excerpts from THE WORD WENT ROUND (1874)
for Garry Currin
6
With every breath
Cosmos from Chaos.
Now, boys, haul the maintack
around. This ‘Hirish hound’ knows
knowledge is inexperience
kneaded like dough by memory –
I want to know the cause of
the effect that novelty
produces on me
with every breath....
Meet her, meet her
not a hair from her
course, or I’ll stop your grog
for a month. With all sails lashed,
Kantian imperative set
aside, I ride my fear of x
categorically as
the Asia shifts, lifting
like that brawny voice:
Meet her, meet her –
experience,
the memory of
novelty. New Zealand
looms like a moult albatross,
prospective instead of tested.
Baited with pork, my fishing-line
snares the bird: a raree-show
for Derry labourers
and those with no real
experience.
8
A boy like me
expected to work
out his own salvation.
Cork fishermen made their skins
from calico: boiled linseed oil,
rubbed it in, then left it to dry
in the sun. I used to be
mad for the girls, my skin
bursting but they spurned
a boy like me –
I had no trade
save taking rooks’ eggs.
What’s in an occupation
with no time to call your own?
Crossing Greenwich’s longitude
in south latitude 38
ten o’clock on board is ten
in a Donegal croft.
There was no time so
I had no trade.
The sky is deep
blue, blue as the sea
non-swimmers imagine.
Edged with silver, every wave
anticipates – what? Whichever way
you choose to look, looking at things
brings gut-feelings of nothing
much. New Zealand is such
a long white cloud now
the sky is deep.
9
In New Zealand
florets of foxglove
outside my own cottage;
orange montbretia marks
the Protestant population –
a fantasy that may come to
pass. As an albatross lifts
dips levels my spirits
follow: it summers
in New Zealand....
Words change meaning
more easily than
me. Some poor passengers
sound like cows at milking time;
they insist on their condition.
I’m more like an unsigned painting
obscured by a sloppy glaze –
unclear yet certain, so
certain each viewer’s
words change meaning.
This new country
means change; changing means
‘the luck of the Irish’
might be more than a bad joke
hotch-potched from potatoes and milk.
A Malthusian afternoon
retires to night: blue-black like iron
and the carpenter’s left thumbnail
after he’s hammered
this new country.
11
Off Cape Saunders
April 26 th
and the notion of ‘home’
slips like an excited pig
on wet decking. Now I expect
‘now’ will mean something other than
the expected. Take stock of
sandbanks with massed shellfish
and devil-black shags
off Cape Saunders;
brown-backed linnets
thrushes green and grey
nameless natives I’ll learn
with tongue and buckshot.
The word went round to be prepared –
near Taiaroa Head shadows
reduce to shoal-spume and flats
at dead low water. Hold
fast to the song of
brown-backed linnets
but remember
The Banishment of
Patrick Brady . Today
night and day permanently
reverse. Turn your head and you will
turn the world upon this headland
or that pier, like to like yet
changed utterly. For now
there’s nothing to do
but remember.
14
You have no choice
because you chose this.
Being sure is being
coarse. Rough as a soujee bag,
your understanding scrapes the soil
you’d cultivate. It’s a fool thinks
he’ll see beyond ‘Moeraki’ –
if it’s all written up
it’s written down, so
you have no choice.
Christ, I don’t know
why the boulders lie
there. How can my accent
wrap the local in its cloak?
The ‘wharenui Uenuku’
means more than I can say, saying
good and bad jostle like sheep
through a lynch-gate. Even
cockabullies grow.
Christ, I don’t know.
A covenant
made of blood and bone
from the nameless backblocks:
that’s understanding. Rainbow
Paleolithic. Promising
the ‘primitive’ a salvation
I recognize from Ireland –
Follow His commandments
you will see our backs.
A covenant
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