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Video
The Held Air
in memory of Reginald William Howard 1928-2003
1
Spin
through the hour
where everything knows
everything: the Pacific
plied by definitions you let loose
like shells thrown by a boy (well hello)
who’ll sleep ‘the sleep of the dead’
beneath a creased coat
that won’t fit
now.
How
your body’s
a reminiscence:
you’re a deckhand untwisting
until your sheets slip that dream, language -
or, a poor sailor, you soil your bunk
on T.S. Vindicatrix
and miss the gull’s call,
the mainsail’s
pull.
2
Youth: a greasy keel
stuck in the mud-flats as the sun
sets late on a late Curnow poem. Dad,
you never read it. Instead you
missed the bloody spinnaker
unfurling in front of the world,
the curt breeze picking up
those has-beens who were best friends
when, one more pretty boy
chancing a tattoed arm, you
stroked the moon home in a row-boat
‘borrowed’ from the girlfriend’s parents’ shed.
By losing her you would lose
your hope, your tenderness towards women,
your desire for fatherhood.
You add: ‘And the tide. And the sky.’
3
While it rains the tiles remain dry.
Nothing will nourish this terrain, nothing
compensate day for night’s hostile takeover.
Even my lover, Kim, drinks dark beer -
the ring of her glass marks your tabletop, Father.
I can’t feel your initials underneath.
Your memory is a splinter working itself
out of wherever ‘under’ is; I guess
neither surface nor depth are measurable
without you. Your carpenter’s tape extended
the length of my childhood. Read, then
retracted, it wore out the pocket of your jacket.
4 Dear Dad
Happy birthday. I hope
you’re OK. There’s snow
expected yet, like your smile,
it’s otherwise occupied.
Your gumboots are heavy
with yesterday’s mud, when
I measured the boundary
in order to buy more wire –
that fence is for tomorrow.
It would be good
to have your hands
correcting the tension
then. But I must be
going on, like this, alone.
(‘ Dear Dad’was part of Glenn Heenan's exhibition 'More Than Looking' at Te Tuhi Gallery in Pakuranga, August 2004)
© David Howard 2004
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