Dennis Haskell: Four Poems

How Close to Calligraphy

For Robert Gray

 

Through the graffitied windows

of a rackety Sydney train

I look out on “hectares” of suburbs

but the word sounds odd to someone

who grew up in feet and inches, and still

thinks ordinarily of acres, who remembers

“chains” and “roods” and “perches”,

those useless imperial words

now mummified in bandages of silence

 

utterly unlike the silence of margins

—not the so fashionably academic

outside the suburbs,

but that white space

at the ends of our lines

that publishers insist

readers insist on,

the spaces that show we believe

there is always more to be said

and readers might say

or at least might think it.

 

Now, when every year seems an extra,

a parody of the death that

has already silenced my father, I’ve somehow

come to think that “God” is the least

likely to say anything,

and be very calm about

that clear-as-a-wardrobe silence.

Why should the years make me meet

His or Her blankness with tranquillity

when those same years have taught

that the wisdom I once thought

we’d grow into

is as distant as a beacon in hell?

So here on the wrong side of 60, with fewer

years to come than have already been,

on a train sliding quickly

through Sydney suburbs

I can see hundreds of kids, and their

screaming parents, all with European,

Arabic or Asian faces, scramble across

huddled fields, and hundreds of girls

scamper down lines, lean up to netball rings

with avaricious anticipation. Life is

up there and out there. Later, at the Quay

 

ferries ruffle back and forth beside

and underneath the black arched bridge.

Dennis Haskell

Instincts
for Ann Jamieson, wherever she may be

One day, one summer, about 1959

my mate and I approached tall,

long-haired, pony-tailed Ann Jamieson

with a cacophony of bugs and beetles

we must have taken days to collect.

She shrieked, and fled in terror,

we chased, aiming at her hair

hysterical locusts and bewildered beetles,

delighted with our bravado,

her schoolbag flapping on her hips.

This apology comes late by fifty years.

Boys who have reached eleven or twelve

have odd ways of showing they like you

which girls who have reached eleven or twelve

strangely, find difficult to construe.

We laughed like larrikins,

unaware of the urges which had lain

so long in the chrysalis of our bodies

and had now begun to stir and buzz.

Dennis Haskell

Nature and the Human

I spent a week at St Anne’s-on-the-Sea

For a dose of English summer—wind and rain mainly—

But I never did manage to see the sea.

I stayed at Breverton, the lovely b & b

Where Anna and her kids were kind as kind can be:

I spent a week at St Anne’s-on-the-Sea.

I looked far, as far as any eye could see

And saw sand flats stretched across the estuary

But I never did manage to see the sea.

The tide crept in at night, oblivious to me

Through the force of nature’s perversity

I spent a week at St Anne’s-on-the-Sea.

Fish and chips and a pint—a gourmet’s specialty;

Under “No dogs” signs dogs walked nonchalantly

But I never did manage to see the sea.

I thought nature and humans could readily agree

But the sand flats leached away endlessly:

I spent a week at St Anne’s-on-the-Sea

But I never did manage to see the sea.

Dennis Haskell

Tinnitus

5,000 angels dance on a pin

creating a thin, high-pitched singing

in the empty area of my ear,

plucking each high harp string

in a Morse of ping and whistle;

I can hear the whistle

but can’t discern the music,

suffer its relentless din—day

into stinging night into day.

It can’t be cured the doctors say

so they play audiologists’ tricks

to fool my brain. My curative sound’s

the shilly-shallying of surf,

of water fussing and trembling

on sandy shores, or flopping

a susurrus over rocks. You can hear froth

laced to the surfaces of sound.

 

For a year I’ve listened

to this slumbrous rustling cure,

surf splashed in the computer’s core,

gushed through the car’s soft speakers,

water thrushed over my head

in whispering sleep.

And still the angels sing

their dog whistle tingling,

their unchanging I-Ching,

the shrill denizens of my inner ear.

A thousand pins drop tinkling

down cliffs of ice, and zing

again in a tympani of feeling;

for folly is as folly does:

this brain is not for fooling.

 Dennis Haskell