Read an Excerpt
Aloe & Other Poems
By Diana Bridge Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2009 Diana Bridge
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-014-0
CHAPTER 1
THE COMPULSION TO CATCH IT
ALOE
Each silver grey leaf whirls out from the stem in a movement
both spaced and communal. Each tapering arm is inflated
with life. Remember how that sort of energy swirled
in her veins as her back bent almost to the floor,
and how her arms aspired, as these leaves curve
and stretch – a gentle arrested crescendo?
There for the taking, the equation. She shelters,
evergreen, among the fountaining leaves, a girl like Tess,
culled from your own or some collective memory.
The thought you get – as light outlines the rim
of sharp inverted scallops that make a bread knife
of each edge – is protection. To the dancer
her bouncer. Your eye moves on among the aspirant
tips to one cut back, or blighted. It browns;
as surely as a girl turns crone it shrivels to a claw.
But why go past the streaming glue of sap,
the glinting spider-web fine rim?
Why bring her image in?
There never was, God knows, a dancer here –
only your need to fix the thing, grab at its life
by any means but grab it now, right down at the root.
And she is just a version of those stories poets tell,
the half-made stories that they tell when they try
to join what lies beyond all hope of joining.
TREES 1
Today at five the trees are offering something,
not just the singletons outside the frame: stand-outs
that end in pale patches of magnolia or flaunt
their bright mosaic bark. These trees touch always
on perfection. I mean the ones that pack the inside
of the bush like different kinds of stuffing (kapok
and feather, brands of rubber chip); each tree
delivering its take on nature's blend of the distinct
and multiple, to make a hillside catching
at her positives: repeat, diversify, diversify, repeat.
TREES 2
One among the crowd is held against an idea of the sky.
I watch, the way you don't quite watch a sibling,
its presence and its placing – something about its branching
balanced growth. I watch until the light gives out.
Darkness takes it swiftly then, just as it took my brother,
and no amount of calling is going to bring it back.
I'm stretching it – I know that all you get with trees is
'seems'. But there are times when night, with its built-in
recurrence, its ghostly passing presence, becomes the setting
for an antique apprehension – the passage of the soul.
EUCALYPT
She is one of Webster's women: gorgeously capricious,
allegiances about as stable as the bark that peels away in fringes
or flaps like an unanchored pocket on her heart.
The common lime has wrapped his cloak around her
as she backbends by his side; brother or Brachiano –
either way he holds her. All month he cradles
and constrains her, fingers stiff with opportunity,
until, like the White Devil, she hangs dying.
She was the colour of death before death caught her.
Is she acting?
* * *
Evergreen, immune from drama, the fumble-fingered
succulents are drawn up like a chorus
that has seen men list like trees, extend the full length
of a neck and die on the autumn wind.
MAGNOLIA
I catch it through branches that stoop
in a ruined umbrella over the sodden earth.
Its own branches reach up like a last supper
of arms, all of them Christ's. No supplication here,
just chalices of creamy white, occasionally incised
and bruised, like Ding ware, with a fine dark rim.
A HIROSHIGE PERSPECTIVE
for Sarah and Howard
1
He gifts you his own interplay of close and distant;
he wants his precise vision to be yours.
He does not wander off the way your eye is used to,
among deep backgrounds and far hills.
He wants you rather to observe a present balance,
one he contrives to lie between geometry
and nature. His scene is telescoped and radical.
It startles like a boldly opened fan.
2
You look through butterfly-wing blooms,
some closed, some open, strung along dangling lines.
Each flower has its bright yang area, its shadowed
yin. The stems sway above water,
tendrils of some nymph's hair. They intercept
the sumptuous foreground of a river bent by rocky outcrops
and screen those elements designed to shape the moment:
a strut that summons up the hidden platform
where you linger; the play of poles supporting the half-
circle of a bridge; a causeway that bisects the woodcut.
There modest figures – brown for a monk, blue
for woman – kneel below hanging lanterns red as sunset.
Beyond these lie a field notched by pines, a last crescent of blue.
3
The bridge is an embrace, as round and high as if it heaved
a belly pregnant with the hopes of any mother to the sky.
You watch along the rim of its half hoop folk so persuasive
you want to pursue them. That is not his intention.
From here, he is saying, you have the full picture.
Scarlet banners at diagonal corners are bookends to his scene –
they snap shut on the notion of more than one vision.
Only the right-hand banner tips the balance that I spoke of,
leaving behind its rationale of naming,
breaking the sealed rectangle of its own shape to join up
with a line of red which roofs the woodcut. Hung
in a transcendent primrose high above the unseen shrine,
it bleeds into the porous scarlet of the sunset streaming overhead.
THE GOD OF HILLS
1
You want him, if it is him, not there,
or there in the sense of an arrow: three twigs
laid on earth's autumn-coloured surface;
or splash-painted onto a peg for
someone or other to pass,
the connection that chancy.
2
But walking these red tracks,
our country, you assume, as safe
as anywhere on earth,
the colours of the day so sharp,
your habit to take one thing at a time,
you ask yourself, why look?
TINAKORI HILLS
SEQUENCE, SARNATH
1
THE WAY YOU SEE HIM
You come upon him as you turn the corner
like the surprise of an idea, one that hits you fluid
as light welling from a niche, complete as sculpted form;
not there, of course, for safety, those dipped eyes
unable to be met, mouth caught between compassion
and the joke that presence, yours as well as his,
is an illusion, a theory capable of turning on its head
the weary human limit in your observation that
from here to the base of the statue is quite a long way.
2
SEATED BUDDHA
What do you think as you stand there, your mind
rearranged into perceptions, feelings, consciousness –
not that I'm saying the compartments are fixed,
nor that you and your thoughts are the same – just
what do you think as you stand at the end of the hall
lined with statues by the great knees looped in a bow?
It's obvious, I'd say; you like your statue leavened
with a dash of theory. I am simply addicted to looking.
3
GUPTA SCULPTURE
I like the way the skin is stone, the stone is skin –
a passage you can almost see between them.
This is Gupta sculpture: what some have called
the wet miracle of the dress, sandstone smoothed
with the ease of pastry to a few rolls at the neck.
We watch light fold a hand around one shoulder,
leaving the left bereft. Two narrow flames form
in the darkness underneath the arms, striking
a low swell, like a breath caught, from the chest.
I don't need you to tell me that to look is never
neutral; or read (aloud) in lotuses imprinted
on the upturned plates of feet a word like peace.
I see it signalled in the still hang of the sleeves.
* * *
Life turns: a wheel behind the head, a freight
of bursting, balanced plants contained by beaded rings.
Implanted, somewhere, in its symmetry a notion,
the notion of attachment; for this is the First Sermon
and the tug of story (exiled to the base) is halted in
two young attentive deer. Where, I might have asked
a few days or a few hours back, is the human face of it?
Where is the face of longing, source of sorrow?
But now you elbow me; you point to something
more, you say, than balance or sculptural perfection:
a band of stone free of all decoration,
a ring that sits in ancient knowing contrast,
a plainness which stands in for silence. It is this circle
that the sculptor places closest to the head.
4
STUPA
Outside, under the huge trees after the rain, it's as if the light
has run, run into the leaves as they move among themselves, making
way for something, as it were, against a sky deepened by rain.
Somewhere the stutter of birds and then the sky moves over,
quarter-filled by that huge stupa girdled, you recall, with pattern,
just a remnant, some design with lotuses both bursting
with the life force, if you like, and at the same time still.
There's a boy, perhaps a young man, offering you an image
of the image you've just seen, an impression stamped on clay,
not even sandstone, but the sweetness of expression –
both their expressions really ... You look down to where the light
has landed, to a lawn you know was never there in his day,
to an earth that was, made redder by the rain. Nothing's stable,
you remember, let alone discrete or solid – not that rounded,
crumbling, fully human shape? If there's heartbreak there,
you let it go. You have to. And you make of 'nothing's stable'
a virtue – that's it really – the shift of sky for stupa,
the blend of boy with Buddha as he's handing you the statue.
You think you're getting close to it, to what is real – the re-
arrangements of your mind like leaves adjusting to the light.
STATUE OF A CAMBODIAN TEMPLE
ATTENDANT, KNEELING
for Amanda
There is something about the act of kneeling:
of sitting back on your heels, toes flattened or
tipped up, making a boomerang of thigh and calf.
And when you lift your hands as she does, fingers
joined, thumbs spread, there is about the action
something that releases, that opens mind,
as they say, not knowing what mind is.
I turn her carefully, not to dislodge the moss
that hangs in spirals, thoughts flirting
by the stillness of her head. She is a censer,
made of iron, triangle for a face, dark decorated
skin. Attachment is, much as it always was:
the jut of a waist tie over the gourd-shaped butt,
a spill of silk panelling the banks of her thighs.
Someone with centuries-spanning style has placed
a silken lotus in the dish that once held oil
on her head. She is resumed. Like a river flowing
through paddy, the life of workshop, temple, village
once again runs through her. She refers forward,
she and her copies. Her stillness is desired now;
her act of kneeling once more, more than a pose.
CHAPTER 2
INTO WORDS
FRENCH DOORS
for Elizabeth Caffin
Beyond the struts of the French doors Queenstown's
silver hills glissade into the lake; the water's grey-blue
breath whitens into clouds the shape of albatross,
the streamlined arc of parent wing, the puff of seated
chick released as subjects into frames: the piped-
with-aluminium panes that quarter up the sky.
You ask, would I make poems in the way struts shape
a scene, choose some rule-governed form, a sonnet, say,
to limit length and stop the throat of line, compel whole
symphonies from accent and induce each major rhyme
to reach as ardently as one of Plato's lovers for his double
in the row just two below? You ask and I don't know.
We trim a thought still, crop a word, as we fit half to
half, hoping to find a symmetry that jolts the heart
and soothes the mind with the illusion of completion.
We lean on matter till it morphs into a bird. But as to
making them the way they used to do? We won't again
make poems the way that these bars shape a view.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aloe & Other Poems by Diana Bridge. Copyright © 2009 Diana Bridge. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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