by Emma Neale
for their concert’s one ‘edgy’ modern piece.
His pale-blue denim jacket, skinny jeans, DM boots,
lip gloss, mascara, the dark blond, afro-dahlia of his hair
stir squawks and eddies of disturbance in the audience
as if a toddler mock airbombs a flock of drowsy pigeons.
Yet his long spine still straightens for the count;
he hits the rhythm’s clip, smooth and tight—
so at the song’s end, after storms of applause,
whooped delight, and above the widening pool of quiet
even the thin, sky-pitched whistles
conjured from someone’s failing hearing-aids
seem like the cries of tiny, pink-throated larks
carolling jubilation.
Tag
From the tangle of trees
by the Warrender Street steps
near where city council crews have been deleting
the fuck-cunts and dick pics sprayed on the path,
sharper than the doof-doof of the stereo
from a student party in the valley’s dank trench,
comes the sound of castanets.
Someone drunk has peeled away from the party
to climb this high; camouflaged now
as sky puzzle, green-stitched twig-work
so all we can see is sycamore sway, azaleas,
rhododendrons in their flamenco blaze.
They clatter again, tik-tik-ticka-chicka!
Closer now, it’s clear we’d got it wrong;
it is the hard bead rattle
as someone preps and shakes aerosol paint.
Doggeding up the steps we scan
the ragged branch and bloomscape
for what little punk might be so half-cut
they’d even graffiti-cuss the trees—
ah quick-quick-look, there there he is
that small sleek agile man
in his hooded, beaked, silken onesie—
trickster korimako
bellbird, mimic bird, can-bird:
in great neon streams now
he tags the air with song—
bird iz here! bird lovez azaleaz! bird lovez birdz!
Two Birds Billing
>x x<
Desire
Be rid of this red ire
Sire.
rise,
and
It Goes Without Saying
*
—
…
Aubade
After the bird’s first small enquiries
cdec? cdec?
love turns, soft awake
makes embrace song’s corollary.
Sheetweb Spider
For weeks, a spider sits on the white ceiling
a small, dark star of muscle and mind.
We could navigate
the boat of our bed by her
if we ever wake marooned
or terrified by
the salt-blue expanse
of time and tide beyond
the known tomorrows
that wait for no mantra
from any of broken us, my love.
The spider hunches;
silent nun
her white prayer flags
spun on thin air
a Zen pin
on the light’s cartography—
hold this stillness
until this stillness holds.
Here,
you are.
Blue Rubato
Outside an inner-city high school
near a gutter glum with rubbish
(licked yoghurt pots, brown fruit peel)
the itinerant music teacher
scalp polished as clarinet keys
bends slightly to the side while his palms lift
as if to pray for just one pupil steeped in genius.
His mouth puckers a little and—
Whoa, he’s got it bad, can’t contain
desire’s blood tango: side-steps in a swoon,
air-kisses an absent lover,
hallucinates fragrance on orchid-smooth skin …
Wrong. As we walk in closer,
his hands adjust position
so he can hold the world’s smallest oboe:
as we pass, we tilt our heads to catch
his spontaneous street solo,
pianissimo as the kazoo
of a bee mid-air-doodle—
nope. Hey-ho. He’s ducked aside
to protect a Zippo from the wind.
His cigarette blows a blue rubato.
Trainee Emo
His heart feels as if it swings its socks and shoes in one hand only to discover prickle-grass under its pale and tender feet
No, his heart feels like a pink geranium craning to see into the gardener’s window, just after half its branches have been hacked off
No, his heart is the black security strap on a trampoline’s edge-padding: dangling, growing a thin coat of moss: essential, but ignored
No, his heart is like a stinging eyelid he can’t scratch for fear he’ll smudge his eyeliner and draw his family’s attention to it: as if they know anything about him
No, his heart feels like the large itchy lumps brought on by eating something delicious but highly allergenic
No, don’t be an arse, his heart feels like the smudge on the wall where his sister hit a bluebottle with a Nerf bullet: unbelievably sick and fluky death
No, his heart feels like the dog-eared page the ideal reader actually never turns back to
You know, his heart could go on like this forever,
but the aroma of his mother’s croque monsieur
serenades on its irresistible pan-pipes
through the light-gap under his door
so he Rapunzels himself down
from his towering melancholy,
vows to treat all family jokes
as he would the tear-sting of Tabasco:
swallow the burning words.
Asks quietly for a glass of cow’s.
Sonnet for Mr Ponting, HOD Maths & Economics
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
I upset Mr Ponting today with my immature facetious reaction to eating in economics class like a budgie.
But I’d probably upset him more if I dared show the edits
Mum scrawls on all the lines he sets for detention
(today, blunt eyebrow pencil in ‘Midnight Burlesque’ all over my loose-leaf)
or worse, if he saw the slurs she scrawls on their reverse.
Not everyone’s as gaga on grammar as she is: not even teachers.
Don’t think I’m meek. Just resigned. Money geeks like him have already scored the earth.
Distance
It was the first spring the child realised
he had seen other springs
and had grown his own memories.
‘So—not very long till you are old!’ he cried
with a quarter smile, flummoxed
by his own smug-sad wisdom
and the pain that flew in
through the mind’s skylight
was so swift and silvering,
I plunged my nose into the magnolia’s bowl,
I plunged it again to the pale spray of
wild plum,
its flowers the size of the metal snap-domes
on a baby’s stretch ’n’ grow;
then asked, ‘Do they have a scent? Can you tell?’
He copied. ‘Mmmm, they do. It’s beautiful,
but it’s very, very faint—as if we’re looking
out of the backs of our minds.
Or feel it from a hill very far beside the sky.’
As if we can only know some things
at a distance. From years away, say.
Or the granular, woven light of a page.
Small Wonder
Our youngest, back home from his nana’s,
catapults himself into the kitchen on the sprung elastic
of a secret he says he can never, ever tell.
I set a knife aside, towel my hands dry,
clasp him close and say, ‘Hey, hey,
little one, hey? ’
He pushes in hard at the sides of his mouth
as the blue-green fire of his irises
brims and flickers, swells and burns.
He pounces at his own impulsive tongue
so it’s trapped between two knuckles
the way a cat will paw-slam a skink;
and again with both hands
in some odd, kitschy copy of an Edvard Munch,
he stretches down his bottom lip
—so I’m braced for a tale
of rapscallion shenanigans: muck and break,
sweet-thievery from Nana’s biscuit tins;
felt-pen sunglasses and beer can
scribbled on a Jesus bookmark,
or water-pistol bulls-eyed! at her corkboard
with its ancient Xeroxed articles
that frown, ‘Would YOU want monkeys for uncles?’
or warn, ‘Harry Potter: Gateway Drug to Satan’.
‘Did some trouble come up at Nana’s?’
‘No! ’ and his wail says he’s battled the urge to tell
for the entire afternoon …
I have to promise not to laugh.
Not to pass it on.
I have to promise again, promise.
I have to close the door, yes, bend down,
so he can whisper inside his hands
that are cupped now like a cloche
to ward off admonishment’s frost,
block disbelief’s
orange wire-cutter beaks,
protect the pale-pink nimbus
of his secret
as it buds, opens.
Bilingual
At our seven-year-old’s school, there’s a new pupil.
His name is Huiseong Song: Korean for bright star.
‘That’s cool!’ our son exclaims.
‘He sounds like the song of songs,
‘the most singing-est of songs!’
Our tousled pipistrelle in ripped black jeans,
he shins up a tree and cries, ‘Hey, Huiseong! Hi! ’
Joy’s echolocation, afternoon serenade
in the playground the children have christened,
like some old-time ship, The Adventure.
Below the climbing frame’s mock-rigging, moored
in caution’s vertigo, his mother confides
fear’s limbo: for Huiseong knows no English.
Yet—see how he close-reads hands and feet
for grip and swing, scoot and climb.
drop and land and run; the children’s step and leap
are smoke, are sails, are flags;
are pale-gold flashes marked on black bark,
sticks laid like arrows on fresh mud,
light brush strokes on day’s blue scroll.
Just one week later, when I ask, ‘How’s Huiseong?’
Our son grins, finds him, cups his elbow;
with an ‘On your marks, get set, go!’
side by side they run and rise;
they clamber, they tree-hide,
they You’re In, they Not-It,
agile under leaf-steeples,
limber in sun-time,
fluent, already, in the fleet code-switch
between a wilding self and first other-kin.
Dark Glass
Against all the winter mind has dreaded: spring again.
We worry, is it too early, will it thrive?
The foamhead of blossoms rushes up the dark, glassy branches
as if festive Prosecco has been spilled well before the wedding, the win.
Optimism, too, stupidly, biologically brims, as I hurry into the city dusk
expecting young crowds tipsy with what they think is wine,
though the zing is really the fumes and flint of their own swift blood.
The stances of a man and a woman in a doorway
short the night as if hidden wires touch—
though there is ample space between them.
They radiate something the way a snake’s hooded head does.
Or the scorpion’s curved tail.
Animal. Angular. Their voices rise higher. Blunt but chopped.
What I catch is you said,
I never, you always, you can’t.
And in the middle, against the shop’s boarded-up door,
there is a small girl calling, ‘Mummy, no! Daddy, stop!’
And the parents slip strange quick sly looks over their shoulders
though there is plenty of history left in the clip, they don’t stop—
you just, I told you, you didn’t,
the same accusations
that corner me here,
shame-crouched
clicking through keys like a rosary,
because I did not stop, turn back, or speak.
I did not.
My Aunt’s Story
She tells me of when she and her twin were only eight,
on a family visit south to meet their own brand-new aunt,
a young émigrée due to arrive and settle
in a small antipodean riverside town.
As Sunday-crisp and silken as rosettes, ribbons,
the townsfolk gathered on the station platform
all there with fresh-picked posies, handmade signs,
to greet my great-uncle’s Welsh war bride.
Sun-struck gossamer, expectation itself seemed afloat, alight,
as both twins clutched confetti, watched the train arrive.
Yet even before my aunt’s own foreign aunt
had stepped her way along the narrow aisle
they saw her infants through the carriage window.
My grandmother warned, urgent and low,
‘Hide your confetti, children. Quickly. Hide it,’
then hugged them tight from pressing forward.
Horror’s echo in gaunt and bone. The almost unspeakable real.
Another aunt, in whispered shock: But they look like Belsen babies.
So as when the starved, to heal,
must first be served the plainest meal
the bouquets, confetti, the banners enamelled with joy
were lowered, concealed; for now they seemed to blare and bloat,
too much, too rich, too soon for history’s
Blitz-shocked, harrowed envoys.
Still
When young, I used to think
a solitary on a public bench
must be mournfully isolate,
soul full-sore from thought’s arid trek,
gaze plunged inwards, sifting the past’s thick clag
to try to mine again the ember-gleam
of optimism, or love’s gold-foiled veins.
Yet now the world feels city-crammed, fierce-frantic,
a disco dystopia drugged by greed-eats-need,
a singleton moored in thought on a park bench
seems a gifted votary of silence,
a living icon of some secret
south seas paradise
of the stilled and quiet mind.
Camellia Trees
When she was five sh
e went boldly into the world
all on her not-telling alone; hiked a great distance,
brave, she thought it, to break out of the dust-cloth hours
of boredom; in her head, a small voice sang
she walked ache-rs and ache-rs; ache-rs and ache-rs she roamed;
sturdily she forged into the soft and secret gloam made below
the camellia trees discovered by her travels;
crawled into their green cave hiddenly;
crouched under the crinkled pink fabrics,
afloat on the loam-sweet scent, soil plush as rabbit paws,
the small beetles and ladybirds trusting enough
to adorn her fingers like mobile jewels—
emerald, garnet, onyx; the colours too
of the quiet, the privacy, the dusk,
the benevolence of trees stooped low
like close angelic attendants in old church windows
shiny as thin-sucked lemon drops, barley twists—
yes, she would like to turn back even now,
although she guesses in truth the trees
were just along a neighbourhood fence;
knows she could only stand there,
elephantine, sigh-worn, mind sleep-grained
as when woken too soon by children
who clamour to open their dollhouse again;
the taste of straw and mash coating her mouth,
the ache in her joints of hill climbs, sway-spine,
someone in the years’ long night
must have slipped her into harness, behind her a cart
that cries with ragged chattels, the laden cases
of these are your days, darlings,
you must shoulder them, shoulder them.
Withdrawn
It is not within the scope of this poem
to discuss the failure of successive governments
to address the glaring discrepancies
between all the different weights and shades
of human pain—
but suffice to say that today,
on George Street in Dunedin, 2017,
I saw a thin young man
in a sleeping bag
on top of a flattened cardboard box
with a disposable cup for coins at his side
and he couldn’t look up
when he thanked us
