Elizabeth Smither

Elizabeth Smither lives in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She is a poet and the author of five short story collections and five novels. The Lark Quartet (AUP 2000) won the Montana NZ Book Award for Poetry in 2000, and Elizabeth was the first woman to serve as Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate (2001-2003). She was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008.

 Tree breath and human

Trees in the garden are expelling

the breath I need. It enters windows

and I breathe out what they breathe in.

How we should love them, never moving

from their posts, withstanding wind

creaking sometimes, losing limbs

but aiding us with oxygen.

While we climb them to gulp in

the freshest air, the most pure

reason for their being here:

their breath and ours comingling

into needful dependencies.

This poem was screen-printed on a T shirt and it gave me great pleasure to think of people wearing it and advertising the role of trees. I think it was also inspired by the huge pohutukawa trees that grown close to my house, releasing the most beautiful cool air. I always think of it as a protection against pollution.

A cortège of daughters

A quite ordinary funeral: the corpse

unknown to the priest. The twenty-third psalm.

The readings by serious businessmen

one who nearly tripped on the unaccustomed pew.

The kneelers and the sitters like sheep and goats.

But by some prior determination a row

of daughters and daughters-in-law rose

to act as pallbearers instead of men

all of even height and beautiful.

One wore in her hair a black and white striped bow.

And in the midst of their queenliness

one in dark flowered silk, the corpse

had become a man before they reached the porch

so loved he had his own dark barge

which their slow moving steps rowed

as a dark lake is sometimes surrounded by irises.

An actual funeral only I had the daughters-in-law wrong – they were all daughters. The first stanza is deliberately rather banal and flat so the image at the end can shine. I still like the way the word ‘queenliness’ slows things down, like the slow steps of the pallbearers.

Margo and Sir Walter   

for Margo Buchanan-Oliver

She lives among others but loves Sir Walter

best of all men, presuming she could choose

from all history’s pages, up to today

the interpretive and the hazy, equally weighed.

She loves him in his Tower rooms, writing

and his evening stroll upon the battlements

his pipe smoke escaping in the London air.

She loves him for going to death over a marriage

an English and a Spanish king arranged

with him as the prize gift. She loves

his request for a knife to stir his wine

and then his abandonment of it for his quill.

She loves – there is no end to the catalogue –

his profile, his beard, his great foxiness

his manliness on his scaffold walk and speech

so if a drop of his divine blood flew

and landed on her dress she would

cut it out in a square and place it

behind glass and in a gilded frame

and draw a heart with Ralegh and her name.

My much-admired and very intellectual friend, Professor Margo, candidly confessed Sir Walter was her secret love which set me thinking about how passion knows no boundaries and ignore centuries.

Tonia looks at her hands

You were in an audience, among

beautiful people, beautiful gowns.

Suddenly you looked down at your

sixty-six-year-old hands.

You loved them, you realised.

You praised them at a glance.

No one else would consider them

hot (they had done heat

and cold, bone-chilling cold

plunged into buckets with detergent

and worse, worn themselves thin

with caresses, as if

they, of all parts, echoed your heart

and its wearing, recording gestures).

Heart and hands. Your heart looking

down on them, admiring, praising.

The beauty in a pair of hands, even if they have been neglected as hands tend to be.

Causing someone to follow in a foreign language

Je ne suis pas d’ici, I say

to the young woman who asks direction

but I do know where the rue Dauphine is.

Follow me, under your umbrella.

My French is broken and peculiar

and I am older. A heavy shower

though she’s uncertain binds us together.

We walk in single file through the same puddles

and several times I stop to listen

if she’s following like Eurydice

this vocabulary-less Orpheus

not with a flute but a leading umbrella

and several times I turn to smile

and she smiles back as it thunders

overhead and people run

to shelter in shop doorways.

But I know the way as Orpheus did

past the market where chickens are roasting

and chestnuts and around the corner

and here is the rue Dauphine and here the Pont Neuf

and I believe I hear her say Voilà

and Merci, madame, merci.

Au revoir. Au revoir, mademoiselle

and I glow under my umbrella like a peony.

This memory still makes me smile. The young woman didn’t really believe I knew the way and we stopped several times in the downpour to exchange a glance. But she kept following and at the end she seized both my hands. I walked away glowing under my umbrella.

The sea question

The sea asks ‘How is your life now?’

It does so obliquely, changing colour.

It is never the same on any two visits.

It is never the same in any particular

only in generalities: tide and such matters

wave height and suction, pebbles that rattle.

It doesn’t presume to wear a white coat

but it questions you like a psychologist

as you walk beside it on its long couch.

Someone has written that the sea is a psychologist and to walk beside it is to clear your head. This must make the beach a couch.

Leaf flurry tram

On Dandenong Road the white tram

throws up the autumn leaves

to not-quite window height.

Those inside are unaware

of what beauty follows them –

leaves from the track dancing up

in the passing current of air

and staying suspended

until the eddy moves on

and fresh (dried) leaves take their turn

to levitate for this great wizard

the East Brighton tram

on its way to University

white as a bride

with a veil billowing

in the speed of passage

the tracks that lead to

a bliss not in front of us

but behind, a double

blessing made more beautiful

because we don’t see it.

I’m in love with Melbourne trams. But particularly this one with its unseen bridal veil of rising and falling autumn leaves.

Fountain

Days of storm when no one walks in the formal garden

or cuts a section of the high yew hedge

with plumb line and hand clippers, a labour

like painting the tall sides of a green ship

when the wind with a passion to join the river

(or first overflow the fountain’s basin)

 dashes the water away from the faces

 of Tritons and cherubs, rearing horses

so the fountain can contribute to the flood

rising now in the sodden grass

the secret streamlet slipping through the walk

between the hedges and the parterre

to reach the water meadow and the pleasure lake

to join with stream and rivulet and river

so when the grass is drained and hills bring back

their towel-dried long tresses

all the fountain’s statuary joins in: the fishes

blowing water through their mouth, Atlas

holding up his concrete globe, pouring water

from his beard and thighs, every drop

a contribution. All this pouring

through the peaceful summer when the rim

was never breached, crowds dipped their hands,

finds its purpose in the scheme of water.

The fountain at Castle Howard. It interests me that the great formal gardens are designed to

encompass extremes of weather without losing their composure.

Amy brings the thesaurus

Midwinter night. Amy strides across

the zebra crossing, a bulging bag of books

in each hand. Head bowed against the rain.

It’s our night for conversation and eating prawns.

The Szechuan chef in the open kitchen

bends over his wok while a line of ducks

is growing redder with each ladle

wielded by the sous-chef. Our little table

beside the window seems cast in street light

from the rain-drenched lamp post opposite.

‘I’ve brought…’ and Amy opens

thesaurus, dictionary, Fowler’s Modern Usage

pushing the bamboo steamer of pork rolls aside

and taking up her chopsticks like pencils.

It is the gesture that overwhelms, not

the heavy compendiums I will return

to each of her bags and thence her arms

though I will hold an umbrella over her

for her pristine devotion to scholarship

for her seeing in the heat of careless writing

a parallel longing for a jewelled fact

a beauty based on solids. And now comes

the procession of dishes: the Bang Bang Chicken

the Mapo Tofu and the luscious pink prawns.

Amy Reigle Newland, a distinguished scholar of Japanese woodblock art, used to meet me on Tuesdays to feast on prawns. Her scholarship and my carelessness: what might they not make together?

The nurses are coming

2.55 p.m. and a swing door opens

and five nurses in dark blue

mid-calf-length slacks and V-necked

tops adorned with silver watches

each with a chart in her hand

detailing the last vital recordings

the progression of signs which they

assess at a glance. In Room 5

all but one line is being taken out

and the morphine is two-hourly.

A head sinks into a little folded towel

deep in a pillow, like a snow angel

and the nurses walk, bunched together

down the polished linoleum, past

the open door of the dire, not looking

just coming on

the way stars come out, flicker

and gleam: We are here, we are arriving.

My friend Jean was dying but this little group of nurses, coming on for their shift, offered a strange consolation. A bit like Hildegard of Bingen: All shall be well, all shall be well…

Engageantes = detachable sleeves

Why put such work by rush or candlelight

into tucks and pleats and slits that open like flowers

when the important shoulders inside fall to dust?

Through thin wavering panes comes

a light divided into little parcels

while the sleeves lie on a bench like mutton

or a long white swan for dressing.

Over the sleeves the dressmakers are bending

working inside them, preparing the battlements

and suspending, on the outside, cascading jewels and ribbons

so the wearer is protected from indifference or too close

an approach. (They forbid intimacy, these engageantes

though admiration is their sense of breathing.)

Inside the shoulders stiffen a little, then relax.

It is dual crowns they are wearing, that will come off

like heads upon a spike, by a bridge or tower.

The sleeves will be plucked (by thinnest threads

after all this effort) and then stored flat.

In Lancashire I saw the weavers’ windows on the upper floor of houses, to catch the last light. Somehow this connected with the way in which elaborate sleeves were lightly tacked to the shoulders of tunics and dresses and could be transferred to another garment. Then it is natural to think of the frailer flesh inside.

Two adorable things about Mozart

First: he’s straight into it. No preamble

ever, as if he’s saying: there’s plenty more

where that came from. You can bank on it.

And secondly: how he drags something

like heavy fabric, like a train behind him

up stone stairs to a window with a view of graves.

You can’t use the word ‘adorable’ an editor said to me but I argued my case – Mozart is adorable – and won. His prodigality – he never keeps you waiting for a melody as some composers do – even death, the cloak he drags behind him – is covered in glorious sound.

Holding hands

Walking behind them in the narrow passageway

I see their hands join while their heads stay high

and I think: equal energies, equal affinities.

Down their sleeves (his jacket, her blouse)

run currents the early evening stars detect

and whose meaning is held in great museums.

A poem from the file for the next collection. It’s very simple really, apart from museums which hold the treasures on which we have been able to impress our identity. The touch of a hand, the impress of love, has the same importance.