Damian Love

Damian Love is a freelance copy-editor in Wellington, New Zealand. Previous poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review and the British journals Dreamcatcher and Insight. He studied at Otago, St Andrews and Oxford, and has written on the literature of various periods from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. He also translates Old English poetry.

Savage nuptials

The father of a family will sell a daughter or two or three, if required, for a musket each.

- John Boultbee

This speech that happens is the amazing

thing. Smiling or what you will she sits there

and speaks and the words empty themselves

out on the air elaborately,

fluent as the quick hands of a pianist,

and I think what a piece of work is a man.

Perhaps she is telling me about herself.

I must have chosen her because she was there

and no one else was there so much.

I can’t explain it. The plain fact of a musket

purchased a superfluity of choice.

It is something we have to laugh about

so we try to. Solemnity is a piece

of specie cobbled in a ring round her

finger, she thinks it is hilarious.

I push against her presence like a ram

butting a ewe, this crude nose is all I have,

I scarcely remember how to breathe through it.

We break our shins against the King’s English.

She is a treacherous shifting of limbs

over an unstable hypothesis,

perhaps we will be shaken into grace,

it does not seem to be predictable.

I whisper about Dan Cupid in her ear,

she says things back, I listen for the iambs,

they make statues in the air, little sculpted

opacities, they dance along together

like an undeciphered barbarian frieze.

I don’t know what to do with all this sanity.

The Seafarer

I can tell a true tale about dead

languages. They are going on somewhere

without us, beyond us, we get there and

they are going on somewhere else, the hard

oars of grammar transport me leerily

over the inscrutable centuries

towards an impossible conclusion.

Bearded, frostbitten, lifting heavy oars,

a man who does not exist sails through

the mind of an anonymous cleric

into the loneliness of the North Sea,

naming the waves, the ice, naming the shrill

sea birds, enunciations of the tribe,

he comes home into the particular

sayings of exile. Storms precipitate

his loss with the precision of a song.

What we have made concrete here is concrete.

Our ventilated solipsisms hang

together in prefabricated towers.

Spring substantiates itself on campus,

the heavy sap of rhetoric flushes

our bureaucracy, suns go up and down

like providential abacuses, this

dead life on land enumerates itself.

Therefore our life hangs on a conjunction,

the heart of the hearer turns in his breast,

his thoughts wander out on the restless tide,

come to him again, sobbing over the sea,

coming between his dry words and himself.

The great apology of my apparatus

sails into the generations.

October

Because it is spring, and spring

comes folding its hands seasonably

in birdsong, and scabs that

itch in the warm norwester begin

again on the hands and feet, and

because there is never enough

room in the doss and in the

opening of each street there is

room for everything that was

never enough—

this sends us through the Valley

and over the suburban hills,

shambling through the birdsong

and the impetuous leaves, the

blooming rectilinear verges, the

crocus-ridden lawns, in hope of

sloughed off butts and redeemable

lager cans, sensual detritus, and

the sky’s cloudy odds and ends.

Six haiku for the briddes

When the bellbirds bumped

into each other there were

twenty symphonies.

Because it was so

important the tui had

to say it again.

The verdict on the

bread was delivered by twelve

impartial waxeyes.

This is the ursa

minor quipped the fantail

over the woodshed.

On frosty mornings

take a handful of sparrows

and illuminate.

The tractors went home

in single file and so

did the pukekos.

Ochils

Essentially it is

getting a fix on the hills

before they slip away

in the sunset or other

perturbation such

for instance as the death

of the author. There is

no saying how long

the job will take.

River and plain and

the arrested stone

curtain, the Ochils, the

sky finally: one

archetype leans

becomingly against

another. Here the sun

exercises its poetic

diction, going down

under the horizon

it lifts up the hills into

the light, it illustrates

them, it is the last

word in the golden style.

Plain and river go dark.

The arrested stone

curtain, the Ochils, the

particular hills float

a little above the

running out of the

light in the queer

vision of the species.

Lulu from ten angles out of the conventional three hundred and sixty

            1

Lulu is amazing,

she is the only

one of her kind, she is

quite impossible.

            2

Lulu blinks, and is she a

moth pretending to be a

flame or a flame pretending

to be a moth?

            3

Lulu is shaped

like a question mark,

her exclamations

sway inside it.

            4

Lulu is intellectual, feels

a breeze from other planets,

her infidelities are

melancholy dissertations.

            5

The eternal-feminine puts

away a pickle sandwich

en deshabille and calls itself

Lulu.

            6

Bearing her triumphal

mammaries before her,

Lulu is weighed down by

the responsibilities of empire.

            7

Lulu is in despair

because the myth

has been discontinued

in the larger sizes.

            8

Suddenly Lulu understands

and cries and cries

because time says

it is not on her side.

She looks and it has

been doing its thing again

round the edges a little

perceptibly.

            9

Lulu wears her bluff

like the fag-end

of a perfume bottle

sentimentally.

            10

Lulu always puts

the cart before the horse

because she is

an incorrigible empiricist.