Ted Jenner is a poet, translator, and classical scholar who was born and bred in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has spent the last forty years living in Africa, Europe and the northern parts of New Zealand. His books include A Memorial Brass (Hawk Press, 1980), Dedications (Omphalos Press, 1991), The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments (Holloway Press, 1997), Sappho Triptych (Puriri Press, 2007) and Writers in Residence and other captive fauna (Titus Books, 2009).
Genius Loci
JAGGED FLASHES
OF LIGHT ABOVE THE
ROOVES IN WAIHI
AZURE PACIFIC A LINE
BREAKING INTO LACE
INCESSANTLY EARS SO
FULL OF CICADAS
THEY SING IN YOUR PILLOW
AT NIGHT A
RESORT OUT OF
SEASON ITS STREETS
EMPTY BALD AND
LICHENED ECHOING THE
BREAKERS AND THE
PLUMP OF DISTANT
RAINSTORMS IN THE
LATE SUMMER DUSK
VOICES GRADUALLY EFFACED
BY THE DARKENING
SILENCE
(5.4.07)
. . .
At Day’s Bay in
profile, the bony angular form of a girl reading, oblivious of the family
crossing the sand behind her. The light shimmering, violet. The year, 1899.
: ‘she heard the
silence spinning its soft, endless web’ (Katherine Mansfield)
. . .
An empty land drained
of any significance for the European explorer, Australia seemed to produce
nothing but dream-like narratives of repetition, events without closure.
Contrast the dreaming of the Aborigine, for whom every corner and cranny in the
land was full of significance. See Paul Carter, Living in a New Country (1992): ‘the glint of sunlight on bent
grass, turning it into a field of scratched glass or gossamer and revealing
someone’s recent passage.’
By 1850, European
settlers were already becoming unnerved by the silence of New Zealand bush.
Stoats, introduced to reduce the number of rabbits, scurried into the forests
and found native birds more interesting prey. Originally introduced for the fur
trade, the opossum now stands at an estimated population of 70 million. One
hundred years later, some descendants of those first settlers are still spooked
by the ‘emptiness’. Others have adopted a more conciliatory attitude: ‘Charles
Brasch saying we are alone, existentially full of angst, and Smithyman came out
and said, “Hey! If you look at these hills which are crying for meaning, they
are covered in pa sites!”’ (Scott Hamilton in Percutio 1 (2007)).
. . .
SACRED HEART:
CONSULT THE DRAWINGS
TRACED IN THE
CONDENSATION ON THE
WINDOWS IN ROOM
21 WHERE PARABOLAS
DESCRIBE AN ERECTION
FATHER CHAMPAGNAT PURE
WHITE SHOULDERS GLISTENING
WITH DRIZZLE GAZES
BENIGNLY AT THE TONSURED
LAWN THE PURSED
LIPS OF RANGITOTO’S
VULVA VISIBLE ABOVE
THE ROOVES OF
GLENDOWIE PRAY FOR
US SINNERS NOW
AND AT THE
HOUR OF THE
BREAKING OF OUR
VOICES PRAY FOR
US NOW
(25.6.07)
. . .
Clothesline: Balmoral (29.9.07)
a
set of baby’s nappies
flapping
against the nor’easter
small
wings flailing
trapped
in lime
. . .
Whispering angels
trail vapours over Balmoral at sunset; the screams of squabbling archangels
fret in the stratosphere as they begin their descent. And down at Earth, a
terrestrial representative at St. Lukes stares coyly from her modest frame, as
from a fresco by Giotto, a wave of lustrous raven hair falling softly over the
left hazel eye, just above a sun-dried wad of chewing gum. (6.10.07)
. . .
THIS FOSSIL
AMMONITE FOR SALE
IN DOMINION RD
IS THE
EYE OF A
CYCLONE
PRESSED INTO
SOFT STONE
IS A
FOUR HUNDRED MILLION
YEAR OLD
PERMIAN RINGWORM
(18.12.07)
. . .
A rectilinear grid of
streets, essentially boulevards, tree-lined, with tramcars in the shape of the
fuselages of the first Continental airliners. The tramcars chime the stops with
an ecclesiastical tone as if summoning the communicants to the host. Though
dust-laden, the trees sparkle in the early morning sunlight in this most
European of Australasian cities, but its outskirts reveal how it sits on its
landscape – as an alien. Beyond the city, the grass is light brown fringed with
eucalyptus; the red earth is cracked and parched. I could be looking into the
heart of Africa.
Suburban gardens in
Ashwood display ingenious methods of trapping dew: in one garden, a plastic
bottle, with the base removed and the nozzle pointing downwards, was mounted
above a slip of nasturtium. I have seen the same method used in the Negev
Desert.
Melbourne,
22.4.08
. . .
Teak
slats filter
dust
and moonlight.
Ashwood’s
slatted
shutters
wink at
the
maid in the moon.
Melbourne,
23.4
. . .
[A man or maid in the
moon in the West; in Malawi, a rooster; in China, a hare and a toad and a
cassia tree. The moon of course ‘es una / misma / en New York / y en Bogotá’
(‘the same thing in NY and in Bogota’ – Mexican poet, José Juan Tablada). And
yet the moon is the West’s notorious image of mutability. In China, on the
other hand, it represents permanence. The West sees appearance where the East
sees essence.]
. . .
Anuta is an isolated Pacific atoll of
only three hundred inhabitants where children are shared with the childless, a
mirror is considered a luxury, and aropa
(cf. aroha) is almost a palpable entity.
As this information
came to me on the BBC World Service as background to whatever I was doing at
the time, I am not sure that aropa is
as close to the Maori as I remember it; was it a mirror or was it a looking
glass that was considered a luxury? I am not sure that all – as opposed to a
number of – children are shared with the childless; was the population 30 or
was it 300? And was the name of the atoll really Anuta? And now I feel guilty
about reducing an earthly paradise to a game of Chinese whispers.
(19.8.08)
. . .
Shivering
after dawn, Balmoral 6.32 a.m.
And
still watching this herring-bone cloud
Dissolve
into patterns I might have
smudged
with a finger or are they tyre
tracks pissed he failed to take the corner?
(7.7.08)
. . .
The
sheen of river silt on your body
the
smell of river stones on your skin
and
Sappho’s melilot vipers bugloss violet
hue mica schist and the aroma of the thyme
you
have just crushed on your shoe…
Clutha
District, 14.1.10
. . .
Pink
salt pans
hills
without
sheep
/ the winds
stream
up through
tufts
of grass
f
i n g e r i n g
m
u l t i t u d e s
of
tousled hair
Blind
River
dry
as a
bone
/ drier
even
than
the
dry grass
our
hands
run
through
rasping
the
tips of
our
fingers
Grassmere,
17.1.10
. . .
NIGHT’S SHADES
DRAW CURTAINS DRAW
SHADES
NIGHT’S CURTAINS
HER CURTAINS DRAW
NIGHT’S SHADES
IN A
SILENT WAY SHHHH
IT’S ABOUT THAT
TIME
SOMEONES’S HAND
FITS MINE LIKE A GLOVE
SHADE
THE DELTA
OF LIFE-LINES NO-ONE
CAN READ IN HER
CLASPED PALM
IS DESTINY THOSE
LINES ARE BRAILLE
Meadowbank,
31.10.10
. . .
Harvesters : all
these
dusty grimy chimney sweeps
in
the hall their flues
ballooning
in the draft
. . .
What song the
wind-chimes sing in Meadowbank
this evening –
perhaps not ‘entirely unknowable’.
. . .
Playing against the
northern façade of the War Memorial Museum in Parnell, the horses at Anzac Cove
are swishing their tails under the olive trees, oblivious to the slaughter
around them. (24.4.10)
. . .
clipped
hedges
throbbing
and shimmering
in
the wind
Remuera,
31.12.10
. . .
A ceremony of innocence
At
its head
there’s
a dry bed
of
the River Avon
where
no bird sings
not
even a cricket
chirps
for the one
hundred
and eighty-
five
monarchs
released
in a
fading
nimbus
to
ghost our
lost
souls.
Christchurch,
22.2.12
.
. .
Q.: WHAT
CAST A BRIEF
AND BARELY NOTICED
SHADOW OVER 128
STUDENTS THEIR KNITTED
BROWS THAT BORE
THE SIGN OF
THE CROSS ON ASH
WEDNESDAY THEIR NCEA
LEVEL 1 MATHS EXAM AND THE SERRIED
ROWS OF FADING FIRST
XV FIRST XI AND ROWING
EIGHT TEAM PHOTOS IN
THE SCHOOL HALL
AT SACRED HEART
THIS MORNING (10.28 A.M.)?
A: A
PARTIAL SOLAR ECLIPSE
(14.11.12)
.
. .
First
flush this summer
fuchsia
red in Kohimarama
and
slender palms by the tennis
courts
off Neligan Avenue
are
charming the breeze that
runs
along these spindles.
As
if your warm breath is blowing
through
the teeth of a giant’s comb
a
colonnade of tall sentinels
sways
towards Melanesia –
Avenue
first then the islands.
(10.12.12.)
. . .
Opo
out
of the corner of the eye
in
the trough of a wave
the
flash of a fin is
eager
still to greet us
a
lost guardian spirit
aching
to find her own kind
Opononi,
24.1.13
(to
be continued)
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