Tuesday Poem: Palmy by Jennifer Compton

Here's a taster of Jennifer Compton's poem Palmy - yes, about Palmerston North - the rest is on the Tuesday Poem hub where I am privileged to be the editor this week.

This used to be all forest, not so long ago, and I could tell by the sorrow

that haunts the wide, flat roads, that seeps out of the sense of openness,

something is missing, something is wrenched askew, as the river runs.

The wind blows through, in rolling gusts, baffled, and almost angry.

The wind is searching for the Papaioea Forest. How beautiful it was.  

Tonight, behind the necklace of glittering lights below, is the darkness

which is the hills. Upon them, when it is light, like many crucifixions,

the wind farm. Then the long, ungainly arms swoop and seem to bless.

I will admit, to you, that I have found Palmerston North disconcerting.

More here at the Tuesday Poem hub. 

Tuesday Poem: Ruby

It’s Ed and me today at the end of the seawall

on the way to Lion Rock. We lean on it, feel

the crust of lichen beneath our elbows, watch 

the dogs

running on the shingle beach. Billy’s a softie

for a staffie-cross but he’s pulled  Ed’s arm

from the socket too many times to count. Ruby’s

not a softie, she has eyes like coins, a seal’s coat.

Together they’re the tigers in that story

running till they’re butter. Ed’s talking

about the dances in Limerick and

gets onto how he trod the boards with Harold

Pinter. Ed’s a painter now, or was – his duff

shoulder tells that story. Some days we fall in

with Charlie the blue heeler and his owner

whose name I always forget. Both of them have

a touch of wilderness about them.  Charlie’s

owner’s parents ran the Oasis Motel

in Palmerston North. Colin lived in Palmy, too,

before he moved to Rome to sculpt; his peke 
Andrew is pissing on the wall now and Colin’s

following in his shark tooth hat. He tells a story
about living on Long Island and how, walking
with his bulldog, he was sometimes mistaken

for Truman Capote.  Justine  is blonde and pregnant 

and makes me think of vanilla icecream.

When she hoves into view with slobbering

Aaron and Beagle-eyed Georgie, the men

hold themselves tighter. She’s pretty,

Justine. Her husband’s a musician and

at weekends you see them out and

about. One day

Ed, Charlie’s owner, Justine, Colin and I are

up by the Rec’ in the pingao grass,

and we’re talking baby names while the dogs

churn. Her face is plump and tired, and Justine 

says, 'Ruby, I think,' then louder, 'Ruby’ –

and we stop talking a moment and breathe

in the sea and the sharp grass and the frangipane

scent Justine wears and the must of Colin’s

sheepskin coat and whatever it was Billy rolled

in, and then we laugh, and I mean laugh. The

belly kind that makes it hard to breathe anything

at all. We laugh, Ed, Charlie’s owner, Justine, Colin

and me

because there’s Ruby - over there – sniffing

Charlie’s arse, sleek and black, eyes a-gleam,

nothing vanilla about her, nothing like

ice-cream. Weeks later, by Lion Rock,

Colin catches me up. He’s got some results back.

His blood is revolting, turning on his heart.

I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, eyes

on the oily sea, the other hand holding a bouquet

of the stiff pale seaweed that washes up

in storms. Some days it’s so luminous here,

it’s like standing inside a shell.

Next time we see Ed, he’s at the corner

of  Nikau and the Promenade waving

and waving with his good arm.  ‘Justine had

her baby! I’ve seen the little mite.’ We
stop and wait. The wind 

getting up. Ed has Billy’s lead tight around

his wrist and pants when he reaches us. He mimes
lifting a pram cover and peering in. ‘Now ask me,’

he says, ‘ask me her name.’ We say all together,

a straggly chorus, ‘What’s her name, Ed?’ What’s

her name, Ed?  says the sea, and Ruby circles
Billy like a tiger, and the gulls ratchet it down to a mew

and everything is one big smile, everything on this

beach, one big ear. ‘Sure as I’m standing

here,’ says Ed, ‘You’ll never guess.’  He heaves Billy

along the path now, a grin like shark’s teeth,

then Charlie shows up, and his owner –

Garwain? – and they want to know too,

and Ed’s having a ball. We’re all having a ball. 

Mary McCallum 

This poem was written very long time ago. Nine years. But I've been redrafting it over the past two months. 

Ed doesn't walk Billy now because he isn't well enough so his wife Patricia does it instead.  We always stop and chat when we see them, but Billy and Ruby are older and greyer and only sniff each other now - no churning. Colin passed away five years ago and his beloved Andrew followed. Garwain, if that was his name, moved away with  Charlie. So, I think, did Justine and her dogs and her Ruby - but I'm not sure about that. I just haven't seen them in a while. I still enjoy my daily walks with my Ruby but it's been a while since it was quite so social and quite so much fun. 

Do get along to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a delightful fragment of Robin Hyde's, editor Janis Freegard. 

Tuesday Poem: Ferry Road, Tuesday

Back from a walk to the ridge

and all the way up we'd watched

the weather coming in across the harbour

and by weather, I mean

a breath like a peppermint-eating cyclist,

nothing, and then suddenly something

fresh and light at your shoulder, and all

the way up we'd turned

and turned again to see it coming

its line drawn and redrawn in the water

closer     each    time

and how fast we walked

to be ahead -- to the top of Ferry Road

and onto the track through the new

growing spindly things and the crocheted

spider webs and the splash of rata

and push of green and the confetti

of beech leaves on the rise and

fall --

up and

up --

'There,' I said at last, as we stood
looking back at the weather again, half
the water crinkled now -- an old man

smiling, 'is where the pa of Te Hiha stood
he could see anything coming --
the whole

of the harbour.'

We'd left the beach in stillness, and
returned to a stiff breeze. 

Mary McCallum

Poem revised May 22

Tuesdays are my poem days and my bush-walking days, but not today (sadly) for the walking -  I have a meeting to get to. Poems, yes. Tuesday is always Tuesday Poem day for me and has been for three years. After you've read 'me' - do go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a wonderful poem by a poet who is UK born to Guyanese parents - Fred D'Aguiar. I read his poem before I started on my poem again last night  (written a couple of weeks ago and left to brew) - I think my poem is talking to D'Aguiar's don't you? The title especially. 

Tuesday Poem: The Summer Day by Mary Oliver [a reading]

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

                                                   Mary Oliver

These two wonderful lines - the  last two lines of Oliver's 'The Summer Day' -  are the perfect preface to a novel I just reviewed today for Radio NZ:  Isabel Allende's Maya's Notebook. Which is why it's on my mind.

What better question could there be? In fact, the whole of the poem is a wonderful thing. It's about the art of paying attention - showing 'love', in effect - and thereby transforming both the thing we pay attention to and ourselves. Which is what Isabel Allende believes and is in evidence, in all its glory, in her most recent novel.

Tuesday Poem: Leaving by Andrew Johnston

Taupata scrapes the house all night,
a madman brushing off spiders. You try

to fold the map small enough
to find a place to live, but

the wind prevails, fraying the sky,
making it hard to

read the directions. Outside
the day is ceramic, brittle --

a bright hood: its
crumbs of light.

*

Your belongings --
as if you belonged to them --

vanish as the funnel narrows:
you want to weigh down

a few precious things,
open the doors,

let the wind take the rest.
Days of boxes, allegorical days:

the sky turns its huge puzzled face towards you,
and then it turns away.

from Birds of Europe (VUP, 2000). Posted with permission.

Andrew's poem looks simple on the face of it -- in shape and message (couplets, another leaving poem), but in fact it's packed with arresting images -- aural and visual -- that wrestle with each other as the speaker of the poem wrestles to understand, or live with, what is happening.

The taupata (a plant also known as the mirror plant for its shiny leaves) scraping the house like a madman brushing off spiders is an image of irritation that morphs into nightmare. The folding and folding to get a map small enough, the wind, the belongings vanishing, the boxes - all evoke the internal mayhem in the poem. The final puzzled face of the sky is like the speaker of the poem - a still sad image.

For some reason I keep thinking of songs by the Mountain Goats like Belgian Things and Woke up New which have that same surface lightness and underlying deep sadness of parting. On first reading, I took the poem to be about a departing lover, but now - and after a brief communication with Andrew on Facebook - I think it is about someone who is leaving what he knows.

I am a big fan of Andrew's work and have posted it before - not least his brilliant double sestina The Sunflower - but this past week saw me run into his work again. Propitiously, I think. You see, I have started a new job working as a new publisher in association with another established publisher who just happens to have his office right near the wonderful secondhand bookshop Pegasus Books in Cuba Street's The Left Bank. On my first lunch hour I popped in and bought Andrew's Birds of Europe - a very nice copy that was handed to me in a brown paper bag (I think the best things come in brown paper bags) - and I glanced through it back at the office, then spent the evening reading it from cover to cover. A thoughtful and sensual collection - including a captivating series of poems about the French tightrope walker who walked between the twin towers in NY which I'd love to post another time.

Andrew lives in Paris and we communicate via Facebook, so I asked him via message if I could post Leaving and he said, yes I could. So I did. Lovely.

Now please please please click HERE to go to Tuesday Poem's communal birthday poem - 18 stanzas posted by 18 different poets around the world over three weeks, and it's finished!! It is quite astonishing - clever, jazzy, fun. Hard to believe it's not all from the same brain. Such a blast. Happy Birthday to us. Happy Birthday to us...

Tuesday Poem: Cloud walking

across the harbour

the city melts into the morning 

over it a sky the pale end of blue

and improbable clouds all hues

of white and grey heaped

in heavy shapes

a hat   a dog   a bird in flight

on the Promenade

a woman hoves 

into view    blue shirt strains

over an improbable bosom

hair springs from 

an improbable white hat

who would have thought it?

the sky down here to say

gidday

Mary McCallum

This is fun and from a long time ago (10 years?) when I was getting back into my poetry again. My subject became what was outside my door and where I walked. I've polished this poem up, though, in the past week, because I'm working as co-editor on an Eastbourne Anthology of writing and thought I should go back to some of my Eastbourne poems and pop them into the mix for consideration. Why not? 

Please check out the Tuesday Poem Third Birthday Poem which is in its third week now - 11 poets have posted 11 stanzas and there are more to come. I love the way it's going... 

Tuesday Poem: my stanza's up for the 3rd birthday poem

I've just added my stanza to the Tuesday Poem communal birthday poem - am rather pleased I am number 7. We're doing a kind of jazzy thing there ... so I've picked up sounds and stretched and repeated them - tried some syncopation. Before me is Keith Westwater of Lower Hutt and after me is T Clear of Seattle Washington. How cool is that?

here's my verse...

7.
catch the
(whispers)
it's time to
(latch the window)
catch the 
      grab it! the tail     oh boy



find the rest here. 

And here's a fabulous poem Death of a Bee  by Tuesday Poet Kathleen Jones.

Tuesday Poem: Curtains by Helen Rickerby

I believe my parents are immortal
They will live forever
in the same house
they have lived in
for the whole of my life
they will stay
at the end
of a phoneline
answer when I call
to ask them questions
to which they will always
know the answers

I believe my parents will never get sick
I mean of course
that they might get
the odd cold maybe
a stomach bug once
in a while but they will always
be able to walk further
and faster
than I can
they'll never be slowed
or stymied by dodgy
hips or feet or hearts

I believe my parents will always be able to look after themselves
They'll stay in the house
up the long steep driveway
with their lifetime of treasures
they'll eat what they like
go to sleep and wake up
as late as they want

I believe my parents will always be together
like a pair of curtains
that overlap
at their edges


First of all - it's the 3rd birthday of the Tuesday Poem! Three years we've been going with Claire Beynon (Dunedin) and me curating. What a ride it's been! So many many poems, so many many poets. As with other years we're celebrating with a communal poem which has already started and goes over three weeks. Do check it out.

Now, I promised my blog readers Curtains last week when I posted Just Fine to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary. I explained I'd been casting around for the ideal poem and that Curtains leapt into view - or rather, opened in front of me. But then I found my way into an old file of poems and there it was:  Just Fine. A low-key poem about an ordinary family Saturday, my ordinary family Saturday, and it did the job, and I posted it.

I saved Curtains (My Iron Spine, Headworx 2008) for this week, and people have been asking...

Curtains is a poem about the everydayness and longevity of love -- love in a relationship (of 25 years or more or less), love we have for our parents, and they for each other. There is the feel of a fairytale about it. The house with the steep driveway and treasures evokes a castle to me - and there is immortality here and a type of perfection and an absence of rules. But the curtains are vintage rule-bound time-locked imperfect suburbia!

I love the line: 'like a pair of curtains that overlap at their edges.' It evokes the way people who are together for a while lose their edges, and how they hang out day and night (what better than curtains to show clearly when it's night and day). 'Overlap at their edges' also brings to my mind lapping in a running race and water lapping, both of which feel like the stuff of long term relationships.

Now my silver wedding has come and gone, I dedicate this poem to my parents, of whom I believe the same.

Curtains is published with permission (thanks Helen!)

Helen Rickerby is a Tuesday Poet, publisher at Seraph Press, and co-managing editor of the JAAM literary journal. She also has a cool day job working on the Encyclopaedia of NZ Te Ara. Abstract Internal Furniture, was published by HeadworX in 2001 and her second collection, My Iron Spine, followed in 2008. More on Helen  on last week's blog and another poem from My Iron Spine, here. 

Tuesday Poem: Just Fine

Saturday will be fine. We’ll start the day with coffee. The tennis club will have a working bee which we’ll forget about. A friend will ride over on her bike. The boys will jam in our boatshed. Our next-door neighbours will finally start on their deck. The fire brigade will be called out to the lighthouse. My husband will buy butterfish for dinner. Amy will look beautiful in her grandmother’s wedding dress. I’ll walk with my daughter in Days Bay to get a glimpse of it. We’ll eat kiwifruit gelato on the beach. That sort of thing.     

Mary McCallum

Eastbourne 2006

It's our 25th wedding anniversary today and I have been very uncertain about what to post here to celebrate that fact. My husband hates hates hates cheesiness and PDAs (public displays of affection), and is a bit suspicious of poetry and likes his privacy, so no love poems then ... (and I do have them.) I wrote a poem once about him in his olive grove during a storm but what I found wasn't the poem I thought it was. He's very happy in the olive grove, my husband, tending things, picking olives, building stone walls. 

I've already posted a number of poems here that I wrote about the grove around when my chapbook was published last year ... so what to do? Last night, I trawled through old poetry folders - astonished by the sheer number of dashed-off 'drafts' and finished poems I'd forgotten about - and feeling it wasn't going to get any easier, I emailed my friend Helen Rickerby asking if I could use her poem Curtains from My Iron Spine. Helen's a Tuesday Poet like me - a very good poet, in fact, but also someone with a very good heart, and this shines through her work. Curtains is about a couple (her parents) who are always together in the same house and never sick and are 'like a pair of curtains that overlap at their edges'. 

I love this love poem for so many reasons. It is of course a wish, not real at all, but the description of the longlastingness and everydayness of true love is the thing that felt so right to me today of all days... So, girded with Helen's permission, I started writing her poem up on my blog and was finished, when I remembered some more old folders of mine from another computer. I couldn't resist a flick through ... and found Just Fine, and it felt just right. 

It's about being happy together - those ordinary family moments on an ordinary day here, at our place, by the beach. At first I had no idea when I wrote it - but I realise that it must have been 2006, with Amy's wedding. The poem is also about looking forward to things and the potential inherent in the work we do and lives we lead and promises we make. I like that there's a wedding there.  

Anyway, that's us. Twenty-five years together since our wedding in Wellington on March 26 1988.  Three children. One dog. One house. One Barn. Thousands of olive trees and books. Countless family meals and perfect Christmasses. Friends we've kept and friends we've found and people, large and small, who've come into our family. Lots and lots of Saturdays and Sundays like this one in the poem. Happy.

Happy Anniversary to us. 

Tuesday Poem: Predictive

How quickly friend becomes frenetic,

Christmas - crisis, singing - pining,

darling - dialing.

Mary McCallum

Just a fragment, really. But somehow, found like this in my draft pile of poems, it seems to work. Reading it - and seeing all my drafts and all my folders of poems deemed finished - makes me feel sad.  I haven't been writing much poetry lately because fiction has taken centre stage. I can't sustain both at the same time. I will need to make some time soon - perhaps a week - or longer - to pull together what I have into something I could call a collection. 

Meanwhile, please check out our hub poem this week by a fascinating Australian, chosen by PS Cottier in Canberra. I love these introductions to Australian poets via Tuesday Poem. A whole new world over there... have a lovely week, especially on Thursday - World Poetry Day. 

Tuesday Poem: Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth (with notes)

    Written on the roof of a coach, on my way to France.

    EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
    A sight so touching in its majesty:
    This City now doth, like a garment, wear
    The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
    Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
    All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
    Never did sun more beautifully steep
    In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
    Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
    The river glideth at his own sweet will:
    Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
    And all that mighty heart is lying still!

---

The above poem can found in:

Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1932

Construction of the original Westminster Bridge in London was begun in 1739 and completed in 1750. Construction of the current bridge began in 1854 and was completed in 1862.
_________________________________________________________________
I found this post on a website called PotW.org - I love the bit about Wordsworth writing the poem on the roof of a coach - not on a bridge at all! I never knew that! Unless he composed the poem in his head on the bridge and later wrote it while travelling ... My guess is he lied as one does in poems all the time in favour of the emotional truth. Go William. 


I wanted to post this poem here today because it's in my Faber diary this week, and reading it again, I realised afresh how marvellous it is in its evocation of a new day dawning, and the hugeness of a beloved city and its beating heart. 

I also can't help thinking of London and its river and bridges and going to work in the morning on the tube and walking those bricked streets to work. The glory of it on the best days. 

This week at the TP hub is a poem that couldn't be further from London or Wordsworth - check out the post by editor Robert Sullivan. 

Tuesday Poem: The Edge by Rethabile Masilo

I walk into light
in a straight line,
I am warmth
when I lick myself
with this tongue;
it's been a hard day
but I'm back now,
I am new earth
for country, brother,
for another swing
at the thing gotten
off thought's edge.
No face, no head,
no tail. Just you, I,
and a need to save us
from the wrong done
to books. A dog leg
caught in a trap
is sawed off. Who
knows what words
were said to the girl
at the well, the edge
of what thought,
before she dove in?
I been trained by
the turn of this century
to be cuss words,
the central insult
in four-letter instants.
If I stop now, short
of the final thrill,
the definitive answer,
if I draw to one side
away from your path,
a curtain under cover
of night, a season
will go without me
in the helix of rebirths.
If I doubt the power
vested in me through
this colour, this tongue
click, mountains
that look at the sides
with the bronze pity
of joy, then all is lost.

Rethabile is our newest Tuesday Poet - born in Lesotho the same year as me, and - in fact - in the same continent. I was born in Zambia but my only connection with that place is via my parents' memories. Rethabile is disconnected physically - for he lives now in Paris - but his heart is still there. 

Rethabile's blog Poefrika celebrates African-inspired writing and writers, and personal heroes in the worlds of music and literature and politics. It's inspiring to see these names and faces, their stories, their poetry, and to read Rethabile's own work. In this poem, I like the way he talks to himself, asks questions, suggests different ways the story could go, describes an edge where - perhaps - he resides or could go (over), and returns to the main question of identity. I love 'I am warmth when I lick myself with this tongue', I love - but don't fully understand - 'the bronze pity of joy'.  I like the way the poem drives forward in its short-linked lines, like a tongue, a path, an arrow, confident in its shape, not breaking out of the edge the poet has set himself, and as such suggests all is indeed not lost.

Thank you for permission to post your poem, Rethabile. 

Please check out the hub for a post from Zireaux - At Melville's Tomb by Hart Crane - and such a commentary! Read to believe. 

Tuesday Poem: Alice Spider (extract) by Janis Freegard

From Alice sings

she's a nightchild baby, daughter of the city, she's part of these neon lights, she walks so fast and looks so cool, you know that she's got it right, she's a citygirl, sugar, and she's so clever, she knows the quick way home, she's a moonbeam baby ...
____

Gorgeous huh? You can see more of Alice Spider and hear her read out loud on the Anomalous website. This exciting US press is publishing Alice Spider by kiwi Tuesday Poet Janis Freegard - she posts on it here and you'll notice that Anomalous has been drumming up some funding on Kickstarter. It's a great way to support a poet and a press and you get a beautiful book (and all sorts of extras) for your troubles. I've signed up, and there's 16 hours left to go from... now... click here. 

And over on Tuesday Poem there's a terrific brand new poem by Fleur Adcock and a lovely piece of writing by this week's editor Helen Rickerby explaining why she chose it. Then there's the sidebar - 30 poets and 30 poems... why not? 

Tuesday Poem: A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

more here...

Thanks to Melissa Green - my lovely poet friend for posting this poem on her blog once and thus alerting me to it. It's perfect for the week when we think of the Canterbury earthquake that hit two years ago delivering such horrors to that beautiful city ... I also direct you to Fault by Joanna Preston which is on the Tuesday Poem hub.

My thoughts will be with the people of Christchurch on February 22. 

Back to Melissa Green who lives in Boston and is a Tuesday Poem alumni and someone I correspond with - not enough, not nearly enough. Just this evening, I suddenly wanted to see what she was up to - to see she was still writing poems and blogging. She is a quite extraordinary poet. 

Melissa Green

So yes, she's blogging (now and again), but more importantly, I discovered (I must have heard something on the wind) that she's publishing her memoir The Linen Way as an e-book with Rosa Mira Books. I have had the privilege of reading this memoir and the images it left me with are burnt into my memory.  

Such brilliant news... bravo Penelope Todd of Rosa Mira! Bravo Melissa!

Do please check out the TP hub - not only is there Joanna Preston's poem but also, in the sidebar, you'll find poets posting their own work and work by others they admire. Lovely stuff.