To the Occupant Read online

  For Danny

  Published by Otago University Press

  Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street

  Dunedin, New Zealand

  [email protected]

  www.otago.ac.nz/press

  First published 2019

  Copyright © Emma Neale

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  ISBN 978-1-98-853168-7 (print)

  978-1-98-859292-3 (EPUB)

  978-1-98-859293-0 (Kindle mobi)

  978-1-98-859294-7 (ePDF)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand. This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. No reproduction may be made, whether by photocopying or by any other means, unless a licence has been obtained from the publisher.

  Editor: Anna Hodge

  Design/layout: Fiona Moffat

  Author photograph: Jim Tannock

  Front cover: Nick Austin, Travelling Envelope #2, 2012 (detail), acrylic on newspaper, 575 x 785mm.

  Courtesy of the artist and Hopkinson Mossman

  Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks

  CONTENTS

  To the Occupant

  i A Room that Held the Sea

  Courtship

  Wild Peregrinations

  Wedding Kiss

  Morning Song

  A Room that Held the Sea

  ‘my mother in this way mixing me wings and tongue’

  So Buttoned Up

  Memorial Service

  Cut Price

  Will our small joys be only their ancestors?

  Warning

  Called

  The Belt

  Big Bad

  The Local Pool

  Minor Goddess

  ii ‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’

  Harwood Beach Walk: Eavesdropping

  Doorway

  Mère-mare

  ‘So Sang a Little Clod of Clay’

  Tone Poem

  Resurrection

  Teen Genie

  Tag

  Two Birds Billing

  Desire

  It Goes Without Saying

  Aubade

  Sheetweb Spider

  Blue Rubato

  Trainee Emo

  Sonnet for Mr Ponting, HOD Maths & Economics

  Distance

  Small Wonder

  Bilingual

  Dark Glass

  My Aunt’s Story

  Still

  Camellia Trees

  Withdrawn

  The Appointment

  Removal

  Slander

  Turn

  Swarm

  Pivot

  iii Selected Letters

  Underneath the Fridge Magnet

  Affidavit

  Letter from Hamelin

  Letter from tomorrow’s tomorrow and tomorrow

  Dear Friend

  Dear Adversity

  Unlove

  Blindsided

  Long Distance

  The TastiTM Taste Guarantee

  Dear Old Diaries

  Joy

  Chain Mail

  Dear Future, I’m afraid this is how I begin to lose you

  Postcards Just Won’t Cut It

  Economy of Style

  Envoi

  Acknowledgements and Notes

  To the Occupant

  A body, such a ponderous thing

  to drag along a life in

  this coffin-fat cabinet

  the mind-candle

  push-pedals around

  and such tiny perforations

  to peer through

  at the drip-drop

  greeny-diamond world …

  But you, still new,

  mind wide,

  lick it, taste it,

  lollop through it

  blithe as a rabbit

  a-whiffle at berry canes

  show us again

  how lightly to shoulder

  these old bone crates,

  remind us we are wrong

  when we long

  to lay them down.

  i

  A Room that Held the Sea

  Courtship

  He wooed me many ways: tried everything from lending books to night-dancing, blood starry with lager. We talked, yet it wasn’t working. So he left the country, asking if he could keep in touch.

  His letters—handwritten—soon arrived. He laughs when I say this, but it was seduction by punctuation. As if each semi-colon was someone leaning forward, head bubbling with the future; or perhaps an athlete, leaping for the catch. Such elegance and rhythm.

  Bud and stalk; sun and moon; hook and sinker. A bottle that’s popped its cork. Or even egg and ecstatic sperm, pre-fusion.

  Wild Peregrinations

  From the look-out point

  of sleep’s edge

  the years spread back

  with all the pinprick fires and dark clutches

  of an old, uneasy settlement.

  The thoughts watch themselves,

  the way one falcon acts silent sentinel

  to another across the blue whisper

  of desolate distances.

  Then—as if it believes

  its moon-washed, grass-gold hide

  will be ample camouflage—

  a dart, a jink,

  an erratic dash and back-dash:

  hope’s wild peregrinations,

  love’s blood-sweet liqueur

  crammed beneath its skin.

  Wedding Kiss

  The four-year-old gasps

  averts his face

  scrunches his eyes shut tight:

  love is an onion

  desire the knife.

  Morning Song

  Gramps stole eggs, green seeds of song, from their nests

  to show us wonder; hairline cracks ran

  our sooky hearts as we watched the robbed mothers fly home.

  He cradled fallen fledglings in his palm, quoted

  Thrush’s eggs … like little low heavens, and

  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang

  then barked, ‘Who wrote those?’

  When we didn’t know:

  ‘What d’they teach you these days?’

  He kept army hours, was formal with our fathers:

  hellos were handshakes as if manners

  meant even sons’ love should be held at arm’s length.

  Yet, his face a white wilted poppy,

  he forbade the word hate

  as yelled at brothers or sisters

  over Yahtzee or Scrabble cheats,

  at garden hoses poked down trousers,

  or whose turn it was for more sucky chores.

  He had seen hate. Had lived inside it.

  Knew its cattle trucks, lice-run bunks,

  its thorn-crowned wires, borne its hunger

  over borders and weeks, stepped over its corpses

  to follow orders, eaten its soup afloat

  with leather threads, and, once, a donkey’s eye.

  Taken prisoner, he’d doctored the war-interred,

  separated off the sick for hospital camps.

  Where the well were sent, he couldn’t bear to say.

  All through his house and daily he whistled ‘Morning Has Broken’;

  heard so often blackbird has spoken stopped meaning birdsong:

  it meant Gramps and damp tea towels; thin coffee cups and saucers

  glazed with flowers that could be owls; owls that could be flowers,

  as in the Garner novel I doubt
he ever read;

  his hours too crowded with the history books he scoured,

  still on the trail fifty years later

  for what drives human

  to its own dread perimeters.

  Praise for them springing fresh from the word

  meant tales of war curtly turned

  down byways of jokes, witty anecdotes:

  for we were only the children of his children;

  there was no translation from lived to tale

  that could ever …

  those random, horrifying odds

  that gave us all his sun-speckled kitchen …

  better not re-count them.

  Better warble down the past’s wind

  mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning.

  We grinned, raised eyebrows at its no-fail return;

  praise with elation, praise every morning

  the tune all whiskered trill, all rheumy-eyed wink

  as he’d pop a dishcloth over his shoulder,

  a clown’s epaulette; praise for the sweetness …

  But the bassline silence seeping

  ominous as horizons blazing in the dark;

  we heard that, too: the thrum of how our own luck shone.

  How improbable the emaciated man

  told by Nazi guards he would be shot at dawn

  should have found this reprieve at all:

  family banter in the kitchen,

  tea towels flicked like circus whips;

  retired GP, buffing crockery, fortissimo on key;

  even at home smuggling single smokes

  up his cardigan sleeve; admitting nothing

  when they dropped at our feet:

  just cocking a blackbird’s peck-quick eye,

  slipping the cigarette back up his cuff

  and whistling, piercingly, on.

  A Room that Held the Sea

  Over cocktails, perhaps, or card games, or at book club in the shared day-room

  of the small port-town retirement home, although on a street with no view of

  the sea,

  a woman told my grandfather of the day she walked into the room

  where her mother wept and rocked, as if on a deck on a wind-lashed sea,

  half-crazed with disbelief, barely aware she was in her own living-room.

  Living-room itself sounded almost crass, as its corners seeped with a red-blind sea,

  despair’s deep tide staining mouth and mind so its curse fixed the image of that room

  for good, for worse, in the young girl’s memory. Through it she could never

  again see

  this spring-kindled world; five words nailed up their own dank room,

  they rang bitter-clear: ‘It should have been you.’ Her mother forgivably at sea;

  yet cruel—unforgivably. Kinder to have denied entry to that plunging room

  where she tried to drag back from shock’s current, treacherous as a rip at sea;

  back from the news that sucked all light from the room.

  One young daughter drowned while swimming in an easy summer’s sea.

  The other stood, hair still tangle-damp, limbs glittered with tawny sand, a dozen

  rooms

  in the wish-castle of self slammed shut: turned dust-patina’d ghost embassy.

  Even at 93, once-translator, ex-diplomat’s widow, her smile a tern’s quick tilt in the

  sky’s vast room,

  she swore her life story was, ‘My sister died. My mother wished it was me.’ Eyes

  grey as wake on winter seas;

  family love a lost Atlantis: anoxic as cold marbled rooms, undersea.

  ‘my mother in this way mixing me wings and tongue’

  after Paula Green

  Mint’s fresh breath on all its haka tongues marigolds white pebbles

  battered wooden chair geraniums fruit canes lemon verbena

  chives and thyme and from a blue jug on a red Formica table a waft of

  memory rides on fine fragrance a woman says ah look

  sweet peas darling you know though you are knee-high to a

  footstool busy with your trike going round and round the clothesline

  aware of something good and solid to your left that you are saving up to look at

  later something as anchoring as bread and butter or a hand-sewn rabbit

  in swallow-tailed coat that her voice somehow means wild enchantment

  it’s sweet sorcery and milk spiked with fey beauty calls for pause soon

  it will dissolve as elusive as the silver moths that cast quick shadow darts

  on your skin with the cool sensation of water though see the sky is dry

  So you stop and you plunge your face in and the scent takes you

  somewhere like stained glass cream lace fountains and maze walks in towering

  hedges somewhere like white picnic cloths and wicker baskets burnished ringlets

  forest tangle centaurs sprites dryads a small elfin thing hiding under

  nasturtium rangiora leaves written on with sticks, call it bush paper

  barefoot topknot man with pounamu in his hand pixies suckling at

  the flowers’ thin teats green tree shade tunnels careful leonine saunter

  bird cry-cascade and it all melts down over the years

  to white ankle socks scuffed sandals metal trike her brushed-cotton

  green zip-up dress ample hold bare arms the full voice of

  this brown-haired woman saying in that slow though urgent way ah

  look sweet peas darling

  So Buttoned Up

  after Stephen Bett

  First time in my god

  damned life I forgot

  my name and when

  you said it, it went

  sherbet-wise inside

  the tiny wires

  of each thought-capillary

  every ringing filament

  streamed like candy dazzle

  lights in the rain

  so how to maintain

  equipoise on its leggy stems

  without once thinking of how

  the wine glasses we held were

  modelled on a French queen’s

  breasts and then nek minnit

  as they didn’t say then

  (we’re old-timers, baby)

  you were asking me

  and what do you do

  for a living?

  When the truth was

  I’d been in some wise dead

  until my name fled

  and you chased it

  while I feigned

  not to know

  certain facts such as

  the very pulse of its note

  had just been breath

  warmed beneath where

  those shirt buttons sat

  obedient and still

  as small bald monks

  meditating

  patiently

  upon

  detachment.

  Memorial Service

  Twenty years

  of sorely missed;

  I thumb your number

  into my contacts list

  so the new phone displays

  your resurrection day:

  Love’s Name—saved.

  Cut Price

  At the grocery store we choose the shortest queue.

  On the conveyor belt sit five mini-tins of cat food

  with two identical budget spice-shakers.

  We’re behind a man whose skin is pale as lunch paper

  and whose jersey droops from his shoulders

  as if it’s still being knitted

  from the needles of his bones.

  He startles when the check-out operator says

  there’s a two-for-one deal on that cat-meat brand.

  The man urges us to take his place

  before he shambles back

  as fast as shuffle-can

  to the pet food aisle.

  But we can’t.

  We wait�
��

  because we do have a cat,

  although today we don’t buy cat food

  and the children have never

  had to think so hard

  about what taste might hunker

  behind a mask of white pepper.

  Will our small joys be only their ancestors?

  That day, beside the sea’s sleep-rumpled sheets

  the sun had leapt from to arrive on time,

  there were chickens laughing as if they’d woken

  to tell each other outrageous dreams;

  there were bushes bursting to tell you their purple,

  honeysuckle trumpets miming fanfare along the street,

  a clam-white boat with blue-silk lining,

  a shag drying its glossy korowai

  on honeycombed, biscuit-coloured rock,

  driftwood sticks like Bo-Peep crooks,

  a wilding apple tree leaning away

  from one small rātā’s red cliff-edge shout,

  a flock of oyster-catchers tapping bullet points in the sand;

  seaweed fronds like the hair of selkies

  diving for taniwha gleam;

  hills the sad colour of straw

  though the cicadas urged on

  the bellbird cabaret;

  and at the watermark a black stone

  like a carved ceremonial urn.

  All of it laps at memory’s coves

  like the lines of folk songs

  our children might sing—

  of the safedays,

  from the bygones.

  Warning

  This item

  contains images

  an audience may

  find distressing.

  A thin child in clothes that don’t quite fit: mid-shin trousers and red short sleeves although the autumn morning is charity cold, his back swaddled in foreign air, face down against the white winding cloth of the shallows, cheeks pressed to wet sand like a baby burrowed into the scent trace of lavender only please won’t someone tuck love’s covers over his shoulders, don’t stay in that twist, little one, your back and neck will ache when you wake, the sea is an unschooled nurse to let you lie that way, the white hygiene gloves of the soldier such small care who lifts your drifted spine, he is trained not to weep so he can still see this shore hell, navigate the sink holes of all dread terrain, trained not to mistake you for his own son, to stifle the cries Allahu Akbar, grant forgiveness.

  In his arms, horror’s answer.

  This era

  contains events

  we must