MORTALITY
I remember being taught at school half a century ago that the proper subjects of poetry were love and death. I tend to agree. About the first poem I ever wrote was this short number:
Now is ever with me alive
To forever search for and strive
To make of me
Immortality
Perhaps that is all poetry is - an attempt to defeat death, or at least hold it at bay for a few generations until the last memory, the last meme and the last thought of the poet has faded to insignificance (See Space Ark and Jackal Words)
My Chosen Role
And did I awake in sweat
last night and think of death
and hollow life,
and wet the pillow
with my brow
and quickened breath,
because the meal I had for tea
repeated now?
Is this creativity I feel
at the birth of a thought,
or the urgency of a full
bladder, and the knowledge
that I ought
to go?
I do not know.
Before I grew,
before I knew
myself myself,
somewhere a limp blue frog,
a foetal elf,
groped its way around a womb,
made elbow room,
and turned itself
the right way round
and dived
headfirst from the living tomb.
The lungs that cleaved
to themselves like glue,
heaved,
and tore apart;
knew their first function,
drew their first breath,
and masters of the art,
sent to the racing heart
red blood instead of blue.
The mindless infant knew.
I wonder, did my wife
drop maths at the behest
of her emerging breast?
And must we owe
each month this argument
to some clash of temperament,
to strain and stress,
or bloody mindedness,
or to the menstrual flow?
I think I know.
Sex I confess
I did not understand,
barely knew the contours
of the foreign land.
Yet, like some old hand
at the game,
my manikin
knew his way around,
knew when to swell with pride
and when to hang his head in shame.
The idiot knew.
So why do I bother
with these thoughts?
I can not delay or halt
the processes of my life.
I can not cause one hair to grow
nor stop another
by saying so.
Yet I struggle to disobey,
to reassert myself
in my chosen role,
to pretend to gain control
over my body,
to postulate a soul.
But why worry?
When the time comes,
when the last breeze
blows the thistledown,
my organs will surely know
how to behave, how to run down.
They had their diagram of love
and now will have their self-destruct
mechanism, the last word.
And death hand in glove
will let limp the puppet
and wipe the smile from the clown.
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Thou art the fairest of them all.
The slow falling away of flesh,
The slow laying down of fat,
The ramification of wrinkles,
The spreading blush of burst veins
On a weather‑beaten face,
The recession of the hair‑line,
The silver among the black,
The regression of gums
From yellow‑rooted teeth –
Thou recordest all faithfully –
An old impartial friend.
Not as dramatically as the camera
With snapshots from the past
Showing violent change,
Celebrating our wrongs of passage.
Inside every sleek poet
Is a shy introverted awkward,
Stammering, incontinent child
Quite happy to stay where he is.
We look with sadness at
Le dejeuner sur l’herbe of our youth.
That stranger there is me,
That woman ‑ my other might have been wife.
The glass is not like an occasional aunt
Remarking how much the children have grown.
When the mirror tells us we are old,
It will be no sudden shock.
The glass is honest but not cruel.
It prepares our acceptance gradually
And keeps us from self‑deception.
When we go out in public
We shall not shame ourselves.
It would be fine to have a mirror of the mind
To show decaying intellect
And the failing off of ambition,
The growth of disillusionment,
The hardening of attitudes,
The greying of hope
And the growth of disillusionment,
The wrinkles in one’s self‑respect
And the slow laying down of compromise.
The Wisdom of Teeth.
To be aware of one’s teeth
Is to contemplate death.
Today I am burying my wisdom teeth,
Which my dentist removed
For a large consideration.
He gave them to me in a manila envelope.
They are alien things,
These heavy yellow stones.
Strangers from my evolutionary past,
Little ivory homunculi.
Not flesh of my flesh, nor bone of my bone,
But atavistic monoliths
Loose-socketed in my gums.
And now they’re out.
Whoever designed these massive cusps
Had in mind some large Neanderthal jaw.
There was certainly
Never room in my modern mouth
For such crude flints.
Nevertheless I shall give my teeth a decent burial.
Laid out on cotton-wool,
Shrouded in toilet tissue,
Each is sent to its final rest
In a matchbox sarcophagus.
In their decay and demise I see my own.
When dead, however, these dental figurines
Will long outlast me.
No plaque will mark their grave,
Yet perhaps a thousand years hence
In some Chinese apothecary
They will bear witness
That once there lived a user of teeth.
Chew on that brothers.
Death of Trees.
Two trees, oak and beech,
Grew within each other’s reach
And tendrils of periphery
Touched in quick temerity.
Two trees, beech and oak,
By unprecedented lightning stroke
Fell with wooden limbs akimbo
In a green arboreal limbo.
His surge of rising sap was staunched.
The fleet of pollen grains unlaunched.
Her tender buds no more unfurled,
Corolla dried and tightly curled.
They heard the mould spores gently fall
And felt the beetle larvae crawl;
Saw the sooty fungal caul
And smelt the slow decay of all.
The Seven Souls of Man
At the end of my allotted span
The seven separate souls of man
To the wide world’s seven corners ran.
My secret name of power became
Encrypted in an anagram.
My spark of life was quick to fly
Ascending larklike in the sky
Until sublimed by wind and sun
My fluttering bird was limed.
Its fleeting sands of time had run.
My procreative urge, we’re told,
Soared like a rainbow bright and bold,
But detumescing petered out
In a proverbial pot of gold.
My mortal soul, poor dear, still wished
I had not been raised an atheist.
Slow to rise like dough unleavened
It sought in vain the way to heaven
And battered on the gates of hell
To find no admittance there as well.
Exhausted by its bootless quest,
My barefoot soul deliquesced.
I sloughed my selves in snakelike fashion
In truly onionspired succession.
My aura waned both wan and thin
With the shedding of each skin.
My cogito-ergo-sum was next,
The total of my intellects,
Author of this funereal text,
Whose parting thought - why but seven?
Don’t id and genotype seek heaven?
The penultimate spirit to depart,
The unseen shadow on my heart,
The negative, the man within,
Of yin the yan, of yan the yin.
This shadow to penumbral shade,
But now in shining white arrayed,
Descended as my flesh decayed.
At last the rest, the humble flesh,
This canopic treasure chest.
This house had seen its final guest.
This reluctant seventh soul of man
Returned to dust whence all began.
Death On A Park Bench
Death came and sat down next to me on the park bench.
“Do you mind?” he said.
I shook my head.
“It’s good to get the weight off your feet,” he said.
He reminded me of my old mother
staggering up the brow to Stockport market
with two heavy shopping baskets.
“I’m Death,” he said.
“I would never have guessed. You don’t look the least skeletal.”
“No, they confuse me with my clients,” he said.
“So how are things in your line of trade?” I asked,
hoping to steer the conversation away from personal matters.
“A bit of a slack time. Sort of in between wars and major epidemics. What about yourself?”
“Oh, can’t complain, just the old dicky ticker and a touch of arthritis.”
“I know,” he said.
“When I was younger,” I tried a conversational gambit.
“I thought I could outrun you. I was fit as a fiddle, could leap
high walls at a single bound. I could have dragged you off
in my super-charged Ford.”
“The tortoise and the hare,” he said.
“Then again, love defeats death, doesn’t it?
I could hide between a woman’s breasts and I’d be safe.”
“I could still see your ears,” he said.
“But I used to tell myself that I would burn that moment
of consummation fiercely into my brain cells,
so that I would never ever forget.”
“Gather the rosebuds,” was all he said.
“And when I was older I thought I could outsmart you.
I went to university.”
“So, you will die by degrees,” he said.
Did crossword puzzles, kept the mind sharp,
became a grandmaster at bridge or chess,
kept Alzheimers and senile dementia at bay.”
“Check mate,” he said.
“But,” I cried in desperation, “I write poetry.
You know, like Shakespeare and Donne
To ensure my immortality.”
“Like Shakespeare?” He raised an eyebrow.
“But you can’t be the real McCoy. Where’s your scythe?”
Looking for a small print escape clause.
“That went out after the Middle Ages.
I carry a symbolic pocket version,” he said
and he took from his pocket a cut-throat razor
which he stropped on his leather belt.
“Oh bugger,” I said.
Cage
Cage of bone
where runs the grey rat the endless maze.
Cage of bone
where baled in a headstall,
prescribed vistas pass her aimless gaze.
Cage of ribs
where the trapped starling batters the white sticks.
Cage of ribs
where the locked clock to its conclusion ticks.
Cage of pain
Where the rack is ratchetted
to disarticulate and maim.
Cage of pain
where the grey moth with singed wings
coddles the last cold flame.
Juxtapositions
Her face is featureless with stroke;
Her hair no longer an unruly mess of chestnut curls
Lies white and flat against her blue-veined skull;
Her puckered lips no cherries; her skin no peach's bloom.
She is a last sere leaf on a winter twig
Waiting for a friendly puff of wind to fall.
The garden hedges, once so manicured and trimmed,
Are now a riotous overgrowth of berried shrubs:
Bramble, sweet briar and bryony,
Hawthorn and sloe, honeysuckle and guelder-rose.
His face is gaunt and stubbled, sickly grey.
Clocks tick in a mausoleum of ornaments.
He teases his wife with delusions of recovery,
Chasing him around the bed in petticoats.
Through the kitchen window a rare sight:
Taking advantage of the unkempt wilderness,
Two roe deer and a fox chase each other
Around the flower beds, the fox ever hopeful,
The plump-rumped roe simply out to tease.
Rare Breed
In the Mountains of Mourne near County Down
We turned off down a narrow winding lane
Between pocket handkerchiefs of stone-walled fields,
Too small to support a family, deserted
Since the Great Famine, dotted with ruins,
Reclaimed by moss and mountain, moor and bog.
'Rare Breeds' the hopeful tourist sign had said,
But the lane petered out in a dead end wall.
Nettles, ragwort, ivy, smothered the verge;
Spleenworts and toadflax spattered the grey
With lime-green tufts and violet cascades.
Steep steps led up to a tiny house.
Very carefully but in eager haste
An old man scuttled down the concave steps,
Purple face a mass of capillaries,
His nose a bulbous ruin, his teeth stumps.
He gripped me by the arm and held me
Much too close within my personal space.
His brogue was as rough as his hob-nailed boots;
His peasant vernacular uncouth,
But his eyes were as bright as a robin's
As he told me of his wife ten years dead,
His unseen daughters married in Belfast,
His son killed in a railway accident.
His shiny-knee trousers with button flies
Had a smell of piss I could not avoid,
But he shook me by the hand, horny palm
And cracked yellow nails. He was amazed
When I told him we came from New Zealand
And not Ballyvally or Colligan Bridge.
I pulled free and guiltily drove away
To leave him to his daily loneliness.
As soon as we were round the bend I'm sure
He slowly climbed again his footworn flags,
To sit on his stool outside his kitchen door
To wait and watch, look down the winding lane.
Your Old Men Shall See Visions
Yes, I am forever knocking on Heaven's door.
I have only to close my eyes to find it.
It is never the same on any two visits,
but every time, in different ways I find release.
I put myself into a trance,
where my ego is subsumed by my id.
(This is you creeping up on yourself.)
I surrender myself to where the spirits take me.
Now it begins, another voyage after nemesis.
In my dreams I visit Paradise.
I take off my spectacles, blink in the sun
and like a falcon released from my jesses,
I take to the blue eternal sky.
I climb like a skylark in a trill of song,
being hauled upwards by the sun,
a thrilling spiral of whirlwind notes
as I sing in larksong my epiphany.
As the peregrine again I stoop,
wreathed with the delightful flight;
scythe the hissing air,
blistering back to earth
and blow apart some plump breasted dove
into a supernova ball of feathers and blood.
In my reverie I visit Elysium
and run my tongue in joyful exploration,
probing the crevices, cusps and contours
of my forgotten set of perfect teeth,
my imaginary possession more real than real.
Mature cheddar stings once more my palate
and chillies are inedible in their ferocity.
Over the years Monet repainted his water lilies
in progressively more jaundiced hues
to faithfully reflect the clouding of his cataracts.
But I now see Elysium in all the vibrancy
of Rousseau's primal, tiger-jungle dream.
In my vision I visit Valhalla,
leave my crutches in the entrance hall
and feel once more the warrior self I almost was.
The bow-cord, cat-gut taut tension of sinews,
the lungs of the runner from Marathon,
the coursing blood and the willing heart.
Shield maidens fair surround me
as I become visible to their gaze
and their nostrils are full of my pheromones
and their dark pupils open wide.
In my mumbling musings I visit Nirvana
yearning to drink once more from the fountain,
to walk again both on water and on air,
and through the bed of hot embers on bare feet.
Hope burns like a bonfire on the cliff top
and my path leads to high mountains
and at every turn I see unexplored vistas
and hear the distant shouts of laughter
and a tickle of curiosity.
But then reality drops a pebble in the pond,
the mirror shatters into chaotic shards.
the visions disintegrate
like clouds unable to make repairs.
Word Hog
To keep swinish age at bay and boredom
Beyond the forest pale I read:
Screeds of women facile with words,
Books of men with virile wit;
And like the tusked boar myself I root
Between lines, snuffle among leaves
For truffles of exotica,
Trifling words, bluebell bulbs,
Wild scallions of wayward words
That have eluded me for sixty years.
I find ghost orchids pale in dark woods
On paths I have not trod before;
Treasures I have not encountered
In a lifetime of looking, of rambling,
Rummaging, snout down shouldering
Through thickset thicket texts.
I find phenakistiscope,
The last hazel nut husked on the twig;
Steganogram, the last blackberry
Unclouded with mould, touched by frost;
Pseudepigrapha, last sweet wild fraise.
These choice fruits of my autumn woods
I shall wrap in my childhood handkerchief
And take them home to show my mother
Or lay them on my old friend's grave.
Page 23 Tane Matua
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