The Beaches

I

Not here our sands, those salt-and-pepper sands
Mounding us to the chins: (don’t you remember?
Won’t the lost shake for any cry at all?)
Listen: our sands, so clean you didn’t care
If fine grains hit your teeth, stuck in your hair,
Were moist against the sunburn on your knees.
Everything glowed – old tar-bubble November,
Nothing around us but blue-bubbling air;
We liked being quiet then. To move or call
Crumpled the work of hands, his big red hands:
(It was he, our father, piled the mounds for us):
He sat and read, dreamed there against the wall,
Thinking perhaps how rocks are not quite lands,
Housing old barnacles and octopus;
How the wet gold soups back, strains into seas.
We closed our eyes: sunlight streamed through, in rays
Orange or green, but I liked violet most:
Black dog splashed past us, with the chewed-up ball:
Here it’s so different. Flesh looks hurt; asprawl
These crayfish people; legs like fungoid trees
Lopped off.
You’re playing safe, to stay a ghost.

II

Island Bay, Orongorongo, Day’s Bay, Miramar,
Evan’s Bay where the slips and the rust-red ships are;
You can’t lie still, pretending those are dreams
Like us … Or watch, I’ll show you: wet and clean,
Coming past the sand-dune couples, strung out far,
Purple on brown, his shadow grows between:
Bleached logs stare up: he’s bringing us both ice-creams.

III

An absent face, remote and sharp, as far
As fishers’ boats that bob across the bay
Setting their cray-pots in the island’s shadow;
Fat men are red … this one’s a different red,
Thin-faced and fair, burnt up in scarlet sun.
Ganges and Jumna, half the parrot places
With screeching feathers, soapstone lantern faces,
Were his; but he can’t talk of what he’s done.
Sometimes he hits his skull against a star,
Rages, frizzles red at everyone.
Later you hear him again: ‘Sorry, old girl.’
The lamp goes up, her face looks wringing wet,
The shadow stoops, to see that we’re asleep:
I’d like to ask them questions then: but one
Thinks you’re clean toothbrush, homework neatly done;
One dreams, says ‘A penny for a curl’:
They love you, but their thoughts tide back so deep:
Both are so very certain you’ll forget.

IV

Sands, sands of my father’s town,
Of my father’s triple sea,
(Once for the eyes and twice for dream,
Thrice for memory);
Quilled in the dusk here, grey and brown,
Cool where the silvers gleam,
Hush your singing and let me down;
We shall hear the low-voiced sea.
What is it quickens the blood?
Smell of the sun-soaked, salt-white wood.
What is the tameless thing?
Gull’s shafted wing.

What is it lads deserve?
White boat’s arrowy glimpsing curve.
What is silk to my foot?
Tide on the turn, when spongy trees uproot.
What makes the sweethearts quarrel?
Third mouth, pink as coral.
What shall a maiden do,
Stay true or be untrue?
What says the Mother Sea?
On a glittering day, go free, go free.
What do fishermen keep in their pot?
Cod, garlic and crab they’ve got.
What makes the wanton’s bed?
Sand while she’s living, deep sea dead.
How about her that’s nice?
Granite shone smooth as ice.
What must I do, my sea?
(With empty hands, quiet heart, little else, O sea)
Still be my child – my child to me.
Sands, sands of my mother’s town,
Of my mother’s secret sea,
(For the head borne high, for the lagging heart,
At last for memory)
Feathered in dusk here, grey and black,
White where the moon’s on foam,
Hush your singing and hand me back
For a bed and a lamp at home.
‘White bed,’
sea said,
rocking,
‘White bed,
but not
a home.’

V

This is my secret, this is the chord most perfectly strung:
There lay the dunes: I cleared them in one white stride,
Feet flying, arms flying, seagull-swift, hair and heart flying,
Smiting my feet on sand, I was into the tide:
Catching striking and streaming the harp-chords: for I was young.

This in a sea-cleft bony with old spars staring out
From the rocks and the swaying livid anemones:
But the tide broke in, and with one magnificent shout
Caught me, carried me, balanced me, held by the knees:
Curled to me, high by the wrecked and foaming trees.
But the sparkling Sabine love three moments over
Ran I and laughed, from the greenbeard’s following wrath:
Whirling in winds and taunted, my hollow retreating lover
Snarled at the cliffs, as his spray-drenched hands reached forth:
And in many a sucking cavern, the convex eyes peered forth.
Turned I, and shaken, a child and a woman, blindly
Shook off the weed from my breasts, and knelt upon stone:
And climbed in the yellow steeps of a hill that held me kindly,
And lay in the yellow flowers: and lay alone:
I parted the white-tressed flowers: I lay alone.

VI

Close under here, I watched two lovers once,
Which should have been a sin, from what you say:
I’d come to look for prawns, small pale-green ghosts,
Sea-coloured bodies tickling round the pool.
But tide was out then; so I strolled away
And climbed the dunes, to lie here warm, face down,
Watching the swimmers by the jetty-posts
And wrinkling like the bright blue wrinkling bay.
It wasn’t long before they came; a fool
Could see they had to kiss; but your pet dunce
Didn’t quite know men count on more than that;
And so just lay, patterning sand.
And they
Were pale thin people, not often clear of town:
Elastic snapped, when he jerked off her hat:
I heard her arguing, ‘Dick, my frock!’ But he
Thought she was bread.
I wished her legs were brown,
And mostly, then, stared at the dawdling sea,
Hoping Perry would row me some day in his boat.
Not all the time; and when they’d gone, I went
Down to the hollow place where they had been,
Trickling bed through fingers. But I never meant
To tell the rest, or you, what I had seen:
Though that night, when I came in late for tea,
I hoped you’d see the sandgrains on my coat.

VII

Cool and certain, their oars will be lifted in dusk, light-feathered
As wings of terns, that dip into dream, coming back blue; but the motionless gull
With his bold head hooked beak black-slit humped harsh back
Freezing in icy air gleams crystal and beautiful.
No longer the dark corks bobbing bay-wide are seen:
Dogs bark, mothers hail back their children from ripple’s danger:
People dipped in the dusk-vats smile back, each stranger
Than time: each has a face of crystal and blue.
In the jettisoned boat, the child who peered at her book
Cannot lift her glance from the running silk of the creek:
It is time to run to her mother, to call and look …
The sea-pulse beats in her wrist: she will not speak.
But the boats, in salt tide and smarting sunrise weathered,
Swing by an island’s shadow: silver trickles and wets
The widening branch of their wake, the swart Italian faces,
Fishermen’s silver fingers, fumbling the nets:
And the island lies behind them, lifting its glassy cone
In the one strange motionless gesture, light on stone:
Only the gulls, the guards of the water-lapping places,
Scream at the fishermen lifting the water-lipping nets.
Far and away, the shore people hear a singing:
Love-toned Italian voices fondle the night: the hue
Of the quietly waiting people is velvet blue.