I won’t say I understand you, but I’ll try somehow to find you. Like you I’ve wasted time and I’ll contemplate some more. Because it’s never quite right, we don’t finish anything as much as the times we begin. You’re as hard as the wind.
Category Archives: Poetry
On sandwiches and other lunches
it’s 11.52
and I’ve long ago eaten my lunch of cheese
and lettuce sandwiches.
I could have added slices
of tomato or cucumber,
but then the bread gets soggy
and wet bread is like
cold jeans in the morning.
sandwiches are a family heirloom
passed down from my mother
who always made them,
with odd fillings too, like baked beans
or lasagne.
there aren’t as many sandwich eaters now;
we’re all grown up
with our credit cards and mortgages
and lunches
with rocket salad on the side.
at university
I bought nachos from the cafeteria
once a week,
served by Polynesian women
who ladled mince and hot cheese sauce like a syrup
over corn chips in a polystyrene bowl:
a meal that sticks in the memory
—and now I'm tempted
by hot food from the pie warmer:
the chips, the sausage rolls, the potato tops,
the kranskies and deep-fried sushi.
because if you’re going to buy lunch
it should be hot
and life
can’t be all sandwiches
in Tupperware containers.
Hot bread
Every drop-off then was the smell of hot bread from the ovens behind the factory walls, made grey in the memory by it always being wet and dark, head-lights on. When I drive past the road today the smell of fresh baked bread still breaks out of those same walls, now Newberry’s Funeral Home, where the ovens are hotter and sealed tight. For no more than the symmetry, it’s at Newberry’s I can be dropped-off on a weekday, when there’ll be a fight for parks, and everyone oblivious to the smells and memories of years ago.
Beneath Hikurangi
Cicadas singing in the fire of the sun. We used to think they lived so briefly and it was too easy for the mynahs to catch them in their yellow beaks, hold them for a moment, still singing; no wild struggle or hardly a change in pitch. After we learnt they lived for years underground, it wasn’t so bad. Now, listening to the cicadas in the crystal space of early summer, the hill, always there, cut-silhouette on the horizon, we’re happy enough in our grand mediocrity.
Arriving
We can’t get it right
like Newton—we search
for patterns to lay it down
in best durable forms
[laughter]: watch the sea
deal with rocks,
feel the sand between
your toes. Does it matter
that Antares can consume
663 trillion Earths?
Monstrous weight, that can,
if you like, be lifted
by the work of bees:
a miracle none foretold.
Let’s say of art
that it thinks differently
about the shape of mushrooms
we picked together
on Saturday—we don’t know
anything about them,
except two hours of fun
in paddocks: the biosphere
and adventure ours. No one’s
going nowhere
but the infinity of our own
creative purpose, arriving
at a place unknown.
The gods in my shed
When Apollo says he knows whether all the grains of sand in the world add up to odd or even, and that he knows too the measure of the oceans, and the number of insects that crawl the earth, and the days of cities and empires, or how many waves are curling now about to break, or that he sees each butterfly flapping its wings and knows where every ripple goes, he is saying we do not know and that we should revere the knowing which is forever beyond us, meditate on it daily, pour water on the backs of goats if we must, to remind ourselves what we do not know, and never can. That is the function of the gods I still keep on a shelve in my shed.
Olive pressing
Seventeen years, mostly ignored. Finally, we learnt to press the olives from our tree into oil, a process which widens out into a world of infinite connections: the universe of stars and dust. Such that I hardly know how to say what we did. Perhaps, like Homer, we’ll discover in writing something smarter than ourselves. First, we blitzed the olives in a food processor, which bounced on the bench, rattling and shrill-screaming, as it spun the hard stones and oily flesh into a khaki mash that smelt divine, like the dark loamy earth between the thighs of Papatuanuku. Each batch we scooped into a large pot and heated, until this indelicate mixture began sparkling like morning dew on a pile of dung. You can thank the sun for sending water to the mountains, and for it to fall back into our laps, though it took men like my grandfather wielding the levers to build the dams with steel cracked from red earth, combined with gravel and cement squeezed from soft grey clay; the hill at Portland almost gone. And all this flows to the turning of the press made from ageless aluminium, everywhere and nowhere in the Earth’s crust, journeying now into space… and held tight in our hands, to wrench the oily liquid from its fibrous body, as alumina is wrenched from bauxite using the holding power of alpine lakes. Oil rises to the top, best left overnight in a jar that you can dip a ladle into and funnel through muslin cloth. What’s left behind is an acerbic liquid any gardener will deploy with pleasure to cut off those obstreperous weeds in mid-growth. In a ceramic jug the oil will stay peppery to taste; a wealth stored, to be drizzled on the familial bread, and spilling over onto the plate bounded by its raised rim. With the last pieces of bread, we soaked up the thin pools of golden oil and licked our glistening fingers— like shining Gods we are, for a moment.
A butterfly’s wing
These sighs, lengthening loud; split world, cold glare, chances gone in a touch of time. * Pains and pleasures still bind a common hope. * A seamless sky behind the weight of Cherry Blossom. A petal turns into a butterfly’s wing.
Rain on banana leaves
I built a shed on a hill about the size of Thoreau’s. Nearby, I planted a grove of banana trees, lady’s fingers. When they’re grown and the broken heart of Autumn brings the heavy rains, I’ll shelter inside my shed and listen for the patter on banana leaves. I make a promise, Chu Shu, to think of you then and share together our ten thousand pains.
The stonewalling shag
The shag declined to be interviewed, wouldn’t allow a photograph, said she knew nothing about the fish carcasses. “Ask the throttle-and-munch-em sea riders who were here last night.” She didn't have a song, just a certain way of puffing her chest, of being exactly where she was: the rock pools, the purple crabs, the decomposing seaweed, the curve of the bay. A rock higher than the high tide, an easy take off, these were her piper and pilchard. “Off the record, my silence was inevitable considering my original disposition to dive down under the horizon into the quiet.” After a long pause, while still looking out to sea, she said: “It's like this, those carcasses were of fish I knew in the way that you used to know the sky at night.” “Take what you want from that, I don't really care.”
Vaughan Gunson : Writing 