Poem 161

Maybe this should be called Owed To Hāwera ? … it’s the poem written ‘on the tongue’ by Ronald Hugh Morrieson that comes at the end of Horseplay my comic drama about Ron and James K Baxter running across each other one dark night in 1972 in the closing phases of both their lives …

… the play contained liberal quotes from Baxter’s poetry but this is the poem I imagined Morrieson might write (his first and last foray into poetry) if sufficiently goaded by Baxter … the progenitor of Taranaki Gothic surprises himself and us with his lyrical cry from the heart about his tangled and inescapable ties to his home town … only for the poem to be lost on the wind as it turns out Baxter, who’s meant to be writing it down, has nodded off somewhere near the beginning …

… I suppose there’s synchronicity in the fact that, written in the mid-nineties, it’s one of my last excursions into poetry also …

… in seeking to find an authentic but also poetic voice for Morrieson I used a grab-bag of images and phrases from his books (mainly The Scarecrow and Came A Hot Friday) as a basis and then freely improvised from there – I’ve always loved the opportunity to be a literary mynah bird …

… it was basically written in one burst the night before I had to deliver the play … I’d been putting it off, knowing it had to be pretty special if it was going to provide a powerful dramatic climax … but I drove into town to my office in the Hope Gibbons building (my home office had become Katherine’s bedroom by this time) summoned the muses and smashed it out in a few hours … I thought of it as a first attempt but in fact only ever changed a couple of words …

… there’s obvious shades of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood here but also an allusion to the last poem James K Baxter wrote – or in the play’s logic soon would write – Ode To Auckland which opens with the lines ‘O Auckland, you great elephant’s arsehole!’ …

… for those who don’t know the play, Morrieson gets obvious inspiration from the nether regions of the dead horse that is wedged in the kitchen doorway throughout the night’s proceedings …

( I love parting the plastic-strip flyscreen of another day [those doorways were ubiquitous in butchers of my childhood], the bereft mother staring at the wall, the grotesqueries of the old cop, the yellow cemetery [in my mind yellow from falling poplar leaves] where Morrieson’s mother lies and where he yearns to join her, the wordplay of chipping in for a headstone …
… metho kings refers to methylated spirits (last resort of an alcoholic) but in our modern day rural towns this has now assumed another meaning … )

Ode To Hāwera

O Hāwera thou great horse's arsehole
what iron frost grips your knackers
out of season

dawn cracks like an egg into your main drag
spilling the Rotary President butcher
farting and whinging out of his sister-in-law’s bed
an hour from now he’ll be scraping mouldy bread
into the sausage mix parting the plastic-strip flyscreen
of another day conning bored pregnant wives with green-nosed kids 
that he’d slip them some beef tea in bed
soon as look at them
                                      telling me pissy-eyed later on
mate it’s the fuckin’ highlight of their day

yeah and morning breaking too on pub
and post office eclipsing the blue all night light
of Davies Gas Station And Lubritorium
where Jim who lost his boy in a shunting accident
lies cold shit-faced round a flagon of Blackberry Nip
while a quarter mile away as still as a corpse
his wife is staring at the faded wallpaper

then the whistle goes at the Treatment Station
as sharp and quivering in the chilly air
as a chord on a cool vibraphone
from the hinterland to the coast the lazy wind blows
      so lazy it’d rather go through you 
      than round you
as the young cop with the seven-a-side moustache
drives through town thinking of the electrically charged flesh
of a girl at a dance and the old cop spindle shanked
and herring gutted unshaven as an albino hedgehog
heaves his brewer’s goitre on top of his wife with the bung eye

sadness dives and collars me low and the sun
supposed to disperse the chimeras of the small hours
only serves to sheet them home
                                                          donkey deep somewhere
down the line this town turned dog on me its narrow roads
shooting away like arrows only ever returned me here waking
with a labouring heart enough dirty water on my chest
to sink a boat

Hāwera
              horse’s arse 
                                    from metho kings to bible bangers 
yawns and stretches dips its lips in Ovaltine
forgets its dead in the yellow cemetery 
                                                                       today 
in shaking sunshine with no zip in it I’ll punch arms 
and slap backs grinning away with murder in my heart
good old Ron booze artist bullshitter and headmaster
of the most hectic school of froth-blowers in the south
Taranaki
                but there’s the wheel of a Leyland ten-tonner
leaning on my heart a six foot trench on my trail
the whole town chipping in for a headstone

this hard case remembers nights
the moon in the gutter of the sky
with its parking lights on brandy glowing like a beacon
in the belly swooping home down the back roads
from the first time a woman wrapped her legs around me
saying boy that feels good
and home was Ma 
                                 and that open grave
that sits drinking with me in the Imperial leans across the table
to say just curl up in me son they’ll plant you where
you can lay your head on her lap like you used to as a kid
coming back on the train from Ōpunake beach
and I want to
                        I’m tired 
and I want to 
but instead I stagger out into the empty street
where a cannonball wouldn’t startle a tom cat
with my brain screaming run boy run
change the scenery shoot through get lost fuck off
out of it and away

but Hāwera and me ... deeper than blood
a boiled carrot and a hunk of corned brisket 
what can I say
                          as my grave catches up with me
on the street beside the TAB lights my smoke
and arm in arm 
we head on our way

alright …
                 alright

I’ll stay