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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775581895 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Lakes of Mars
By Chris Orsman
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2008 Chris OrsmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-189-5
CHAPTER 1
Grass
Wade into the long grass,
the world is tougher
than we imagine;
what do we know
of hidden topographies,
ridges and valleys
drowned in green,
insect life
of that sea-floor?
This feral sweep and gain
over deserted ground
seems like natural justice.
And here we come across
an upland rugby field
out of season, a savannah
of faded lines
and goal posts askew.
Stone out the windows
of the changing-shed,
call it the barn of the rich man
after his soul was demanded,
emptied of all but the living
granaries of seed heads
carried in by the wind.
What was his name
that he proved so poor?
Think of the newly dead,
heft the airy scruples, drachms —
weights they carry
to the personal judgement —
and read the metaphor
incumbent in the grass,
its biblical power
to persuade
that life is short
and full of strange reverses:
the soldier turns man of peace
and is murdered by the pious.
i.m. Yitzhak Rabin, 5 November 1995
Instamatic
I mourn the loss of my Kodak 133,
it went the way of all plastic
but there are times I feel beholden to
that small faithful body and nylon strap,
that comforting drag at the wrist,
and pre-sexual click of satisfaction
as each new shot fell into place.
Two settings covered all weathers
— cloudy, sunny — the viewfinder
stepped the world back, squared it
to a commodious miniature
almost anything wandered into.
* * *
A whole century moves until you stop it,
at the airport
or behind the pump-house where you've snapped
a summery group against a backdrop
of gorse and convolvulus;
even the sky pauses and is reduced
to the same grey stuff as the rest of us.
What were you looking for?
First film was an exercise in hope —
the cat in the cross-hair shadows
of the clothes-line, the lawn mower
rusting in a corner
near that backyard pylon, the Hill's Hoist;
several posed shots with caps
and badges, a bottle display,
a jammed photo of a path
overlaid with someone's
faint portrait. An absence
is present here but is barely accounted
real life or history, being partial
and often blurred or otherwise
resisting focus. Have I then
stalled time at the wrong time,
as people were getting on or off,
or blinking, or raising fork to mouth?
Who says that life's like this,
and how do we reclaim the desire to desire
that's called nostalgia?
* * *
We're easily charmed by inaccuracy
and learn to love the plainness of life:
the kitchen in a previous incarnation
with its round-shouldered refrigerator
— an asthmatic under high cupboards;
cake on linoleum bench top, my mother
and sister wide-eyed in the flash;
Jane with Mitty, the cat's half her height,
well grasped at the midriff, saucer-eyed;
children holding toetoe on a blustery day;
Jeff and Murf flexing muscles,
concave adolescence on the garage roof;
John on his first day at college;
grandparents in a plain bungalow
off Scott Street, Blenheim;
first house in a subdivision, a hillside
of forked pine trees, a house
burning on Wright's Hill
(is this one back to front?),
the valley framed in the foreground
by a charred silhouette and fireman's head;
long shadows across a park,
the harbour from a watertower,
a rock tossed over a cliff
and caught; fennel and blackberry on slopes;
my brothers
in let-down flares and school socks
by the problematic blank windows of the porch;
an alarm clock stuck on half-past four
as Derek reads Tintin on a bed.
* * *
You'll see yourself out of doors,
a bland reflection in a window,
the arm raised to shield the eyes
from what's flared up
in some cameral sunspot
too bright for the film,
too bright for people's waking lives.
Who can find time again in these
near-images, affectionate botch-ups?
Who'll gorge again these
art-disappointing
light-sensitive squares
on that plenitude that rouses us
and slips away before our eyes?
White Wind
for Greg O'Brien
The man in the canvas deck-chair
hears no dissension but the wind-vane
clattering homemade at the gate.
He jokes with someone out of view,
half-in, half-out, on a verandah
that's closed-in west and east
with small panes of cathedral glass,
orange, yellow, emerald-green.
High-toned, it's summer and no summer,
a white wind scourges the harbour;
out beyond the verandah posts
a parade-ground is mutinous with dust.
The gate rattles its one good hinge
to interpret tidings of the wind.
A nor'wester on manoeuvres
struck camp some days ago
across the Tasman Sea. De-ionised,
the air has tuned the serotonin down,
although that isn't widely known
this last year of Victoria's reign.
Our man turns his deck-chair around
to read in the glory-room windows
the slab of air and sea, the sand-blasted
text of the morning: white street
between gate posts, neat fences
of abraded pine, a pier bleached out
a hundred feet from shore.
What's reflected
is penitential and troublesome: lives
— the new century — blown off course.
Boys fish with arcing lines, a couple
regret their stroll along the pier: his hand's
to his hat, she's dead weight at his elbow.
They mouth a dialogue still audible
over ninety years, as distance squints back
from the false horizon, and the sea's
shaken out like a parlour-cloth.
* * *
Bracketed and decent, a shelf holds
a jug of clean water, a bar of soap,
a towel is draped across a chair:
a woman finds some peace at last.
Life is grafted to the sweet stem,
tendril and full bloom of the wind,
its airy sap and held-in breath
kept at bay by a closed door.
There's a clash of sill and frame,
a crackle of paper, a white
rustling in the leaves, a voice reading.
We whisper a commonplace, locate
a strip of already focused ground
between gateposts and clothes-line.
Our brows furrow and we listen
as tidal movements of the air
blend all our subtle kinships — what's
breathed in and out, the chemistry
of atoms and sub-atomic particles.
Later, we draw back in threes and twos
to take in the wider scene: the picture
frame's a natural division of the wind.
The Polar Captain's Wife
I imagine you are much
preoccupied with the cold,
inching your way between
icebergs of a menacing blue.
This picture satisfies us both;
it is your duty to sound out
the buoyant and laden,
and think betimes of your wife
stranded amidst the furniture.
Being a little drunk I wander
from room to room, touching
temperate surfaces —
a book, a clock, a chair —
missing the body heat
we stowed in that chamber
our last night together.
A First Landing
Cape Adare, Antarctica, 24 January 1895
I
Some twenty yards from the cockboat
a killer whale ruddered and took our range,
exhaling a hollow sanctus — fishy, lung-warm —
on our enterprise.
And with that benison
one of the Tasmanians leapt from the gunwales
and slipped where summer had made it treacherous
underfoot; his shout and shoaled heave broke
into the waters of the cape; his wetted knees
were a supplication and finely judged gesture,
and the sound was new there.
II
The bay's near-crescent made a threshold
for our standing figures: Captain Henrik Bull
in a tall hat, the crew disposed to be casual,
lending scale to the scene, the ship as background.
Yes, how cleanly the binding of glass and light
— the shutter's fall, the meagre snick of plates —
invented for us the afterlife. A clarity
came into the picture from outside
like a dangerous air over the shoulder.
For what was moving was engaging us,
and nothing could be seen of it that calm forenoon
or heard above our clanking steps — the continent
setting its range, closing in from fierce
inland horizons of basalt and ice.
We kept our minds on petty things after that.
Our hands cupped and dipped in a cascade
where icemelt over gravel was a lens
on the secret, held-in life; knowledge brimmed
in bare concavities, slipped through our hands.
Soon the Captain waved us back to the shore;
we discarded all that was low-natured
or contingent: the Bosun held his phlegm,
no one whistled or coughed; as the shutter was set
we stiffened and drew breath.
III
'Whatever happened there was ordinary:
the men formed their pairs and ventured out,
collecting stones, making fire under a cliff;
one man read aloud a letter from his wife.
We grew serene and forgetful by degrees.
As we sailed again into the Antarctic gyre
we thought of severance from that bridal life;
an exemplary hunger overtook us,
we were the driven ship again — empowered
to balance opposites, surprised at nothing.'
Firmament
Bill Culbert's Lightworks
Light or heat — what reaches you first
When you wear your skin as an organ of sense?
What burns below you and above
Tethered to its source?
Come in from the winter,
Warm your hands against a star,
Where one with luminance has stowed
The trestles of the universe.
Alexis
for Harry Orsman
One law is
mixing languages
ancient & modern
fifty or ten or eleven
or six perhaps
read from behind
the whole is
a total stock
of words
of course,
a name, and
split neatly
a lexis is
a humane
preoccupation
for two score
years
and six.
Storm Warning
If we could talk to each other
We wouldn't need these
Emblems of distress:
The plague-flag nailed to a wall,
A strip of canvas hung high,
To glow in the burn-off
Of its own painted hills.
If we could talk to each other.
* * *
And if what persuades us
Is not a bat's squeak of theory
Honed like radar — but honest words
thickened by an artist's brush
We might still hear each other:
A chain of voices on the ridge
Like bird-song, making whole
Within rain's sweet foreclosure.
Cape Gooseberries
for Lynn
I think of the Cape Gooseberry
In its little house of sighs,
A lantern of good intentions
Pulsing the veined husk,
A flare-up on the tongue
Extinguishing pleasure.
Volunteer
William Orsman, Nelson City Rifles
1
'We met no resistance throughout that country,
everything we carried was a dead weight:
sabres and carbines, the lumbering Armstrong gun
ploughing a single furrow to Parihaka
across the ripening fields. A salt wind
nosed at the earth-wound in our wake.
Some shucked ears of green wheat and scattered them
— Sabbath-breakers on a weekday morning
cursed back into line. Daybreak found us
wading a ground mist on the western flank;
a low scrub parted and closed on us again,
and the boasting and big talk petered out.
Parihaka lay under a bluish haze,
deft with the chink chink of bit and rein;
on the perimeter you could hear
rifles being cocked like knuckles cracking.
* * *
'The sun reached us first as a mock fusillade
on the terraced hillside; in the valley below
it seemed that earth lifted, as on a sheet,
into brightening air. The mist dispersed;
we heard children singing, and saw the town
laid out before us like a cleared brow
on the face of the morning. Then hooves and shouts
as Bryce's Cavalry charged at the gates,
and girls shied the horses with shoulder mats,
deflecting sabres, and those kilted dogs
— the Armed Constabulary — followed through,
breaching the City of air and light!'
2
Hardly in whiskers, and true to your age,
you aim your rifle across a felled tree
into the crowded marae. Great-grandfather,
you were high-minded enough at nineteen years
to realise that the fight was no fight
— though you longed for it. The enemy
lodged within, crouched and defensive
behind the heart's palisades.
I volunteer you as a single figure
in the tableau beyond, someone to set right
in your youthful ignorance and hopes
what you helped destroy. Bequeath to me
your clear sight on that morning, whatever
is necessary in your ignorance;
for now I station myself beside you
as you ease off the trigger, gazing out
where you stand, watchful at daybreak,
waiting for the ground mist to rise.
Making Waves
for Maurice Wilkins
Light diffracted on a bedroom wall
at 30 Kelburn Parade, making waves
through a cloth blind, circa 1920;
outside, pongas and cabbage trees
lie just within memory's range,
a pattern and a shadow.
The silence here is qualified
but it draws you out, four years old,
or five. The world's a single room
where fronds and wind tap a code
against the window-pane.
Next up you're wild, sprinting down
a helix of concrete steps
from the hills to the harbour.
Or you're leaning into a gale
commensurate to your incline
and weight; the elements support you,
and the blustery horizon
is fresh with new information.
* * *
And now the landscape changes
from island to continent to island again,
and there's a sea-change as we fire off
certain rays to form a transverse
across your history.
Acclimatised,
you wintered over in laboratories
and made a virtue of basements
and arcane knowledge; you found
a scientific silence or a calm
in which things are worked out
at a snail's pace, a slime
stretched and scrutinised between
forefinger and thumb to yield
a feast of the truth, or a field
ploughed with frustration, if that
is where our guesses land us.
For Science is a railway carriage
rocking with big ideas, sometimes
stalled on the sidings or slowed
on branch lines near rural stations.
And still the whole is too huge for us
to comprehend, one metre long,
wrapped around each cell,
unread until it's unwound,
the scarf and valence of our complexity,
from which we derive our unique timbre
to say: Well done! Well done!
* * *
To an amateur an x-ray plate
looks like an old-fashioned
gramophone disk: yet it plays
scratchy music of the spheres,
jazz of an original order.
Or perhaps it's the ground-section
of a Byzantine cathedral, or a basilica
of double colonnades and semi-circular apse
— and who builds upwards from that
to discover the grand design? Who
constructs with only a floor plan
to find the elevations?
Those
who are neither architects nor masons
but quiet archaeologists of the unseen
hand and mind of God, digging upwards
to the exquisite airy construction
of the double helix. Gifted clumsiness?
Genius? You are there at the start of it,
a chiropractor of the biophysical,
clicking the backbone of DNA into place.
Dunedin Postcard
On the way down to Tunnel Beach
I thought of Baxter's grave, ambiguous brow
and sighted it there on a slope few see
in a clear upland of tussocky grass
above pressure-bearing strata
so dense and buckled
you felt that if you prised a stone free
it would zing like a bullet
from the cliff face. Trope and guilt
in equal measure! I thought
how his poetry was like that
kelp-stained finger of the sea,
poking and poking a funnel
to the arena beyond.
We held our breath going through
moist, ribbed sandstone
that smelt faintly of urine.
All the air was sucked out
to return as a deep-voiced boom
from the Pacific. I smoked,
you took half a dozen photographs,
we climbed back to the car.
Later, over the city, drizzle set in,
and I recall how the south wind
tripped the electric door at the hotel,
sending in jabs of the Antarctic.
Primer of Ice and Stone
for Raewyn Atkinson
What language can we find
for the true desert? Call it
Terra Irredenta, land
unrecovered, unredeemed
without fame or renown
until one walks here and claims it
by right of vision,
and returns
through conscious art
what has been felt and seen:
a translation
of elements,
a survival
of that original order.
* * *
What are the valences we speak of
when water bonds as ice and snow,
or rock forms in the deep furnace,
a kiln of the earth long ago?
Is it a lake in the granite hills,
the iris of God in its wide bed
of infinite gazing;
or is it terra rossa,
a hardening of soil from a climate
Mediterranean and remote;
or small craters of snow,
cupped hands, a begging bowl
in Bull Pass: or a spine
of snow on stone,
a crack, a piercing,
a widening to the underworld
to hold us in perpetuity.
And the map itself,
a nest of ceramic glazes
between islands and mountains,
and ice shelves,
pooled on the plateau amid
the reddish teething of mountains;
seeping into valleys,
the Pleistocene gravel
buried far down.
* * *
Go back to the source,
the original order, wind and sand
working off each other,
each facing-stone polished,
a facet to the Plateau;
rock hollowed out
like a turtle's shell;
or the hogback of stone
cut like the plated spine
of stegosaurus
by that ancient
irresistible wind
that falls
from great heights, the cold
and dense air gravity moves
high on the Plateau, to scour
these valleys,
katabatic:
if only because it falls
so long and heavy to the sea
and strips the igneous rock
into sinus or abdomen or shell,
imitating the mineral ice.
* * *
Or pillow lava from Cape Royds:
emblem
of black and white,
rounded
like the buboes of plague
in the land's groin
or armpit;
a camouflage, a revealing
integument
of Antarctica.
* * *
Core samples
transformed, as if earth itself
were fired, its cones cooling
to the touch;
or those
diagonals, that lunging tilted
imperialism
of the linear
that works its way somehow
into each horizon:
mountainside, glacier face,
country of ascent.
* * *
And whether our view is deceived
by what we hold in our hands,
we lift
this crafted scale
against the light, measure it,
gauge it, it is a return
made, a recovery
of land without fame and renown.
* * *
Last is the light
filtered through ice, seepage
and flow through the walls
of a primal shelter:
invasive and defining, lucent,
a blue watermark, a survival:
so build us a home of it,
make it solid, the light
of home, 'Homelight',
a cold pressing
on to paper
on to clay,
shaped,
fired.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lakes of Mars by Chris Orsman. Copyright © 2008 Chris Orsman. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1,Grass,
Instamatic,
White Wind,
The Polar Captain's Wife,
A First Landing,
Firmament,
Alexis,
Storm Warning,
Cape Gooseberries,
Volunteer,
Making Waves,
Dunedin Postcard,
Primer of Ice and Stone,
2 The Lakes of Mars,
The Lakes of Mars,
The Book of the Dead,
Notes,