Poem 414

Visual and dreamlike this is evocative for me because the images come from such a variety of sources – imagination, dreams, my memories and other people’s memories … a house I stayed in as a child on holiday in Whangarei is in here, as is my father’s boyhood memories of his grandparents’ house, plus impressions from the film The Go-Between and a childhood story told in Last Tango In Paris … I think there’s even something from Finn Family Moomintroll …
… ‘Cherie’ is a splice of two different people, one the girl I wrote about in Poem 71 …

( I like the Bermuda blue tiles – both the colour and reference to things disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle … also the way the heat and Swiss watch combine to suggest a sundial to match the birdbath … the way strumming and plucking (and later twanging) evokes music … how memories not ants nevertheless depicts memories swarming like ants, the rhyme and image of drunken pumpkin plant (that’s from the back lawn of my flat in Hamilton) … the alliterative assonance of the last lines and the way that image of the plums sums up the sticky sweet rot of memory … )

Memory Garden

The haunted house yawns and taps out messages
planes are lost in the Bermuda blue tiles
of a birdbath
                          the garden growls
          heat a Swiss watch
          in its belly
clouds are going down the chimney
and rolling like babies on the old
tense floorboards
                                    I want to find you
by your music
                             strumming wild nostrils
in a cupboard somewhere plucking things
out of pockets and the pockets
out of air
                   this is the Japanese gadget of recall
it folds up so small
you can take it anywhere
                                                     I can flip you open
and feel desire
                   want to twang your overall strap
                   put my hand in your pocket
                   which isn't a pocket
                   where I dimly perceive
                   the cool vanilla eye
                   of your hip

listen Cherie
                            because yes
I'm talking to you
this house is half haunted
                                                       has memories
not ants in the butter
                                           I'm beckoning 
you in from the garden
the stone geese
drunken pumpkin plant
beneath the bay window
                                                   where we bent 
                                                   our heads to a book
the grass is green and rank
as drowned women's hair
it couldn't be mowed without covering yourself in syrup
  from each dropped detonated
plum rotting there