Onager


The dictionary trips on the header ONAGER:
meaning what by it - reminder or jibe?
Onager my emblem: "Unbiddable ass.
Mournful brayer." One subtribe,  
the Syrian hemippus, already extinct.

Otherwise: siege engine (named for its kick),
"oak-framed catapult, primed by windlas".
A call to arms: is that the hint?
- that I'm insufficiently a chucker of rocks,
picking bitterly the poetry from poverty
till nothing persists but a V-sign poked
at history's diminishing back?

If I'm honest I'll stick with the mule.
Look at him! - locked to the crown of the track,
bum to the zeitgeist, hemionus hemionus,
nobody's fool, static implacable voyager!

Predictably enough, this is the one that goes down best at readings:

Home is where I hang my hat


Home is where I hang my hat,
currently a tiny flat
with views to compensate for that.
Home is where I hang my hat.

Home is where I sip my soup
and rock at sunset on the stoop
(I don't belong to any group).
Home is where I sip my soup.

Home is where I stash my bag;
it has no team or hymn or flag
to cause its citizens to brag.
Home is where I stash my bag.

Home is where I choose to stay.
I may be here till Saturday
and after that I'll go away.
Home is where I choose to stay.

Home was an island in the sea
where I was born but knew to flee
before the taxman came for me.
Home was an island in the sea.

Home is where we await the hearse
- a glass of wine, a book of verse:
many waiting-rooms are worse.
Home is where we await the hearse.

Home's an unfamiliar song.
My household's what I take along,
the road ahead's where I belong.
Home's an unfamiliar song.

Sing it, you lot, if you must;
- no doubt by now you have it pat -  
but leave me to my wanderlust.
Home is where I hang my hat.
Home is where I hang my hat.

Stuffed Fish, Vermin and Kingfishers

Can't sleep for the heat,

can't sleep for the fan's clatter.

Take your choice. Sat up late,

opting for the latter,

aiming to beat the brain

into somnolence,

reading Edward Thomas again,

and Kleinzahler in tandem:

- not the voulu pursuance

of incongruity it might seem:

observers both, and namers-of-things.

Could not Thomas have written

a Spring Trances, had he eluded

the carnage and sailed after all

to join Frost, who'll convene

at the dock a couth caucus

of poetical well-wishers?

Among them will not quite be

the young August (b. 1949):

he'll read of the famous 20s landfall

decades later in a magazine,

be sent on his way by the cited

"many cases of stuffed fish, vermin

and kingfishers".

The Thomas and Kleinzahler poems referred to above are on the Others' Words page.

Higher Education

for Marilyn Hacker

He a Distinguished Visiting Professor,

she a T-shirted teaching scholar

'sitting in' on his famous knockabout lecture

on the Irish Counts of Toulouse.

She laughs out loud - in the right places.

Her brazen gaze from a rag-quilt of faces

has him wonder, 'What have I to lose?'

They go for coffee in the campus café,

stroll downtown round the Indigenous

Arts Centre, watch aborigines

skateboarding a wharf by the bay;

a fiery tagine with almond couscous,

a weave uphill bras dessus, bras dessous . . .

On her porch she asks him to stay.

Their dovetailed days rush on towards autumn

a basso continuo of bayfish and salads,

whitewater weekends shooting the rapids

at theme-parks the faculty shun.

They lie in late with a Tolhurst chorale,

drowsily discourse on La France Impériale,

her thesis on 'Schnack and Verdun' . . .

He, the distinguished visiting adulterer,

returns none the less to his other.

She, the scholar of piquant ephemera,

has briskly signalled a kiss

in Departures and left. Now the impartial

ennui of airports: in his learned journal

her deft pantoum on Loss.

Old Shoes

You have been so long in my heart

I wear your absence like old shoes,

and really I don't know how I could

do without doing without you.

But I strode forth this morning

armoured for the Big Clean,

and you know I was making a fair fist

of parcelling the little regrets

(peccadilloes for the most part

timidly untasted)

when it came to me I was foolish

to be emptying and papering

the high cupboards, with all your things

still slung over the chair-backs.

So I've bundled the whole lot up

into one big sack for the trash-cart.

It's time you moved on darling:

I need room for the new griefs.