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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780864736642 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Victoria University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 210 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Victims of Lightning
By Bill Manhire
Victoria University Press
Copyright © 2010 Bill ManhireAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86473-664-2
CHAPTER 1
The Cave
We found bones at the back of the cave.
I wanted to walk towards you,
to part your hair where I think the grey starts,
but I am not the man who marches,
I am the man who writes with a twig.
Under the bones, there are always more bones,
and always above them the puzzled heart
so that we hover like hunters above confusing earth,
for the quarry has gone in many directions,
and after a while we both stop digging.
Creatures around us are frightened now.
They watch how we stand and face away.
They see we have thoughts, that we are big.
Creatures around us are frightened.
Always these words come out of our heads.
The Victims of Lightning
A good poet is someone who manages, in a
lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be
struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or
two dozen times and he is great.
Randall Jarrell
Often they are naked; clothing is scattered
across a field; or trousers and shirt
appear in some nearby village –
a little tattered, waiting to be folded.
Sometimes with women the chemise is scorched,
yet – strange – the dress and petticoats are spared.
As in war, men are in extremest danger.
'His shoes remain on his feet!' cries the wife,
who then begins to weep; and yes, there are boots
at the end of the man's pale body. Height
is always there at the heart of peril:
a shepherd with staff moving among his sheep,
the tall fisherman lifting his rod, those boys
who huddle beneath a tree ...
all in their way supply attraction. Even a raised umbrella,
black in the sky, means danger.
And lightning will boast about its work.
It likes to leave an illustration.
On one man's trunk, a grove of pines.
On another a flower, or spider's web.
An ancient pear tree is destroyed
yet shows the branches of itself
on the waggoner's wide chest.
And sometimes it leaves us nothing:
it digs a trench and perforates the bones.
Over there, the farmer stands erect
as if he is posing with his cattle ...
yet, tiptoe across the field, and touch ...
well, every creature crumbles!
Some who survive wish to be studied.
I show them to my special room,
ask for a poem, or request a song.
They complain of melancholy and despair,
of ringing in their ears, of cramps. No one
retains the charge, though some believe they do.
Some walk with difficulty, others feel it in the brain.
The blind man regains his vision, yet now is deaf.
An imbecile is rendered sane.
A friend reports how lightning struck a church
and only the minister was spared.
The arrow of the belfry flew across the fields.
Nature is full of mystery: ephemeral realm
with permanent effects. And always accumulation
reminds us what is next: thunder in distance, choc de retour.
And silence in schoolroom and cathedral ...
and body like paste, tongue torn from its roots ...
so that we move to close the open door.
Outside, the poet lifts his pen, and waits.
The widow raises her umbrella.
Velvet
The earliest deer had a number
and a name. And always when we called he came,
165, unlike those others in the paddock,
unlike the skyline or the failure
in the farmer's thumb, which slipped his mind
at some important moment. It is surely
the plural thing, pure need for company,
that makes us chant at the start of every story –
and in many poems, we say, the short line hides
within the longer. Now when they say velvet,
they mean blades and cuts, they mean this powder.
These days I spend my whole day planting trees.
For only a deer in solitude can be a 165,
can turn and be this other thing entire,
a great head watching from the wall.
My Girl
My girl, she looks like the government,
white and the high far towers.
She eats everything in sight and looks for more.
Always she ignores me.
Yes, that's the government.
My girl she looks like Alaska
a long way off where the oil is
and the white bears are dying.
They swim and they swim to an ice that won't be there.
She goes to and fro in her kayak.
I can hear her crying:
we will all live in the water now.
She stitches the land to a spell.
Change the world, she says.
Squid like some soft candelabra.
Do it later now.
Yadasi Clips
Cold October spring,
light lengthened out in the evening.
But the wind!
Wind made the world frightening.
The water was blue, then black,
then the world went gray. Could the wind
blow every colour away?
Yadasi shivered
he felt a faint breeze from another place,
from an earlier time of day.
* * *
Yadasi: he felt like a tree,
a wandering tree.
He was trailing his roots
(but he had them).
* * *
When someone told Yadasi a lie
or sold him a rotten car
or a pot with a sorrowful crack in the bottom
he was just like you or me.
He didn't like it.
His whole head went wintry.
He ran and he fled and he ran and he fled.
Then he stopped.
Always being back where he started.
* * *
The wide sea was his father
and the river, and the harbour
and the rain which fell to make his father well
and make him a fed man
and a man who could not, would not
sink to the bottom.
* * *
'I'll tell you one thing, son:
he could smile in several languages,
but he counted and wept in one.'
* * *
Some windows said how much;
some didn't.
That was unpleasant.
* * *
On the street, three men with no hair.
Yet they were hairy and horrible.
How could that be?
They came up to Yadasi.
Yadasi smiled.
You, said one of them, are a nasty wee cunt
and a fucking wee foreigner.
But they didn't hit him.
* * *
But of course, Yadasi needs a key!
He searches for the key cutter.
The map had a key.
And there was always a key to the problem.
Education was a key.
His neighbour worked in a key industry:
electricity, something you couldn't see.
And the other neighbour, his music
should be played in another key.
And then the key should be turned on it!
A keyhole was not a hole in a key.
The key-cutter was a locksmith.
A lock of hair lived in a locket.
Too much. Yadasi bolted!
* * *
So many adverbs rhymed with Yadasi.
Quietly, quietly, quietly.
* * *
She told him the past was locked in her heart.
and she had thrown away the key.
And on the streets the pretty girls locked arms.
That was why they looked pretty.
* * *
A load of ladders went by on a lorry.
So many people needing to climb.
Life went by
but he could not see it.
* * *
Talking to the world
his words were bold on the screen,
he wrote to her and told her everything.
And spam mentioned so many things he was lacking.
Money and drugs and girls who did anything.
* * *
Money!
It came in tall columns.
A page was not high enough, nor a tree,
nor a tower with twenty storeys.
There were two columns at the heart of the city.
On top of each, a black dog.
Each day he entered their shadows.
And each day he made a fresh count.
A page was not high enough, nor a tree,
nor a tower with thirty storeys.
On top of each column, a black dog,
watching far out across the horizon:
and out in the ocean was another horizon
and so on and so on
till eventually there were men
entering tunnels, and women watching.
Yadasi's people!
Each day he made a fresh count.
On top of each column, a black dog.
Whenever one barked, the other was silent.
* * *
A man went to prison on the TV.
He was a local identity.
* * *
She came to the door.
Someone from the university,
a girl doing a survey.
Her legs were bristly.
Inside she was bulky.
Afterwords, she wrote his name on a clipboard.
Ya-sa-di.
Well, thought Yadasi, this is what you get.
Girls were a mystery.
Writing was a mystery.
Well, at least you can make your mark, she said.
* * *
Yadasi went walking.
It began to rain. Oh no, cried Yadasi,
I have forgotten my life. But he meant his umbrella.
Language again! He went under a tree,
which was there fortunately.
Beyond it a railing protected a graveyard.
The rain stopped and he went across to see.
There were many tombstones
families of every age,
and many names, too,
like a pop-up phone book,
but not a single Yadasi.
Was this good or bad?
Don't know, thought Yadasi,
who was the first to devise this particular simile.
Then it rained again,
and around the graves it grew muddy.
Time to go home.
Goodbye, dearly departed!
But if this was a book, who would close it?
* * *
Yadasi went to the beach.
Sign after sign said Vacancy.
He walked a mile or two east.
There was sand, then scrubby stuff,
then grass, and sheep on the grass
and maybe cars on the road behind them.
Then it quickly got mountainous.
That was far enough.
In the other direction, what did he see?
Water, of course. He ran towards it.
He swam out furiously, then relaxed.
He admired the wide horizon.
They were both treading water,
watching each other carefully.
But even out there he could hear
cars, and sheep,
their cries on the oily air.
The School
Inside the chalk, a hundred numbers,
marks which want to be words.
The teacher writing speech.
Inside the chalk ... also a river.
Inside the river ... the hurry of sky!
And now it is lunchtime, and we are hungry.
Bubble and squeak, says the chalk.
Bubble and squeak.
Evening
Now came still evening on
Milton, Paradise Lost
Boat in the sky,
boat in the misty harbour.
Far off, you can see it coming:
day's heavy light.
* * *
Hills make a boundary,
window a place
for watching stars.
* * *
Says the child:
'The light likes to be outside.'
* * *
The giraffe
puts down its knitting.
It, too, is sleepy.
* * *
Apothecary: word with a shadow.
Parchment and branch
agree it is dark.
* * *
Her handshake
shakes itself free.
Come back to me.
* * *
'Does a star have branches?'
* * *
But no one answers.
* * *
Oh the mother has branches,
has branches.
At night she is an apple.
At night she sleeps in a tree.
A Lullaby
Here is the world in which you sing.
Here is your sleepy cry.
Here is your sleepy father.
And here the sleepy sky.
Here is the sleepy mountain,
and here the sleepy sea.
Here is your sleepy mother.
Sleep safe with me.
Here is pohutukawa,
here is the magpie's eye,
here is the wind in branches
going by.
Here is a heart to beat with yours
Here is your windy smile
Here are these arms to hold you
for a while.
Here is the world in which you sleep,
and here the sleepy sea.
has branches.
Here is your sleepy mother.
Sleep safe with me.
Song with a Chorus
The child stands
in the moonlight on the moon
and bounces slowly.
His mother tucks him in.
The light tickles his chin a little.
Dear one, dear one.
Illness is here with its puzzling song.
It muddles your mind
yet tells the truth. For a while
the doctor remembers his own youth
when he, too, was cute.
My lovely one.
The moon lists to port
then to starboard. It is
somehow charming, the way
a mother weeps.
The tears repeat slowly.
My dear, my sweet.
A tear hits the forehead:
a piece of that great sea
we witness and respect.
A doctor would once have said hectic
but what now to say?
Dear one, my dear.
Meantime the moon is always travelling.
Stones live on its surface.
You throw them and they take an hour to land.
Give me your hand. Hold me.
It goes around the planet.
Oh my dear one.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Victims of Lightning by Bill Manhire. Copyright © 2010 Bill Manhire. Excerpted by permission of Victoria 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
Contents
I,The Cave,
The Victims of Lightning,
Velvet,
My Girl,
Yadasi Clips,
The School,
Evening,
A Lullaby,
Song with a Chorus,
1950s,
Talking to the Moon,
II,
Frolic,
Quebec,
The Small Top,
Nuptials,
A Round,
The Secret Wife,
Little Elegy,
A Married Man's Story,
The Little Match Girl,
Bring Me My Matrix Bands!,
III,
Garden Gate,
Pacific Raft,
Buddhist Rain,
Rarotonga Sunset,
Crime Scene,
Warehouse Curtains,
Bad Man,
Making Baby Float,
Across the Water,
IV,
The Best Burns Statue,
Captain Scott,
Poem Beginning with a Line by Ralph Hotere,
The Peryer Arms,
The Things I Did,
Visiting Europe,
Herschel at the Cape,
Toast,
Pussy,
The Lid Slides Back,
V,
The Carpe Diem Poem,
The Workshop,
Saying Goodbye to My Mother,
The Black Road,
The Wrong Crowd,
Edit Suite,
Peter Pan,
My Childhood in Ireland,
The Sick Son,
The Ruin,
The Oral Tradition,
After Class,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,