A Momentary Stay

A Momentary Stay William C. Clarke

PANDANUS POETRY

A Momentary Stay

A Momentary Stay William C. Clarke

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

© William C. Clarke 2002 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in Goudy 11pt on 15pt by Pandanus Books and printed by Goanna Printer, Canberra, Phone 02 6239 1208 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Clarke, William C. A momentary stay. ISBN 1 74076 022 0. I. Title. A821.4 Cover painting: Ten Mile Hill [detail], watercolour by Ian Wroth Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard and Emily Brissenden Consultant Editor: Paul Hetherington

Dedicated to the memories of Tom Parkinson and Murthi V. N. Sripada, or ‘Chris’, as he liked to be known

Acknowledgements

Without Ian Templeman’s kind encouragement this selection would not have been put together. Many thanks. Grateful acknowledgments are made to the editors and publishers of the following periodicals, where earlier versions of some of the poems in this volume appeared: Mana: a South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 8, no. 1, 1983 (The South Pacific Creative Arts Society); Dreadlocks in Oceania, vol. 1, 1997 (Department of Literature and Language, University of the South Pacific, Suva); Conversations, vol. 1, no. 2, 2000 (Centre for the Contemporary Pacific, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University).

Contents

Ecology

1

At the Pantheon

2

Hesitation

3

Tourism

4

Day’s End

5

Beside San Francisco Bay

6

In Memory of

7

At Four in the Morning, Approaching the Coast by Sea

8

Lines Upon the Sand

10

Long Corridor’s End

11

The Fragrance of Cinnamon

12

One Winter Day, Walking by a Crowded Cafe

14

Once, Watched

15

Your Skin

16

Islands in the Bay

17

A Short Essay on Poetry

19

Rainbow Lorikeets

20

vii

viii

Query from the Street

21

About the Solicitor

22

On Listening to the Stock Market Report

23

The Future

24

On a Hill Beside the Sea

25

‘The Real Work’

26

Poem

27

One Evening at a Party

28

In Life

29

My Father

30

Sometimes

31

Jesuitical

32

At the Rock Concert

33

In the World

34

Pacific Corals

35

Uluru

36

‘Poor land may be rich country’

38

Biographical Note

40

Ecology

I know the songs of birds sound not for happiness but to denote possession. I know the flash of plumage came not for beauty but as a sign. I know the same for flowers’ fragrance and calling colours set in functional green. I know the flux of energy and interchange of atoms maintain our lives and that in the momentary stay of early morning my breath catches against the depth of loveliness in the world.

A Momentary Stay

1

At the Pantheon (A postcard from Rome)

What spiritual catch can be exacted from a visit to the ancient city where devotion’s currency weakens against time’s desertion, shuffles in halting caterpillar queues, buffeting crowds in contrary flow and it’s all thumbs through guidebook pages, minuscule designations on map mazes, falling lost in bent and sultry streets which change their names along their lenient ways? Until I found that place where light led my gaze aloft to a fontanelle of stone open always to admit sky and rain and sun and snow falling softly, softly falling, equipping me to hook shy morsels swimming there holy in that apprehended air.

2

A Momentary Stay

Hesitation

It allays near dusk to regard how the bricks of the terrace blush, how the greying hardwood chair reddens, while the subsiding luminance enlivens the stalky geranium that stays in affable flower no matter long neglect. The turning Earth spreads shadows up the valley against which a congregation of white cockatoos dot the duskscape in their flight, gliding downward to their roosting tree, oracular embers curbing the dimming toward night.

A Momentary Stay

3

Tourism

Idle now the pier last night was lit by a hundred suns, portholes glaring down from the cruise ship’s wall of steel. It was the Princess Something-or-Other or the Islander Whatever — I forget — moored into connection with our town. Perhaps another name, perhaps it never came at all but something left a stain of alien wealth upon our ground.

4

A Momentary Stay

Day’s End

That light lambent tremulous like music semaphoring glints of ardent orange through youthful foliage prismatic notes proclaiming the sun’s egress

A Momentary Stay

5

Beside San Francisco Bay

Do the gulls remember the middens of shells tossed there by the Indians before we amassed our dross into prodigious mounds, covered now by a scab of grass? Or are they tied to our time, domesticates like the dogs, kites, sailboats, cups of foam, the myriad cars — part of us?

6

A Momentary Stay

In Memory of

You might think a cemetery would resonate with death but when I walked among the graves on that sunny morning I found the burial grounds surrounding the chapel built of country stone insistent with the scent of cypress and enduring pine, while inscriptions wearing away still signalled love My dearest wife, our beloved parents, a precious child gone too soon Kindling melancholy made less immanent by the tiny petals of a weedy flower purple beside a listing tomb

A Momentary Stay

7

At Four in the Morning, Approaching the Coast by Sea

Waking, I saw a shining streak made up of countless lights quivering along the line where sea and sky and land converge. Water and air together with rock, each yielding its riches, forming a favoured place where people long to spend their lives relishing Earth’s munificence. As we approached the harbour’s entrance, the flood tide turned. Marlow’s words about the sea-reach of the Thames edged into my memory. ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ This sparse remembering prompted by the rosary of lights effulgent beads along the shore led me to the text itself:

8

A Momentary Stay

‘And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.’ The lights of Conrad’s London a century ago now spread far across the wider world, the night so bright it makes astronomers cry, effacing faint images from the sky. We can no longer see the distant stars.

A Momentary Stay

9

Lines Upon the Sand

Three dark birds about their lives wing landward in echelon, the sea’s lilting surface rises up into coils of foam, water sheens from blue to green surging into white, waves advance and retreat embossing lines upon the sand, appetite recedes ebbing into pain-edged grains inscribing memory.

10

A Momentary Stay

Long Corridor’s End

Today at long corridor’s end I glimpsed through a closing door red and yellowing leaves swaying in the moving air, arousing in my mind our love that lasted seven years because we did naught, cherishing the thought. Beyond the door, trees fall lethargic in this season, their roots resting in the soil, waiting.

A Momentary Stay

11

The Fragrance of Cinnamon ‘…giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment…’ — from Mary Oliver, ‘In Blackwater Woods,’ American Primitive, Little Brown & Co., Boston

Exactly, it was that the fragrance of cinnamon released by the heat of love the words rousing me to remember how I inhaled the scent so many years ago when we found ourselves alone, free of the crowd, sitting beside the embers of a campfire’s final moments, how amiably we chatted, old friends who knew much about each other’s lives, and loves,

12

A Momentary Stay

both feeling the warmth of the hearth, a confiding connection, which flamed abruptly into ardour, bringing us together on the ground, forgetting loyalties amid the pungency of cinnamon liberated from your skin, engraving on my memory the spice-scented joy that enthrals me still.

A Momentary Stay

13

One Winter Day, Walking by a Crowded Cafe

I felt the sharp air drawn in electric across my nostrils’ skin shuddering toward the vacancy of you not there. Exhaling drained my desolated frame continuing the cadence of remorse.

14

A Momentary Stay

Once, Watched

Once , watched, I squatted, a sick dog, soaked in metaphor, on a steep slope, bulleted with rain. Water drenched me, flushed downhill, turned the soil to slickness under flat streaming grasses. Pivoting my head, looking over my shoulder, I saw the watchers staring down while I sank irrevocably deeper always in memory.

A Momentary Stay

15

Your Skin

Suddenly amid the clutter of an wan untidy day I smelt your skin an aromatic simmering light as dust ineffable ineradicable a penetrant elixir staining the threads of time

16

A Momentary Stay

Islands in the Bay

Walking beside the bay my friend and I talk again of poetry having passed along the way through decades of reading. writing, crafting, attending to bumps and niggles in words and lines, trying to fine tune the mechanism of a poem and give one more polishing once over lightly with the soft rag of language dancing. Earlier on, the islands in the bay — Yerba Buena and the others — were hills on a plain grown with leathery oaks while the pungent-leafed laurel sheltered near the great river, whose waters sourced from mountain snows flowed oceanward through the Golden Gate.

A Momentary Stay

17

Now, the west wind carries landward scents of the sea, its minerals, its many forms of life.

18

A Momentary Stay

A Short Essay on Poetry Homage to David Schubert

Our incurable destiny is redeemed only by affection innocent, blithe, insouciant, dancing to the sound of language turning into poetry, the lyric of vowel and consonant without which there is no poem, no exquisite lilt married to deft contemplation, no caress between meanings and music attending the play of possibilities.

A Momentary Stay

19

Rainbow Lorikeets

Bright birds, rascals squabbling, flashes of rainbow joy, what can equal your piquancy upon the stems bending beneath your roguish sidewise lurch? Your diffracted radiance arose from a mix of water, rock, and air joined now in a tumbling flow of life revelling in its own creation. Are you laughing that creatures such as you could come into being through chance, a planet at play?

20

A Momentary Stay

Query from the Street

It looks to be a complacent house with a tennis court beside it behind some low-leafed trees — nothing luxuriant but decently maintained. Is a glimpse from the street sufficient to deem it a congenial habitation, a hearth scented with affinity, wherein doors open and close, voices arrive, glances vault, talk tangs with family phrases, volleys across the equivocal net, spheres of tension and attachment, rebounding in erratic ways, deflected by hollows and hillocks accrued in the archives of the house?

A Momentary Stay

21

About the Solicitor (With a debt to John Ashbery)

As solicitors go, he isn’t such a bad one and the process is in train with some attention. A modest advance. His vile prose and faulty commas carry sufficiently ahead the intention we seek: securing separateness from togetherness’s rotted hulk. Of course you have to be patient about the documents. For them to be finished, I mean. Expecting too much won’t work. I anticipate their tardiness, the unkempt lack of speed, noting the occasional bauble of progress. Arrangements stumble forward. In time you will be free to go, to go free. But that time waits a further day, a few more days. Days, difficult things.

22

A Momentary Stay

On Listening to the Stock Market Report

Every day I hear how the Dow is down, the Dow is up. It’s falling, rising, suffering a sustained correction following the forecast. This is not the Tao that cannot be named or known. The Dow the world watches tacks along a jagged course swerving between sentiment, voracity, and fear. Looking out my window I see a brown hawk floating lightly in the ocean of air.

A Momentary Stay

23

The Future

The future looks likely to face hard times considering how we now expend the earth and live our lives, allowing the dragon’s greed to hoard such of nature’s wealth as might have otherwise endowed grace to boulevards, enriched orchards of invigorating leaves, originated gardens, affirmed the lucidity of water.

24

A Momentary Stay

On a Hill Beside the Sea

I never heard skylarks until on a hill beside the sea they flushed from tufts of brown-gold grass chirruping their flight song clear, trilling higher and higher becoming the voices of mermaids singing ringing from the sea falling suddenly into silence. Where land and sea converge surf advances and recedes, water sings a hissing song sliding down the sand.

A Momentary Stay

25

‘The Real Work’ — Gary Snyder, Turtle Island, 1974

Ruminant us reflections dark held on waking into thought How it continues so the same succumbing sliding back The flow still not attended to

26

A Momentary Stay

Poem

Oh spare me! Not another goddamn poem come to take me over, the occupying impulse demanding attention like a slighted wife and receiving it any hour, day, night as thoughts and words kindle in my mind until as Ashbery writes they erupt in lightning a steely glitter chasing shadows, which then (one begs for this blessing) gradually form prickly engraved letters on a page — this by means of endless emendation, a long love affair, not an evening’s fling.

A Momentary Stay

27

One Evening at a Party

Forth into cooling dark back into glowing snugness recurrently the party flows from sheltered chatter to a sky of galaxies withdrawing. Ambushed, I encounter her apparition. Talk begins again, intellect resumes, dew mists the cylinders of drink, a synchrony of murmurs and shrill opinion backdrops her absence. Sequestered from conviviality, their eyes green like stars, dark animals dart past rough-barked trees, a cold stream sheets the shape of stones, its water flowing to an estranging sea.

28

A Momentary Stay

In Life

In life Clifford never missed a step nor tripped on curbs Now dead he flees weaponless from disgruntled gods

A Momentary Stay

29

My Father

once helped me with my arithmetic and because he was an engineer became exasperated when I didn’t catch on quickly nor rightly see how numbers should be reckoned but did he I wonder now grasp how much I liked sitting beside him nonetheless

30

A Momentary Stay

Sometimes

I don’t know how the God I don’t believe in judges me who is so sure it all began with that Big Bang, inexplicable, a universe out of nothing for no purpose. Sometimes, though, I see it must have started with a thought. Only that possesses the effrontery to create such vastness, fathomless voids enclosing incalculable galaxies, incubating the infinite paths, the openings for choice, my yearning to pray.

A Momentary Stay

31

Jesuitical

Of ‘disordered affections’ did Loyola really bid his followers to purge their souls? A tall order since the last thing we want to be rid of is them. Not them: they play such vivacious roles on the feature screens of our senses offering opulent entertainment for a trifling entrance fee.

32

A Momentary Stay

At the Rock Concert

noise (noiz) noun [ME.
Does it have to do with noise a racket desirable, a pugnacious din? I can’t work out what it’s all about, a thump, a bump, a bump, a thump, screech from beat to beat across the heap of transported adoration, tear-stained youthful cheeks. Singers bawl into phallic tubes shafting sound across the crowd, gyrate and moan, a copulatory connection, I guess de gustibus non disputandum est a thump, a bump, a bump, a thump.

A Momentary Stay

33

In the World

Like leaves indifferently falling the documents proliferate, the reports amass, adhering into sedimented piles, a repetitive clutter stocking the warehouse of bureaucratic merchandise. In libraries neatly aligned volumes sag the shelves fodder for bookworms, the words failing to explain their own assembled stasis. In the world poverty propagates, crime climbs, economies debilitate, health statistics sicken, the soil slides down slope beneath the dearth of a bird’s song. Intervention is supplicated, implementation stumbles, theories prove unequal to their task, policies are not initiated, regulations cower unapplied until the too-hard basket overflows, away into the amnesiac swamp.

34

A Momentary Stay

Pacific Corals

Tiny architects of atolls your tombs built the annular monuments piled upward apace with the surface of the sea. Submergence brought you life, sinking skeletons uphold you lifting ramparts above the dark, reaching for the transient diamonds emergent in the foam.

A Momentary Stay

35

Uluru

Weather-furrowed animal, old as time, subtly shifting your skin’s transient hues into colours beyond their usual names, neither orange nor ochre, not sienna, close to crimson, near purple, almost blue when wet with rain the leaping waterfalls spew streams of white foam hiding algal black stains, commemoration of rains long past. You shed scales of stone that tumbled hulking down your huge flanks like herds of dinosaurs collapsing in their extinction, opening rugged emptiness to mythic vision, stories dreamed, holiness transforming space to place now needing protection against infidels rudely overrunning you clutching their possessing-mad devices.

36

A Momentary Stay

You are the giant worm, acquiescent to surface decay whereby a crevice becomes a vast gaping mouth enclosing rough piles of stone debris like broken teeth. Scars in constellation call forth wars, spears, birds from imagination’s shadowed depths, endless sublime forms flowing out of stone, beings conceived as you are gazed upon. Over you the ant people climb, clinging to conquer, to preserve by camera, finger on shutter, champagne at sunset, snapping at the unphotographable. Uluru, how deep do you go under the earth? For what do you wait to slough off this time of spectacle, to devour this foolish, this so unsacred hour?

A Momentary Stay

37

‘Poor land may be rich country’ — Aldo Leopold, ‘Country’, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

Poor land may be rich country, opulent with hints of life, a haiku instant when a snake’s skin glimmers, spans of weather, history’s palimpsest, whispering casuarinas casting plays of shade upon a boulder-shouldered shore, a place, momentarily a peace. Country tests us for aesthetic competence: is it grand and scenic or hides its spare exterior a cache of riches, to perceive which takes long living in and with, a witnessing?

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A Momentary Stay

Biographical Note

While pursuing an academic career in geography and anthropology in universities in the USA, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, William Clarke sustained the love of reading and writing poetry that began in his childhood. His first published poems, written while he was an undergraduate, appeared in Occident, the literary journal of the University of California, Berkeley. He has since published occasional works in various journals, with A Momentary Stay being his first collection of poems. While a Fellow at the Institute of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, he edited collections of poetry written by Pacific Islanders and helped facilitate their publication. Although agreeing with Auden that, generally speaking, poetry ‘makes nothing happen’, he has written papers on poetry as commentary on contemporary social and economic issues in the Pacific Islands.

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A Momentary Stay