John O'Connor

John O’Connor is a Christchurch poet and critic. He was co-winner of the open section of the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition in 1998 and winner of both the open and haiku sections of the same comprtition in 2006. In 2000 his fifth book of poetry, A Particular Context, was voted one of the five best books of New Zealand poetry of the 1990s by members of the NZPS. He is an editor for Canterbury Poets Combined Presses and was founding editor the poetry magazine plainwraps, co-founder of Sudden Valley Press and Poets Group, occasional editor of Takahe, Spin and the NZPS annual anthology. He is a past chair and long-term committee member of the Canterbury Poets Collective. His poetry has been widely published and is represented in Essential New Zealand Poems (Random House/Godwit, 2001). His haiku have been internationally anthologized and translated into eight languages. In 1997 he received an Honorary Diploma from the Croatian Haiku Association and in 2001 a Museum of Haiku Literature Award, Tokyo, for “best of issue” in Frogpond International, a special issue from the Haiku Society of America, featuring haiku from 52 countries and language communities.

For a Time – after Manet

two penny-roses

              in the

                       wine glass

                             by red and green bottles

                                               she

                              stands behind them…

               if

                   you look

                                 into her eyes

you’ll see

           the full moon’s     out

                                          already…

                      he doesn’t see

                                             and

you

       place your order;

                               study

               the corsage

                                on her breast

(Takahe, 1988)

The River

Laconic temperament

    moves

carefully

             from

      bank to brink

        touching the

  osiers

               yet

       doesn’t stray

                even in winter

keeps

its head.

     In December

tries

not

to

watch

the bank-

             side

girls

the light

             that doesn’t seem to move.

**

‘When did you arrive?’

‘Today. I

came right here.’

Reflections of willow in her eyes

(plainwraps, 1989)

Pink Shutters

a fabulous figure

a snapshot in a bio facing p

120 king of the cuckolds she is

being rowed so innocently

to another bay if it weren’t for

the caption you would never

know except the sun is maybe

too easy he poses by a deck

chair holding an iced

drink like an olympic torch

and you know

there’s a little man strumming

a mandoline not five minutes

over the water in the shade of

that small white house with pink

shutters 

(Takahe, 1993)

At Governor’s Bay

1

This is where Curnow wrote

    ‘At Dead Low Water’ or

signed it off, ‘December

    1944’, five years before

my birth, fifty-seven before

    his death. The publican

tells us that fog beyond

    the heads will roll up

harbor at nightfall,

    as traffic crabs past

the general store/restaurant

    the eye follows

a road to Cresswell Ave

    & the primary, once site

of Kai Tahu stockade

II

Blue gum smell. The odour

    of death in life heavy

in the light air follows

    us down from tarseal to metal

to the long wharf pointing

    nor’east. To the right

Quail Island, home of wrecks

    once home to lepers & further

east the rock Ripara, armed to

    repel Russian ‘threat’ in

Victoria’s ’88. Agapanthas only

    attempting to clamber

from foreshore to the higher

    ground impervious to them,

music that could

    be Shostakovich – or Elgar as

background to a full-on domestic

III

If I too love to be

    an old man I’ll sit

in the sun & smell the

    ‘sump of opulent tides’,

& watch the kids

    drift out from the

playground past

    the convenience &

up the main road

    to disappear into their

own futures leaving

    behind my shaking hand

& the glow of Monteith’s Black

(Kokako, 1999)

Wind & Fire

i.m. Bill Sewell 

I (closure)

when all the talk

    & all the poems are over

when the lights go

    out at the MCB & the WEA’s

redeveloped & the computer

    whizz & the Net-head

are old hat &

    no-one remembers Twiggy,

when Bo & Bic

    are no longer chic &

Mick reverts to coke

    when 9/11 implodes to a list

of infinite grievance &

    academics draw fine distinctions

on matters yet to

    evolve from simplifications, when

the self-promoters & writing course

    junkies find their places

usurped by monkeys & nothing stops

    (for nothing stops) – &

all the world’s precisely

    as it was, someone might say

having read your poems, that

    you caught it all/everything

that rushes towards inevitable closure

II (the Sunday papers)

the dust settles –

    we look around

        & wonder why it happened

adept at cliché

    (rather than analysis) we express

        unqualified approval

of those who set it up,

    put it right, turned the

        tables then

buggered off to write

    their final testaments for

        the Sunday papers

III (the most we can hope for)

we can hope for

a disinterested report

that says simply

that love is not

something we all have

(is all we have)

& given few options

can still choose

how to speak. that

choice defines us.

it holds the bank

against the elements

for a time

which then prevail –

turning all

to wind & fire.

(JAAM, 2001)

At Kaoukourarata / Port Levy

with Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Helen Jacobs and Mark Pirie, 3 June 2001

we parked the car by a memorial

to Taawao, the Nga Pui missionary

which greets you as you arrive

on the final flat that horseshoes

round the bay to the wharf and

a collection of sheds and boatsheds –

it was full tide, a spring tide,

the water foreshortening the hills by

a myth or two. we were too close

yet close enough to see. somebody

wisecracked about the gullibility

of biography – or biographers – as

an afterthought from thinking that

Mick Stimpson – Dirty Mick – had

humped his load of fish past here

many a time, as we turned back

and walked together towards the

cemetery beyond the gum tree

just off road, two gates

and you’re there, standing above the bay.

**

and I’d never seen the bay

so beautiful, in the winter air

smoke rising and the magpies

absent, for once, that weren’t

even the usual sheep in the grave-

yard that had so disturbed

my American guest a few months before.

just Stimpson’s grave at Port Levy

a bare headstone that as you say

may or may not be above the right

person. Alistair, you also said

that the mistakes don’t matter

and quoted Auden on Yeats who

hadn’t died in the depths of winter

but in Spain, sunny Spain, and

as we left the spot the Maori

kids ran after us, playing and

also visiting the graves, who

stopped by the gate before leaving

and washed their hands and flicked

the drops away. I

latched the gate and followed

you all downhill. and the kid

who asked were we old –

a naïve and unexpected question

which I liked and you replied to –

you later said she was the spirit

of the place. she had come

from the creek that cuts the road

and afterward went back to the

smoky yard of a Maori family’s

home or bach. how do you

end a poem like this without

saying that all poems are about

love and death – as you had?

Note: Yeats in fact died in Menton on 28 January 1939. The poem follows my (no doubt fallible) memory of what was said that day. The essential point, of relative warmth rather than bitter cold, is clearly correct however.

(Kalimat, 2001)

Mother & Child

for Alistair Te Ariki Campbell 

round the edges

of the photograph time

is reclaiming you, still

for a moment in

your European shoes

cane chair

& photographer’s back-drop –

your left shoulder

drops & the outsized

collar of your

dress leaves shadows

at the base of your neck –

a Polynesian face

at odds yet not at odds

with all of this

as if something in

the brown air said

that time’s irredeemable

& yours almost up

**

along the coasts

the rusting hulks

stand above

the tides & waves

lap about them

or crash about them

when the wind’s high –

& in the still air

fishermen carry

their lights moving

slowly as if they’ve

done this for as

long as the lagoons

& sky can remember

– as long as the sand

& moonlight – which

curve toward the

south – the grey

acidic smoke of Otago

**

Teu, over thirty

years ago I rode

the waves of your

home islands as

the oarsmen struck

their rhythm

to the call of

a master standing

by the transom –

they timed

the breakers, surfing

tiny gaps

in the reefs

to sheltered water. &

now I write

about your son who

turned the rising

mists of the south

to lighter & darker

shades, whose photograph

also stands beside

 me – old man /

child – his outsized

collar too forming

shadows – his

eyes searching the

middle distance

just above my right

shoulder. something there

(Tiny Gaps, NZPS, 2003)

The Jester

A Jewish sunset. A particularly grey sunset

or perhaps it’s red

it’s as old as the hills beneath it

a tear

runs down one cheek constantly.

Some say it’s a spotless lamb

that springs in the slaughter house

some say

it’s just an old croc

that takes a child playing

by its mother working by the river…

The sunset doesn’t need to say anything

it’s seen it all before

it’s as old as the Mount of Olives

as old as a man carrying a jar of water

as a colt & donkey

as the dusty streets & the girls

who don’t know the language

but do a brisk trade anyway…

By Ground Zero & in Gaza

it mourns the dead in its own way –

in the language of the tribe which

it cannot purify –

as old as the old wives’ tales

as young as the kids in the beat up wagon.

(The New Zealand Listener, 2008)

A Left Hook

an early experience

of the left hook (admirably

tight if open-handed) came

at the beautific hand of

Monseigneur O’Dea – too

old to be a parish priest – who

about to impart the very

body & blood of Christ found I

was not holding the paten

correctly. a few years later

an equally irascible boxing

coach imparted impeccable

advice on how to throw it,

though he didn’t know the bit

about feinting with Jesus.

when the good Monseigneur

had his final photo taken

he bestowed a copy on our family

– old friends should be so blessed –

for a decade it sat on the mantelpiece

between a bunch of plastic grapes

& a glass bowl that snowed if shaken.

(Climbing the Flame Tree, NZPS, 2008)

Joyce

left school at 12 /

                  other things to do

       like “helping the old man out”

       or washing sheets & towels

                                              for Mrs Roach.

       once trundled “classics”

       door to door /

       trouble was she couldn’t

       lie convincingly

           

                                    preferring local stories

               news / wasn’t all that keen

                                               on overseas.

       at 18 married Jack

                            – shotgun wedding –

               

               Cousin Kath

               took Tim /

               within a month

               or 2.

       quick learner though

                            aptitude for figures

               kept the books for

               small businesses /

               despite the lack

               of formal training.

                              but basically / increasingly

                              the Royal felt like home /

                              she liked the cheek / &

                              meeting someone new

                              once Jack cleared out.

(Cornelius & Co, Post Pressed, 2009)

Speculations on a Birdcage

A geography

                        of tumbleweeds

everywhere you look the same old man

a rusty bike

a mote of dust in God’s eye /

                         a city

                        white & entelechious

its down-pipes announcing the beginnings of spring

               +

            No moment’s eternal

            eternity’s the absence of time (as large as a peanut

            as golden as autumn lovers

            black as a swan or bread loaves)

               +

Each spring creates the LANGUAGE of its own

beginnings

            At the roadside – an old man fixing a puncture

            his dog asleep beside him

(Bravado, 2009)

OK

Albrecht considers the Great Fire of London

he knows you can’t go there

but buys the ticket anyhow

Twilight is the colour of closed hands

the page (of a book) that flips over

in black light

In the Synagogue of Larks

                                                the heart rises…

that’s what A reckons

(he said the ceramic air-vents are particularly lovely)

               +

“If silence is the absence of sound

how come we hear it?”

“That’s a good question,” replied A

who didn’t believe in it anyhow

               +

                        (All stratifications reduced to a riccocino

                        a sidewalk caff

                        they did their post-doctoral work in fifteen minutes

                        all you need to know

                        to repeat the data of post-colonial histories)

               +

an alphabet of sighs / alphabets of conflict

the simplest ‘actions’ /

like diplomacy

the Prince of Time

multiplications of illusions

(a mirror in a mirror

in a mirror)

IN YOUR WORDS

               +

A said it was all skylarks

& mountain passes

(Poetry NZ, 2009)

Cutting Wind / Taxi

“If it were a bloody cat

I’d take it home and feed it,”

businessman re streetworker

in inset doorway. midnight.

the girls with him think that’s

quite funny / being well dressed

& all. outside it’s bitter cold.

sleet off the windshield. I knew

the one he meant. you

don’t see her around anymore.

maybe AIDS… maybe. maybe

the wind made her that thin

night after night after night.

(Bravado, 2010)