Seven Poems
My Education from 1964 to I Forget
Souls
You can tell the rolls of dust under the bed are ghosts
because their bodies are see-through
but they have their own mind
their own fierce, unpredictable, grey mind.
Your mind crouches inside your hard white head.
Ghosts are actually souls. Ghosts, souls, dust—all the same.
Your soul is a white satin cushion under your ribs.
Inky stains have spread into the weave.
The dust-ghosts are dead but they’re trapped on earth
—for some reason which will not be a good reason—
so they still have a mind. If you have a mind you have free will.
You have free will. It’s a wonderful gift which you can’t see
but it makes you do everything wrong.
When you’re down on the yellow sparkly lino playing
and all the other things you do with your body
you see the ghosts quivering under the bed and watching.
The games, the children coming and going,
the sleeps, the smacks.
They know everything about you, the things
you’ve done and caused in that room in your four years.
But one day—every day new things are revealed—
you realize that the ghosts don’t like it when the mother
savages them with the mop.
The mother with her hair going grey like fine dust,
dyed with a kind of Vegemite only smelly in the bathroom
in the afternoon.
The mop handle flickers like an old Charlie Chaplin film.
Black and white and black and white scratching the air.
They do not like it one bit.
The mother with her tight lips and her dirty yellow mop
and her muscly arms shaking with rage.
They scream away into the wind
and up and up into a sort of Heaven.
Watering Can
One summer everyone was away except us.
Mum and Dad never argued, but once a year Mum said,
That wretched gas company takes its pound of flesh.
All January I walked along the Wilson’s wall made from
rocks from Red Rocks. I knew every vein of every rock.
My brothers caught sparrow in a trap on the brown lawn.
After weeks I went over the road to see if Peter Z was back.
Through the picket gate. Their garden had died in the heat.
There was a drought that year. There were children in Australia
who were eight years old and had never seen rain.
The house creaked in the wind. I knew everything about it.
The bleached back door, the porch shelves, the cobwebby panes.
It was like there was no one left on earth.
By the back door was a red plastic watering can, small,
for a child. It was light in my hand.
At home Mum is reading the paper in the cool house.
Look, a watering can, I say, from the Zivkovics.
It’s not yours, she says, it’s theirs. Take it back.
I can feel the moment in my brain. It is almost red
and bigger than the long summer. His. Mine.
I put it back exactly where it had been.
Red Jacket
So much happens on the winter afternoon it’s like
a year of fever.
All the children play in the room with the bay window,
bright in the grey house.
At dusk the rain’s thumping so the Brookeses bundle me into
an old jacket.
It’s dusky red with a brass zip and a musty smell.
I am loved.
At home dripping beside the rack of dead grandparents
I struggle to get out.
Mum wrestles back and forth with her nails and lips.
This is a tough zip.
I will spend the rest of my life in the red jacket.
When I’m old, like now, writing to you,
I’ll be wearing the jacket.
I’ll be bursting out of it and it will be ragged and I
will have never had another bath.
It has already been recognized that Anne can fly into a panic.
Don’t panic, Anne.
With a sudden squeal of pain under Mum’s hands
which can do everything good and bad
the zip parts like a mouth. I tear off the jacket
as fast as his little legs can carry him.
Someone says, We could always have cut the jacket.
You can cut jackets.
Girl
At home it was just boys so she was a boy.
Later when she could think she thought, Raised by wolves.
It was actually marvellous tumbling about.
Every day a new shadow ambled into the house.
Every day they made up a new set of rules that could be
smashed to bits with everything you could think of.
She thought the war of independence happened
out the back door. Well it did, but a different one.
On the stripped carpet with the brother one up from her,
their purple knees playing redcoats v. bluecoats
while the older brothers played drums in the shed
and got into trouble. The police watched their house.
Everyone went apeshit sometimes. The war on the floor
was peaceful. The dead men fit in a matchbox.
It was better to be a bluecoat because they didn’t like
the English but sometimes you had to be a redcoat
otherwise there’d be no game. My men, my men.
Her brother said, My men, and she said, My men.
When she went to school she turned into a girl and got
two shirts called blouses that did up on the other side.
Beach
My father couldn’t walk on the beach because special boots.
He leaned on the sea wall and watched me play in the sand.
Don’t go in the water. There’s no one to save you.
This was just once. I was the last child and they were sick of children.
It was cheerful. Dad smoked with the Italian fishermen.
Their men’s talk and laughter bounced out to the island.
I played in the sand while the other kids splashed about.
Eventually they emerged blue with cold. It was Wellington.
A boy from school said, Why’s your father got funny feet?
We went to the Basile’s for afternoon tea and ate soft cakes.
Mrs Basile squeezed my cheeks and gave me a special pink cup.
Later I asked Mum, Why does Dad have funny feet?
He just does, she said. She was peeling potatoes.
The sun went down suddenly and there was a pink dusk.
Next day at school I said to the boy, He just does.
School
Mrs M wore a red cardigan and her mouth was a red strip.
She owned a snake.
Children, she said, a fiery dungeon rages under the earth
and the Devil lives there.
If you’ve ever, ever told a lie or stolen anything
he’ll clutch you in hot eternity.
We had our white blouses and our black shoes and our white
triangular sandwiches.
I’d once taken thrippence from my mother’s purse.
I went home.
Why hadn’t anyone told me! Everyone went about as if they
didn’t care about terror.
Fish Fridays ticked past. How could you keep your mind
on a game of Ludo?
At school we had our little chairs and our little desks. Writing
made a lot of white dust.
We held our forefinger over our lips like a sentry guarding
against talk.
One day men arrived to lay the new living room carpet
and rungs were revealed.
Like volcano sand it went: carpet, underlay, floorboards. Fire
flickered through the cracks.
The men heaved the old carpet out like a statue. Look! I said.
We live just above Hell.
Everyone laughed. That Mrs M is an idiot and the Devil
isn’t true.
The relief was like a bath. At school I told the other kids.
Some believed, some didn’t.
For ‘Faith of the Fathers’ I sang my lungs out because I had
the knowledge.
Glass
With each gust the windows snort like horses at the riding school.
The windows ripple like the worried green harbour.
The riding school is rough and you shouldn’t go there.
It’s just up the road and everyone peers in, even the little kids.
You see Pākehā teenagers in their dark jeans and boots,
the horses in their mangy skins. Smoky, Blacky and Misty.
That’s how you know that the windows are ready to blow.
Sometimes the sea whips up in a fury like horses except white.
Sometimes horses escape overnight and in the morning
you see them ripping up the grass verge with their big teeth
like all the kids’ new big teeth, and their tender gums.
A boy is kicked in the groin and rolls on the grass crying.
Don’t tease the horses. No one helps him and he limps home.
The harbour is really the sea. It’s the same water.
When the windows explode everyone will blow away.
We will all be gone, somewhere, like death.
In the end the riding school goes and Bruce Stewart arrives.
There are packing case houses and Māori teenagers.
Your mother walks up with a batch of scones.
You trail behind in your summer shorts and sandals.
Your mother is usually shy but she hongis someone.
On the way home a neighbour says, Ronnie, what are you doing?
The Home of Compassion sells Bruce the land.
Your father nods. He likes anything the Catholics do.
In a storm the chimney clunks down and bits of roof blow off.
The windows are thin and invisible and fragile.
You all look through them into the wild abyss.
Anne Kennedy’s recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf, and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. Awards and fellowships include the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry, and the IIML Writer in Residence. Anne is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.