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DREAMS

Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams. Poetry can often be an expression of hope or of nostalgia. Dreams give us the chance of an alternative reality. Maybe in a quantum universe all times and all places are synchronous and ubiquitous. Maybe dreams are like wormholes through space and time allowing us to see those other existences we could have lived in.

Red Tide

Red Tide.doc

The wind ruffles the marram grass
On the sand dunes by the sea.
A bright sleepless moon
Stares through the window of the bach.
The insomnia of middle age yawns
As in fitful slumber I observe
The nightly joust of the phantom of sex
With the spectre of death.
Better to be awake and walking
With such dreams abroad.
On the beach the bright moon
Throws ridges of sand into hard relief.
Moonlight reflects in sharp shards
From the surface of the glassy sea.
I shiver in the cool breeze,
All nightly apparitions banished
By the hard, sharp, cold light.
But then a mist blows in.
A softness dimples, the focus blurs
And for a moment the fabric
Of reality shimmers.
Aphrodite steps from the waves
Radiant with beauty in paua and pearl,
Shocking in her nudity.
Life washes from her in floods.
She embodies every fantasy.
The world is forever young.
Sensuality and innocence
Are inextricably merged.
Luminous arrow squids explode
Like champagne corks
From the sparkling water.
A scarlet planktonic bloom
Bursts like an artery
And smears the tidemark of the sand
With phosphorescent blood.
As quickly as she came she vanishes
Into the flat grey dawn.

Moonbow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbow

Disillusioned and cynical we drive
At midnight on the Taupo Road.
A hard frost hoars the tussock grass.
It glistens like broken windscreen glass.
Underfoot it crunches crisp and dry,
As the full moon stares from the cold sharp sky.
Quicksilver lies in all the hollows,
Sparkles like spangles in the grey lawn.
A mercurial mist rises in veils,
Diaphanous silk and satin shawls.
We speed on in our lonely car
Breaking the scintillating silence,
Shattering the brittle crystal scene
And then brake in wonderment,
Turn the engine off and gaze
As a moonbow forms to our amaze.
It coalesces soft and pastel hued.
We bathe in innocence renewed.
A magic moment of beauty rare,
A shining in the silver air,
A unicorn caught unaware,
Stepping gently on the frozen lawn
And we as children newly born.

Passing Ships

In the black sea of eternal death
We float as lonely barques.
A lantern at the stern glows
As we retreat into the sea mist.
I cast a boarding line of silver spider silk
That snakes over the dark waves
And makes tenuous contact with your hull.
I reel us in across the yawning gulf.
Our cobweb rigging is enmeshed.
On each spar sparkle drops of dew –
Diamonds in your hair.
On each mast St.Elmo’s fire dances.
The cold flames of our entwined auras
Cast a pale light on the waters.
From afar sheet lightning illuminates
The leaden sky.
Lavender flashes from our southern lights
And a pearl grey curtain drops
Over the soft black velvet of the night.
Two ghostly ships converge
And for a moment coalesce
And then sail on straight through each other.
Flesh slowly tears asunder
And in perfect silence
All shrouds disentangle
And all lines part.
We sail on and become transparent
Against the black backdrop
And all lights fade
And no ripple disturbs
The oily surface of the sea of death.

Rip Van Winkel

One day I woke up an old man
And wondered where my life had gone.
Suffering from spiritual glaucoma,
I’d hovered in a sensory coma.

I’d been on a life-support machine
Of daily grind and common task,
The trivial round and average mean,
When much, much more I’d ought to ask

The world I knew has subtly changed.
The Rolling Stones have gathered moss.
Cassius Clay has Parkinsons’.
All golden dreams have turned to dross.

So time to trim the yard long beard,
Set young Hermes’ heels a-twinkle.
Time to motor, go ballistic,
Rip-snort, smokin’, eat my dust Van Winkel.

The Millwheel

In some shady limestone gulch,
In every precarious nook
The bright green ferns a living force.
There runs the grey and glacial brook.
Boulders are rumbled down its course,
Pebbles smoothed in river’s gizzard
And tumbled in its maelstrom vice.
Lies on the bank the basking lizard
And in the air the hawking dragonflies.

The old millwheel once stood there
In perpetual slosh and splash,
Making the creaking axle turn,
Causing the peg-toothed gears to mesh,
The granite grind in the millhouse quern.
Beneath the steep and slated eaves
Hung cobs of corn and sunflower heads,
On the balcony tobacco leaves
And geraniums in riotous red.

The girl who lived there long is gone.
No Lorelei combs her golden hair,
No Aryan archetypal maid,
In dirndl dress embroidered fair,
Sky blue eyes and flaxen braid.
The valley, the stream, maiden and mill
Were only figments of my mind,
Ever romantically inclined, still
Loathe to leave its boyish dreams behind.

My Map of Europe

I have a map of Europe with red roads.
I see my fossil footsteps in old ashes.
Here walked my boyhood ghost,
Eating raw herring in Volendam,
My sea blue matelot cap set askance
Over my freshwater eyes,
Cocking a snoop at all the world,
Cooking coffee on a primus
By my sleeping bag on the beach.

Wherever we hitched or hiked,
We coloured the map roads red
Like a dissection of facial veins.
We claimed the territory for ourselves,
Young Viking frontiersmen.

In Serbia the road from Belgrade
To provincial, sleepy Novi Sad
Is highlighted in sunflowers.
There twenty yards offshore
In the great grey, muscular Danube,
A rusty barge is anchored
Where cormorants dry their wings.
If you walk upstream a hundred yards,
Swim madly athwart the current,
With luck you can haul yourself aboard
With the slim brown seals of Serbian lads
And watch the Russian barges
Plough their way upstream.
I feel alive with my pounding heart
And bleeding knees, and swim for the shore.

In Belgrade a girl in a communion dress,
No older than fifteen with a bright red belt
Outlining and cinching her slim waist,
Takes me as her brother’s foreign friend
To a Viennese waltz evening
By moonlight on the castle battlements.
I am her student prince from the decadent West
Where the Beatles and the dry rot
Are beginning to make inroads on Mozart and Strauss.

The thin red pulsating artery
Advances across the parchment map
And pauses at Aix in Provence
Where Romans built their aqueduct.
Perhaps from that very spot
Where we dive tanned and slim
Into the cool green waters of the Gare,
Young Roman legionaries
Had splashed and swam and laughed
As they too conquered Gaul.

In the Black Forest my paths are white streaks,
For there is snow on the Feldberg and the Schauinsland
And we ski down between the pines
Over the buried fences, through the drifts.
Although she is lissom and adept
And I am awkward on my first skis,
She is still mine in this wilderness.
But back in Freiburg, her German friends
Are cultured and urbane
With just the slightest nick of sabre scars,
Just an air of condescension.

Munich in Bavaria is marked
With the stigma of a large black dot,
Centred on a student garret
Under the icicle fringed eaves
Of a narrow tenement block
That overlooks the Englischer Garten.
The landlady, Baroness von Witteman,
Lived downstairs with her cat,
And her cardboard suitcase
That held all her possessions
When she fled East Prussia after the war.
In my tiny, lonely room
I open the letter in its cream envelope
Addressed in a neat Gothic hand.
I utter the scream of Edvard Muench,
Bleed from Vincent’s severed ear
And scrabble frantically up Hopkins’ fell of dark.

I had not thought to read so much
On my map of Europe
Between the red lines
And among the black stains.

One Last Lost Dream

The fantails perform their aerial pas-de-deux
Among the honeysuckle and wisteria.
I synchronously loop-de-loop
And mentally rollercoaster swoop
As they snatch dead flies from spiderwebs
Under the eaves and festooned trellises.

I search my internal latticework
For old dreams that once left butterfly kisses
Along taut thighs, or effleurage
In the dimples of her lower back.
I rummage through the attic of my mind
Avoiding the mist nets of Miss Haversham’s lace.
Somewhere in some old box of souvenirs
Will be that glass-wampum, turkey-feathered,
Nylon-strung, Sioux nation dreamcatcher.
I check out lacrosse stick, tennis racquet,
Crayfish pot, and net for sticklebacks
Crafted from knotted stocking and garden cane.

The fantails must surely find fat flies,
Succulent with juice and plump with promise,
But some they will discard, mere husks.
Such papery things, such emptiness
Are these, my memories of sap filled youth,
Sucked dry by the old spider hag of time.

Perhaps somewhere hangs one last lost dream,
Ambrosia filled honey pot ant,
Twist-untwisting on a thread of life,
Shelob-stung in suspended coma sleep,
Mummy wrapped in time-tight spider silk,
Some Tutankhamun forgotten midnight feast.

I step warily on the glistening strands
Of the world wide spider’s web,
But initiate a tremor of coincidence,
That resonates in quantum harmony
Across disjointed age, dismembered space.
Fangs unsheathe, spinnerets are primed.
My heart is as a fluttering fantail limed.

Stargazing

The city lights are an orange glow
That erodes the darkness of the night.
Like spilt acid it eats the sky
Curdling the milky whey.
All the glowworm stars switch off.
All my wild thoughts return to roost.
We live inside a neon sphere,
Trapped within the now and here,
Bounded by the norms of our lives,
Nailed coffin down by our mortality.
Deep in the dark countryside,
Deep in my soul’s black landscape,
A myriad stars burn brightly,
A billion synapses in my brain discharge.
A trillion thoughts are triggered.
Naked of flesh I roam the starlanes
Surfing the interstellar wave
Beyond all horizons to farthest shore.
Immortal, incorporeal
I am Ariel freed and Prospero confined.

Italian Holiday

I am going to Italy, a Tuscan dream.
Ancient gnarled vines embrace me,
Dark haired cypresses on Etruscan tombs,
Olives rooted deep in catacombs.

In Hawkes Bay wires are strained,
Tanalised posts in numbered rows.
They stand in sullen phalanxes,
A plague of viticulture on the land.

I am looking forward to Umbria.
Left behind, my body like a zombie
Shuffles along concrete paths
In this thin, bare-boned reality.

My mind is soaring, a fierce-eyed kite
Above the tessellated warm red roofs,
The crenellated medieval walls
Of some Apennine hilltop town.

But then I dread the reality check.
Will the autostrada lead me to my dream?
Will warm, sweet lambrusco wine turn sour?
Will I have missed the witching hour?

I think I should perhaps stay home
And cherish my delicate fantasy,
For if my crystal vision breaks,
How can I pierce the greyness of each dawn?

Curious Bones.

We were curtain peepers,
Skirt clutching children
For we had a visitor.
Uncle Fred, building contractor,
Just popped in to spread
Brotherly pity and largesse,
Avuncular unction
And his large presence
In our small kitchen.

“Business was good,”
He boomed. We listened,
A sounding-board to his success.
He'd landed a contract
To demolish Marple Hall,
Once the stately home of
The local squire and Lady muck.
In later years of disrepair
It lent its aura of gentility
To a boys' preparatory school.

Fred was flensing the hall,
Gently abrading its oaken skin,
Mouldings and panelling prised adrift.
Then he dissected the muscles,
Balustrades and architraves,
Staircases and bookcases.
Mantels, lintels, banisters
Were each unmortised
And disarticulated.
Crowbars with claw hammer beaks
Descended on the carcass.

At the heart, the school library,
The contents of a glass front cabinet.
“What about this lot, Boss?”
Things brought home in a sailor's chest
From Tierra del Fuego,
Wrong things preserved in jars,
Musty, stuffed, mummified things,
Shells and nuts and carved things,
Teeth, eggs, skulls, bones.

After the sandwich and the cup of tea;
After he had slipped my father
A fiver and a bottle of whisky;
“I've got something for your lad.”
And I stood saucer eyed
As he emptied the carton
On the kitchen table.

I learnt that Brazil nuts
Grew as shrapnel in cannon balls,
That nutmeg grew in a caul
Of scarlet aril mace.
Was my sperm whale tooth
Scrimshaw carved by Inuit
In the long, cold polar night
Or was it etched by whalers
Tattooed like Maoris?

Mine was now a world
Of hope and curiosity,
Where elephant-birds
In legendary Madagascar
Laid giant eggs for the fabulous roc.
Where bird of Paradise skins
From the highlands of New Guinea
Always came without their feet
As befitted fallen angels.

Mine was still a world
Where the skulls of pygmy pachyderms
Could give rise to Cyclops myths,
Where on one last undiscovered isle
One lonely solitaire
Was not yet dead as a dodo.

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