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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781877578939 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Otago University Press |
Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
Pages: | 124 |
Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.40(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
SHORE
The Conch Trumpet
Stars are setting westward,
other stars are rising eastward:
a handful of sparks on the horizon,
glow-worms on the roof of a cave.
Scorched grains of colour mask the reasoning power of the human swarm.
Apparitions in mist, cloaked or vanished, gone to earth,
emerge in the green heart,
the green lungs of divers.
The blueness of the tongue swells.
The sea chest thumps.
The waka is pelted by ochre dust,
by red pohutukawa, carried in a waterspout.
A centipede paddles.
Squid wreathe miles of black ink;
scuds of smutty carbon drift.
An iron-sand glaze is fired by a burning forest.
A hand coils pregnant clay.
Neutrinos pinwheel and oscillate through everything.
Ode to the Beach-Wrecked Petrel
Claws grip in gnarled rookeries.
I am brother to tuatara,
a companion to ruru.
I see a karearea rising at russet dawn and applaud; I draw breath at bees in yellow forest:
at bark syrups nuzzled between black chasms of sea and white chasms of mountain;
at the glacier's goofy foot blue with cold that slides over rocks, surfing on;
at those bevies of alpine beauties,
shimmery in sunlight with a forbidding air;
at bladdery kelp, bright green as gherkins,
cast up from under brine, bursting with salt;
and at a petrel,
getting the red carpet treatment from fallen stamens,
under twisting rata boughs.
Whakapapa of Rangi the Melody-Maker
Rangi, atua, kumara, cave spiral,
sizzling manuka soot and weka fat,
embryo whose tongue protrudes purple.
Karanga wails mingle with drizzle,
curling surf like toetoe flicking water,
and mauri is dancing in the blood.
Hineputehue embraces Tawhirimatea,
maker of storms, with her calm gourd music, so the grey sky gently weeps.
A putorino chrysalis sings to katydids,
Uenuku casts rainbows for kokopu,
a ponga forest scars with flame's moko.
A hawk tumbles through a helix of light,
but the legless lizard waits under schist,
beneath mountains' plumed albatross wings.
Rangi, uplifted, wearing a mist mantle,
floats on bier, on waka, on mana reo,
to music sweet as marrow from bone.
Sunday's Song
A tin kettle whistles to the ranges;
dry stalks rustle in quiet field prayer;
bracken spores seed dusk's brown study;
the river pinwheels over its boulders;
stove twigs crackle and race to blaze;
the flame of leaves curls up trembling.
Church bells clang, and sea foam frays;
there's distant stammers of revving engines,
a procession of cars throaty in a cutting,
melody soughing in the windbreak trees,
sheep wandering tracks, bleating alone.
Sunday sings for the soft summer tar;
sings for camellias, fullness of grapes;
sings for geometries of farming fence lines;
sings for the dead in monumental stone;
sings for cloud kites reddened by dusk —
and evening's a hymn, sweet as, sweet as,
carrying its song to streets and suburbs,
carrying its song to pebbles and hay bales,
carrying its song to crushed metal, smashed glass,
and fading in echoes of the old folks' choir.
Trails above Cook Strait
So Farewell Spit, they mocked the seasick;
Tangaroa always gets burnt by the sun.
Bird cries carried by a squall's lick echo in the ears of Captain Cook,
sunk like an anchor as fathoms break.
Waka creep past wooden islands outrun.
Fish-headed waves snare, skein by skein,
the filigrees of slithery reflection.
Cut those ropes, they said, so the sails can gather to slowly skywards their way take.
Winged flotillas fly, radiant with lyricism.
Spanked canvas shines in accumulation,
buoyed up by air like honeycombs of foam.
Waves dance in perpetual motion,
stitching the Tasman under swell of moon.
Raukura
Stone clacks on stone,
so creek lizards slither,
runnels slip through claws,
each cloud's a silver feather.
Mountains flex then soar;
the red tussock pulses.
River's mouth is drowned,
when ocean surges, green below dark vaulted forest.
The salt spray mist, violet,
granular as dust, climbs to grasp snow mountains in fog layers, and above glides the boat of the moon.
The Hook of Maui
A fanged shank yanks him from open sea.
Silken jellyfish glisten on hot iron-sand.
Mottled green light tattoos a drug-blue gaze.
Stingrays undulate along sunlit nerves.
The road snakes, and cars fishtail in gravel.
His ears are earthenware, glazed by mud.
Gold toetoe rise in hair-triggers from his armpits.
His filaments snarl round a plastic comb.
Police bolt-cutters snag on his tongue stud.
His lungs are stopped with red scoria splinters.
His lips turn black from a summit's pure snows.
His blanket's unbound clay, slid from bedrock.
Night's moths flutter from the cave of his mouth.
He dreams he's woken, wrapped in calm water.
Hei-tiki
Spindle-shank birds step on shadows;
estuary's sheen dances the tidelines.
Manuka buds into a white floor of stars,
and summer's kihikihi husks shrivel.
Sheep nuzzle hollows of particular hills;
froth billows and eddies on farm streams.
A paddock of thistles anchors the view;
all God's azure peels to an apricot blaze.
Dark water funnels a reservoir's turn from spider colonies and cocoon trails.
Cobweb fleeces, hung by spinners in orbs,
glow like ghosts, like ship's rigging.
The tuatara's eye beholds the moon's eye.
A stone hei-tiki is dug out of the earth by a settler grubbing the first garden.
Hatchlings glow and struggle from nets.
A poled kauri scow floats off the bar.
In this swamp, only buzzing of fat horse-flies over a long drop, but heat's sump soakage stews up tannins,
the dappled tarn is frog-eyed with shine,
and beeswax softens. Under the sun,
the shed at the end of the road warps.
Lighting Up in a Singer Vogue
Winter tilting on the beach groans,
and daylight's embers are buried.
A mechanical digger gouges clay for a trench to pipe the seagull's cry.
Swept by breezes, the soul rolls thin.
Surf streamers flex their vortex crests under skies whiter than albatross wings launched for horizon's arc of ocean.
Mist is flying, in pages torn from books.
Slid beneath a sparse quilt of snow,
the land's skeleton reaches to hug you.
Trampers in Westland
I Acrobatic sandflies,
Satan's fiends,
their powers and dominions tumbling clouds driven by
frenzied bloodlust;
living mobiles,
demonstrating dark energies of sub-atomic particles;
we walk
in secret peoplehood through these cross-questioning
insect swarms.
II
We molluscs expand,
by an ebbing tide,
dripping;
we beached seals,
sand-encrusted ones,
our red-rimmed eyes mournfully raised
to the overcast skies;
with long wet hair,
trailing seaweed,
the puddle dripped into,
rising round our knees.
III
Solitaries
in alert reverie,
listening to shush, shush,
rhymes of the sea;
feathery smears up arms,
feet mottled salt-and-pepper,
soggy-bottomed swim-togs,
or bikinis towel-wrapped;
perched on odd driftwood forms
by bonfire's crackle and woosh,
omnipresent dark hills,
morepork! cry from the bush.
Fiord Haka
Ruaumoko slaps thighs, thumps torso, and groans heavily,
busting moves to rattle gravity:
needle-scratches a seismograph,
making dolphins leap for the starry.
Our echoing ship rumbles, bumps,
and the fiord wobbles up from sleep,
whaleback thrashing around midnight,
before gurgling back down to slumber,
between rockfall splashing hemmed.
By day's steepled buttresses we tramp,
next to river's muscle-tug flow west,
rain a velvet-nosed champagne wetness —
such fine balances of skimmed rainfall,
such varieties of mould and mosses,
on pathway's crumbled clay crust a dolphining fern curve, a feather flutter;
while in haphazard winks and touches broken sunlight brightens the gemmed webbings of branches, water's drift:
all misty impediments to a clarity difficult to determine in unsettlement.
Moriori Dendroglyphs
green tongues lollop round branches through wounds in bark with deep affliction like tattoos freshly fingered
surf's blind gravel spat from the sea rain streaking a small plane's windscreen as it lands on wind-flattened paddock
black waves of coal an ancient tide clenched between clay layers and just them walking in ideation
on limestone walls under kite claws
INLAND
Syzygy
Moon dreams of moonlight,
cracking sutures of the skull open.
Mouth, moth, o moonlight, flicker.
Dance, moons of May.
Dance, moons of torch-shine.
Moon, tossed over our heads, a ball,
sails towards the net.
Scry the moon, note down marks you see on her surface reflected in still water.
Moon, round mirror,
veined solid slub, a prism.
A telescope, gibbous grim-moon,
a drinkers' moon — full, fat, cheerfully bright.
Melon moon, pregnant to many moons.
Moon conjuring mystic syzygy,
with the sun in harmony.
Moon's spectral lake, draped weightless with moonlight, gathering shadow.
Tarot moon, shuffling decks of the zodiac,
leaving runnels of shadow across her forehead.
Knight errant, his black pennant flags hung on a Golden Holden out in the scrub,
with mattock, shovel and a body,
leaning on the bonnet,
ponders the mellow moon hugely aloft and crossed by tatters of cloud,
its insignia a kind of stigma.
Moon, her abdomen girdled with stars,
she carries the teardrop of sorrow tattooed on her cheek.
All the phantom pregnancies sigh and cry.
Once in a blue moon,
everyone grows older, if you need something to cry on, here's my shoulder,
not cold, but nor does it smoulder.
Hey you, this is the room to chill in,
with its moony glow of black and blue.
Moon? City lights swallow it,
but there's the neon moon,
and the sizzle of its brand burns till dawn.
Roadkill
fleece fur feather petrol fumes hard rubber wheels and leather
Bounty
Years stack up like hymn books;
days run like rabbits,
or writhe in talons.
Soft breeze ruffles trees;
a hand reaches into a hatful of raffle tickets.
Hydrangeas, too,
sport bitter blooms still sunlit within rain's green abyss.
From trance of rubies,
gold, emeralds,
time's buzz wakes you to zebra stripes.
Pull the catch —
it remains in light;
but burning whale oil blackens the moon.
Hawk and Butterfly
As the kahu, a hairline, coasts in clear blue,
yellow gorse stretches under big rock's face,
and barbed wire's strung, enclosing our place.
So we pace at the gates of Te Papa,
made a paradise from haka to haka,
for kiwi by kiwi just passing through,
each carrying a piece of thin silver fern,
cut while you wait from corrugated tin.
Billy's boiling away, down back of beyond;
planed kauri frames a fret-sawn view.
We're listening to the rugby in lemon light,
with a longing for victory, with a dog's sigh.
Rain flutters from horses, skips off a frond,
and forms a sheen on roads in the wet;
till the sun comes out to weakly, and yet steadily, illuminate the monarch butterfly.
Minute Bodies Falling
Dawn hung on the horizon,
vistas of unending south,
skinny land between,
green ribbons rising, falling,
kilometre after kilometre,
and minute bodies falling,
tiny lives in cobs, hives or nests,
enmeshed, knitted, buckled,
midge, beetle, dragonfly aflitter,
swarms intricate above a river —
all hesitations swept away,
barbered siftings falling in place,
floss, fleece, feather —
a scrap become airborne, trembly,
as pelt or hoof or eye might be,
as fabric in turbulence, skimpy —
the whispered caress of wind-chill,
near sheer, on the move, balanced uneasily, piecing together,
flake by flake in surface tension,
gauze wrap, ivory drape,
bony frame, enshadowed hill,
ridge-top's face of thunder,
gunmetal, frost, silver,
staunch, blackened, clattery —
the gale grown, bruised and bled,
to bared teeth, evening fur,
contour after contour,
sleet working a white comb,
weight of clouds raked and torn,
streaks haphazard tumbled,
over patchwork jerseys of farms,
enmeshed, knitted, buckled,
province woven to province,
in weathered solitude of roads, lights, transmission —
staccato of hail's confetti on untidy bush from sky dishevelled,
outlandish perspectives sunk low,
in dirt seams, in leaf-scissored,
peekaboo flyaways overturned,
to turn and turn as ice,
as minute bodies that parachute to peaks —
vistas of unending south,
caked with snow at dawn.
Summer Rain
Spring trees grow collections of wands,
to conjure gently the colour green,
but in summer drum-taps bounce on water to ease a tension of the skin,
and when summer rain thunders,
then starts to dance, it is itself the romance,
prancing down the street with silvery feet,
kicking a frou-frou cancan from verandah overhang,
splashing the spatterdashes of an entrance.
Rain brings Fred Astaire's tap-tap across the roof,
before a razz of jazz is given tumultuous applause,
the ozone in the air extinguished like snuff of golden beeswax melted in candles.
Petulant petals quiver in crimson.
Rain bodies forth a spectacular earthworm welcome from hitherto undistinguished lawn.
After the storm's glance moves on,
silence fills with bird song, the sheen of datura,
sky-blue of the violet, whiteness of carnation,
scarlet glow of iceland poppies —
until the very nectarines blush, as teeth break skin,
grass dries out, heat splits pods,
and all summer breathes from the garden.
Hydrangeas
Shrubbery's floral bells.
Delicate as grace-notes, tough as wicker-knots.
Gathered to empurpled perms.
Arrayed like Parfait Amour liqueur shots.
Petalled bathing caps of a legion of synchronised swimmers,
blue in a hubbub.
The charge of the light opera brigade towards the best seats,
clustered as a violet rinse contagion.
Floating tethers of balloons in delicate pinks.
Sleepy heads of nursery beds,
cobwebbed in leafy dreams.
Powdered wigs of toffs and swells,
who lord it over a fancy-dress carnival at dusk.
Hazy as clapped chalk dusters in school monitor's grip.
Bubbly as champagne, snipped and mounted in vases on ledges.
A bobble of tennis-court fans,
applauding their own cornucopia to garden's very echo of umpire calls.
Pom-pom girls, cheerleaders of suburban rah-rah squads.
Amid stridulations of summer days,
of lark-soaring trills and cheep-cheeps,
hydra-headed and growing more heads,
crouched under masses of cumulus,
colours are your confabulations,
and flowering in that assumption,
you are the crest of the wave.
On Recrudescence of Waterfalls After All-Night Rain
Before the movies they had waterfalls:
movement spectacular, streamed from bluffs;
gorgeous reels, unspooled in wedding-dress train;
blessings and curses that coterminously reign.
A heart surge, over stone, all spray and rivulets;
spangled dribble of some open-mouthed giant, deaf-making, whose tresses spill,
wig upon wig, to gravel mosaics between clay gullies, where the kinetic pool of its massed body weaves and ripples.
So strewn, grappling gravity, it headlong flings between ridge arms, to the blow-hole of a reptile fossil look-out, wet with glitter mined as popcorn additive for Lord of the Rings.
Catchment
Trees heave, flap, grizzle,
as wind croons rock-a-bye,
but roots grapple beneath hill crests that jag and scoop at squalls groaning like bullocks hauling trunks across ponga banners,
bracken skirts, tumbled bird balconies,
in genesis of rain spawning on creeks gurgling through gullies,
while drizzle's spit settles as mist which swirls cool bulk over paspalum,
and a weatherboard church's drummed roof.
White silks sag to shroud macrocarpas.
From slicked fronds erratic tick-tocks tell time to crumpled rock slides,
and uprisings of moisture crawl into pines to breathe vapour and breed in darkness.
Water wrangles and spouts below boulders, clambers and deepens.
It sings, and glides its fingers out of ponds sewn with green seams.
More water pulses and slithers from bogs, flicks silver along traceries of gravel, and spools over mud-banks,
punching loose humpty-dumpty clods,
until with a rush the weight of river hurls its roar higher than a rainbow.
Aniwaniwa
Trembling across sky's cream-dress train appears the arc of rainbow's membrane,
sun's burst-through flame kindles colour from overcast;
a hawk shifts back to the river,
where a hillside has slid down a gorge as the river scrubs round it with a surge,
in mocking glub-glub cataract past a wet-gold bloom of gorse and broom,
half-echoed by bellbird's syrupy call,
beyond clumped kidney ferns, slick in iridescence from the late squall;
while on dark earth's mudcake,
toy-like, a yellow bulldozer squats,
by rimu pit-sawn weatherboards stacked inside a tin shed camouflaged with rust;
the greasy teeth of a chainsaw also there, trickled with orange sawdust,
and all around a panorama of muscular, jostling hills,
under the authority of upthrust crags,
draped with pine forest as the switchback road twitches on hairpins for a timber treatment plant;
and the flare of the sun is on the river slanted in its chasm,
as if probing for incandescence,
as flow half back-turns, then forward gleams,
ripples like numerals of surplus rolling coastwards and is squizzed at by satellite lenses,
a rivering witness-ribbon of currency,
rubbing elbows with pulp and paper,
toothpicks and matchwood;
so night engulfs each good pozzie,
beneath pinched heaven's pot of gold,
and bird chorus extinguished.
Excerpted from "The Conch Trumpet"
by .
Copyright © 2015 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
Shore
The Conch Trumpet 11
Ode to the Beach-Wrecked Petrel 12
Whakapapa of Rangi the Melody-Maker 13
Sunday's Song 14
Trails above Cook Strait 15
Raukura 16
The Hook of Maui 17
Hei-tiki 18
Lighting Up in a Singer Vogue 19
Trampers in Westland 20
Fiord Haka 22
Moriori Dendroglyphs 23
Inland
Syzygy 27
Roadkill 29
Bounty 30
Hawk and Butterfly 31
Minute Bodies Falling 32
Summer Rain 34
Hydrangeas 35
On Recrudescence of Waterfalls After All-Night Rain 36
Catchment 37
Aniwaniwa 38
Hokitika 40
Nor'wester Flying 41
Observatory 42
River 43
Waitaha
Alpenglow Reddening 47
Orogenesis 48
Cloud-Piercer 49
Wilderness 51
Place and Mana 52
Omarama: Place of Moonlight 53
The Granary 54
The Burnt Text of Banks Peninsula 56
Off The Sheep's Back 57
Rakaia 59
Haast Amongst the Moa 60
Resurrection of the Waimakariri Floodplain 61
Mystic Courses of Camper Vans 63
Old Man Nor'wester 65
The Motherlode 66
Q Feb 22 68
Grounded 69
Erewhon Unearthed
Untold 73
The Visitation 74
Rust Casting an Iron Spell 75
Clocks, Calendars, Nights, Days 76
Atua of Nowhere Zen 77
Colonial Pidgin 79
Erewhon Unearthed 80
Sound and Fury 82
Oamaru Cavalcade 83
Provincial Champions 85
Watching the Detectives 86
Before Compulsory Drug-testing Begins 87
Beacon 88
The Opening of Toi o Tamaki Refurbished, Rugby World Cup, September 2011 89
Between Two Harbours 90
Fire
Night Flight to San Francisco 94
Six Days as a Manhattan Island Castaway 96
Ode to Coffee 98
Testament of Databody Dave 100
New Zild Book Awards Considered as a Five-Horse Race 103
The Wisdom of Crowds 104
Browser 105
Is This You? 106
Freedom Songs of the Vietcong 107
Exquisite Corpse 108
Nightshades 111
Superyacht 112
Threads 114
The Death of Gaddafi 115
Your Call May Be Recorded 118
The Age of Terror 119
Where Gods Live 121
Notes 124