion,
Updraught chaff in a granary.
Momentarily it twirls and shines
In a vortex context understood.
Then disappears from view,
Out of sight, out of global mind,
A sheet of dandruff sloughed
To lie in drifts under bed,
Its meaning dry, discarded, dead.
The Derelict House
Windows that once surveyed a world of dreams
Or inward looked upon genteel oppression,
Are paneless now and deaf to silent screams
And the domestic rituals of aggression.
No latches, catches or prison bars.
Only unhinged, unavenged ghosts linger.
Nothing now happens behind closed doors.
Quiet save for the casement tapping finger.
Rusty roof-iron sieves and strains the rain.
The varnish veneer is stripped and blistered.
No lies nor hypocrisy remain.
All style is tarnished and mold has festered.
This house stands unpretentious, bare,
Unshod and shiftless with disheveled tresses,
Like Joan of Arc awaits her funeral pyre
That all pain ends, all harm redresses.
Catastrophe
What a good Friday!
The cat sat on the dat/sun shone.
Palmy weather, raining datsun cogs.
Traveling back from Palmy
With my daughter’s cats in a crate in the back of the ute.
Sascha and Paddy - a box of mogs.
It was Houdini who did it,
Who toothpasted out of a crack in the paddy wagon,
And Blondini who balanced
With his tail outstretched on the tailgate,
Until at a hundred k’s he leapt,
Somewhere between Woodville and Waipukurau.
On Highway Two the crosses grow
Where a carload of teenagers were wiped out by drunks,
And now there’s a crosslet to a cross-bred cat.
Via Dolorosa - the highway of the cross.
And on Sunday to expiate my guilt
I drive all the way to Palmy
With my ute crawling on its knees in second gear
Looking for dead cats.
And all I find is
Three hundred and forty six aluminium beer cans,
Chunks of flagellated tyres,
Three possums, a ferret, a magpie
And a hedgehog’s flatmate.
Skeleton Wind
Bone bleaching wind that blows
From the island’s mountain spine
Where the exposed vertebrae
Of white limestone bluffs protrude.
This is a sap sucking,
Life draining, leaf wilting wind
That whistles through the holes
Of the albatross bone flute.
That reclaims with interest
The precious shower of yesterday.
The paddocks brown like a pie crust
And crack in fractured polygons of clay.
The earth’s bones are showing
Through their tanned hide.
The static cat spits sparks
As we exchange thistledown
With neighbours five miles away.
We close the stomata of our house
And wait out the skeleton wind.
A New Zealand Summer
(Painting by Fiona Whyte)
The heat of summer is mostly illusion,
A mirage mostly déjà vu in holiday snaps,
An evocative scent of salt and honeysuckle.
The icons of the bach and beach.
The purple bougainvillea vine.
Mould pocked hammock and marmalade cat
On the old armchair on the verandah.
The phoenix palm whose massive fronds
Arise above the scars of previous summers.
The heat of long dormant volcanoes
Oozes gently from the pumice pebbles
That lie on the bleached, sand-scoured boards
With wind and wave carved driftwood shapes,
The taonga of seagod Tangaroa,
And lime-encrusted opalescent paua shells.
A bellbird sips from a harakeke flower.
Pohutakawa bloom strawberry red
As a little white-painted boat bobs
On a blue glazed pukeko sea.
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