A Rare Moment

Seven years ago, my diary for 28 February 2003 reads:
‘In the evening we visited Fran and Howard who live nearby and had just sold their house to celebrate with them. When we got home after ten our house was very hot, indeed the hall gauge showed 26 degrees. So we opened the doors and sat on the patio seat, a whisky nightcap for me, tonic with a twist of a lemon from our tree for Anne. We left the house lights on but did not put the patio ones on. There was interplay of light and shadow on the patio and surrounding shrubs. The white nicotiana and alyssum and variegated flax glowed in the reflected light. Overhead were the stars, part of my childhood sky but rarely noticed in the city. The air remained absolutely still for about ten minutes. There was movement, Dorothy padded out of the bushes to flop down quietly by our feet and moths fluttered over the lawn and around the flowers. One of the beauties of moths and butterflies is their silent flight. We just sat there contemplating the surroundings. There was no sound. Then with a gentle stirring of air, the mildest of breezes arrived, touching the pittospernum leaves. "That was a moment of absolute perfection," Anne said. We remained outside as it continued warm, talking far into the night.

Work in Progress

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As Doty says ‘a poem is always a made version of experience.’ Here’s my latest, unfinished at this stage. On Thursday Paul took me to the hospital for my six-monthly respiratory check-up, a four-hour process. ‘You’ll have to write a poem about the waiting room’ he said.

When I got home I tried but it was going nowhere. Poems cannot be produced on demand. But then two thoughts coalesced. A few days earlier I’d jotted down some thoughts about the garden. And last year when my mother was dying I’d written a few lines. If I combined the three I could create a narrative. Like all fiction it is true and not-true. I’m unhappy about the Muse – an abstraction amidst concrete details. Sooner or later I’ll find an appropriate metaphor to link the thoughts.

Alien Actuality

At home after the tense
boredom of the hospital
waiting room, interior
minds sitting each in its
own space, I contemplate
the alien actuality of an
orange gerbera, a present
hastily heeled in, now
dominant in the petunia
patch. A monarch flutters
past, cabbage trees stark
against a cloudless sky.
The Muse proclaims sit
& sing of defiant Gods
but then the phone rings
to say she’s sinking fast.

Harvey McQueen

After I'd put this up I sat there thinking how much my daily blog has become part of my present life. This poem popped into my mind. Here it is unaltered in the writing down.

An Old Man Starts To Blog

Metal bars rattle the cattle stop
Weeping willows trail the Avon
Kids crowd school corridors
Imposing ruins rise to Grecian skes
Meetings plod through afternoons
Now, he pursues the power of audience.

Harvey McQueen

Us

Geoff has shown me how to put pictures on the blog. Here's us at Christmas in a photo taken by Bill.

Goya Rules

I received advance copies of my new poetry collection Goya Rules.

Mark Doty

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Vince lent me ‘Fire to Fire’, new and selected poems by Mark Doty an American. From the moment I dipped randomly into them I was hooked. Descriptive power, based on close observation with a sense of connectivity are his striking characteristics. I’m impressed with his empathy for animals.

Two dogs show affection in different ways. One buries his head into his master’s clothes. The other
‘Beau, had another idea. He’d offer his rump
for scratching, and wags his tail while he was stroked,
returning that affection by facing away, looking out
toward whatever might come along to enjoy.’

A friend has a friend who is dying. He has got rid of his dog and cats but is persuaded to get a goldfish for some company. Doty tells of reading a story about a Zen master who on his death thought about a deer he used to feed and so came back as a ‘stunning fawn’. The poem concludes
‘So Maggie’s friend –
is he going out

into the last loved object
of his attention?
Fanning the veined translucence

of an opulent tail,
undulant in some uncapturable curve,
is he bronze chrysanthemums,

copper leaf, hurried, darting,
doubloons, icon-cloured fins
troubling the water.’

On his web-site Doty has an essay, ‘Souls on Ice.’ In it he describes the process of creating a particular poem. Here is a paragraph from the essay: ‘Of course my process of unfolding the poem wasn't quite this neat. There were false starts, wrong turnings that I wound up throwing out when they didn't seem to lead anywhere. I can't remember now, because the poem has worked the charm of its craft on my memory; it convinces me that it is an artifact of a process of inquiry. The drama of the poem is its action of thinking through a question. Mimicking a sequence of perceptions and meditation, it tries to make us think that this feeling and thinking and knowing is taking place even as the poem is being written. Which, in a way, it is --just not this neatly or seamlessly! A poem is always a made version of experience.

Here is a full poem, which is from that site.

SIGNAL

LOST COCKATIEL, cried the sign, hand-lettered,
taped to the side of a building: last seen on 16th

between Fifth and Sixth, gray body, orange cheek patches,
yellow head. Name: Omar. Somebody's dear, I guess,

though how do you lose a cockatiel on 16th Street?
Flown from a ledge, into the sky he's eyed

for months or years, into the high limbs of the ginkgos,
suddenly free? I'm looking everywhere in the rustling

globes and spires shot through with yellow,
streaking at the edges, for any tropic flash of him. Why

should I think I'd see him, in the vast flap this city is?
Why wander Chelsea when that boy could be up and gone,

winging his way to Babylon or Oyster Bay,
drawn to some magnet of green. Sense to go south?

Not likely; Omar's known the apartment and the cage,
picked his seeds from a cup, his fruits and nuts from the hand

that anchored him -- and now he's launched, unfindable,
no one's baby anymore but one bit…

Think of the great banks of wires and switches
in the telephone exchange, every voice and signal

a little flicker lighting up -- that's Omar now,
impulse in the propulsive flow. Who'll ever know?

Then this morning we're all in the private commuter blur
when a guy walks into the subway car whistling,

doing birdcalls: he's decked in orange and lime,
a flag pluming his baseball cap; he's holding out a paper cup

while he shifts from trills to caws. Not much of a talent,
I think, though I like his shameless attempt at charm,

and everybody's smiling covertly, not particularly tempted
to give him money. Though one man reaches into his pocket

and starts to drop some change into the cup,
and our Papageno says, "That's my coffee, man,

but thanks, God bless you anyway,”
and lurches whistling out the door.

Butterflies, Marigolds and Tomatoes

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Yesterday afternoon was lovely and warm. Outside I saw the first monarch butterfly of the season. I also noticed another strange butterfly fluttering past. I know that New Zealand does not have many butterflies - only 17 have been recorded, some very rare, compared with Britain’s 69.

Research suggests the this one was probably a glabe copper. The same research reveals that the one which up till now I’ve called a red admiral is probably a New Zealand copper. Apparently the red admiral larva requires nettles, and as far as I know there is none around here. The other possibility is a painted lady, a recent immigrant from Australia.

The gloomy summer has meant few ripening tomatoes on the two plants that Anne has in pots. Lots of flowers and green ones. When I used to grow them in the old house veggie patch, I planted African marigolds alongside as companion plants to repel eelworms and insect pests. It’s not just eelworms that this plant repels. No dog will cock its leg over it either. This marigold actually comes from Central America; the Spanish took it home and from there it was taken to North Africa, where it did very well. When botanists found it there, they assumed it was a native.

The tomato also originally came from Central America. Once an Italian restaurateur told us proudly that the tomato had been the secret of Italian cuisine ever since Ancient Rome became a republic. I didn’t have the heart to disillusion him.

A Full Life

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‘The golden fleece did not power the boom, but it did provide the main life-raft when the boom ended.’ This is the end of a section called ‘The Golden Fleece’ from James Belich’s ‘Replenishing the Earth’. I had understood the merino flocks were the cause of the prosperity of 19th century Australia. Belich paints a different picture.

Belich as always is stimulating. He provides an economic history underpinning to a story I roughly knew. Jan Morris’s history of the British Empire was guns and glory. Belich’s account of the Anglo settlement of what he calls the British West is data and detail while his description of the similar American West migration fills in large holes in my knowledge of USA history.

He’s slow going though. Very dense and so jam-packed is his narrative that I have to consciously remain in a slow reading gear. My reading life is getting complicated. Tom dropped four books off last night. I have three of Pam’s. Bill has lent me another on Venice. Anne has four review novels which I want to read, plus the Kingsolver I gave her for Christmas. My 'to read' shelf is over-flowing.

As it is life is fairly topsy-turvy at present. Anne’s away in Tauranga so Jo is house-sitting. Then Susanna my care-giver is on leave. Christina her temporary replacement comes early, before eight-o-clock. So I’ve had to rearrange my morning. It’s hard for an old dog to change his habits. I’m out of kilter and forgetting to shave or take my tablets.

To complicate matters the hospital has just rung. Tomorrow’s appointments have been transferred from two in the afternoon to eight in the morning. Christina is coming now at 6 30. Anne will be back but is seeing someone from Waikato University so I’ve made arrangements for Paul to take me. It was an exhilarating half an hour on the phone.

As well as reading Belich, I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics. Last evening I watched breathtaking free dance ice-skating, The American pair were unbeatable I thought. But then a Canadian couple Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir outdid them before an ecstatic home crowd. The previous day a Russian pair had won the compulsory dance section but they couldn’t compete with the two North American couples in the free dance.

I’ve also been pigging out on nostalgic DVDs, especially ‘Dad’s Army’. I have joined up with Fatso in a scheme where I am able to have three disks out at a time. But I’ve enjoyed re-seeing ‘The Cruel Sea’ and ‘Genevieve’ while Deborah Kerr as a nun in ‘Black Narcissus’ (which I hadn’t seen) was miles more erotic than most modern actresses. I must say I found Woody Allen’s latest 'Vicky, Christina, Barcelona' very disappointing. So life is full.