The Lakes of Mars

by Chris Orsman

Overview

This stunning collection of poems is a characteristic mix of thoughtful reflection and precise imagery of landscape. Each piece captures an ordinary moment with a visual clarity but always pushes the descriptions further, broadening the intellectual and moral meaning. Finding a true balance, they re-create historical moments with vividness while evoking the gifts and loss of the past. From the Wellington hills to the light art of Bill Culbert, the poetry displayed here is distinctive, scrupulous, and splendid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781869404086
Publisher:	Auckland University Press
Publication date:	06/28/2008
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Chris Orsman is the author of Ornamental Gorse, which won the New Zealand Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and South: An Antarctic Journey, which was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. He was the 2002 writer in residence at Victoria University of Wellington's Glen Schaeffer House. His poems have been published in numerous anthologies and journals.

Read an Excerpt

The Lakes of Mars

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By Chris Orsman

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 2008 Chris Orsman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-189-5

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CHAPTER 1

    Grass

    Wade into the long grass,
    the world is tougher

    than we imagine;
    what do we know

    of hidden topographies,
    ridges and valleys

    drowned in green,
    insect life

    of that sea-floor?
    This feral sweep and gain

    over deserted ground
    seems like natural justice.

    And here we come across
    an upland rugby field

    out of season, a savannah
    of faded lines

    and goal posts askew.
    Stone out the windows

    of the changing-shed,
    call it the barn of the rich man

    after his soul was demanded,
    emptied of all but the living

    granaries of seed heads
    carried in by the wind.

    What was his name
    that he proved so poor?

    Think of the newly dead,
    heft the airy scruples, drachms —

    weights they carry
    to the personal judgement —

    and read the metaphor
    incumbent in the grass,

    its biblical power
    to persuade

    that life is short
    and full of strange reverses:

    the soldier turns man of peace
    and is murdered by the pious.

       i.m. Yitzhak Rabin, 5 November 1995


    Instamatic

    I mourn the loss of my Kodak 133,
    it went the way of all plastic

    but there are times I feel beholden to
    that small faithful body and nylon strap,

    that comforting drag at the wrist,
    and pre-sexual click of satisfaction

    as each new shot fell into place.
    Two settings covered all weathers

    — cloudy, sunny — the viewfinder
    stepped the world back, squared it

    to a commodious miniature
    almost anything wandered into.

    * * *

    A whole century moves until you stop it,
    at the airport

    or behind the pump-house where you've snapped
    a summery group against a backdrop

    of gorse and convolvulus;
    even the sky pauses and is reduced

    to the same grey stuff as the rest of us.
    What were you looking for?

    First film was an exercise in hope —
    the cat in the cross-hair shadows

    of the clothes-line, the lawn mower
    rusting in a corner

    near that backyard pylon, the Hill's Hoist;
    several posed shots with caps

    and badges, a bottle display,
    a jammed photo of a path

    overlaid with someone's
    faint portrait. An absence

    is present here but is barely accounted
    real life or history, being partial

    and often blurred or otherwise
    resisting focus. Have I then

    stalled time at the wrong time,
    as people were getting on or off,

    or blinking, or raising fork to mouth?
    Who says that life's like this,

    and how do we reclaim the desire to desire
    that's called nostalgia?

    * * *

    We're easily charmed by inaccuracy
    and learn to love the plainness of life:

    the kitchen in a previous incarnation
    with its round-shouldered refrigerator

    — an asthmatic under high cupboards;
    cake on linoleum bench top, my mother

    and sister wide-eyed in the flash;
    Jane with Mitty, the cat's half her height,

    well grasped at the midriff, saucer-eyed;
    children holding toetoe on a blustery day;

    Jeff and Murf flexing muscles,
    concave adolescence on the garage roof;

    John on his first day at college;
    grandparents in a plain bungalow

    off Scott Street, Blenheim;
    first house in a subdivision, a hillside

    of forked pine trees, a house
    burning on Wright's Hill

    (is this one back to front?),
    the valley framed in the foreground

    by a charred silhouette and fireman's head;
    long shadows across a park,

    the harbour from a watertower,
    a rock tossed over a cliff

    and caught; fennel and blackberry on slopes;
    my brothers

    in let-down flares and school socks
    by the problematic blank windows of the porch;

    an alarm clock stuck on half-past four
    as Derek reads Tintin on a bed.

    * * *

    You'll see yourself out of doors,
    a bland reflection in a window,

    the arm raised to shield the eyes
    from what's flared up

    in some cameral sunspot
    too bright for the film,

    too bright for people's waking lives.
    Who can find time again in these

    near-images, affectionate botch-ups?
    Who'll gorge again these

    art-disappointing
    light-sensitive squares

    on that plenitude that rouses us
    and slips away before our eyes?


    White Wind


        for Greg O'Brien

    The man in the canvas deck-chair
    hears no dissension but the wind-vane
    clattering homemade at the gate.
    He jokes with someone out of view,
    half-in, half-out, on a verandah
    that's closed-in west and east
    with small panes of cathedral glass,
    orange, yellow, emerald-green.

    High-toned, it's summer and no summer,
    a white wind scourges the harbour;
    out beyond the verandah posts
    a parade-ground is mutinous with dust.
    The gate rattles its one good hinge
    to interpret tidings of the wind.

    A nor'wester on manoeuvres
    struck camp some days ago
    across the Tasman Sea. De-ionised,
    the air has tuned the serotonin down,
    although that isn't widely known
    this last year of Victoria's reign.

    Our man turns his deck-chair around
    to read in the glory-room windows
    the slab of air and sea, the sand-blasted
    text of the morning: white street
    between gate posts, neat fences
    of abraded pine, a pier bleached out
    a hundred feet from shore.

         What's reflected
    is penitential and troublesome: lives
    — the new century — blown off course.
    Boys fish with arcing lines, a couple
    regret their stroll along the pier: his hand's
    to his hat, she's dead weight at his elbow.

    They mouth a dialogue still audible
    over ninety years, as distance squints back
    from the false horizon, and the sea's
    shaken out like a parlour-cloth.

    * * *

    Bracketed and decent, a shelf holds
    a jug of clean water, a bar of soap,
    a towel is draped across a chair:
    a woman finds some peace at last.
    Life is grafted to the sweet stem,
    tendril and full bloom of the wind,
    its airy sap and held-in breath
    kept at bay by a closed door.

    There's a clash of sill and frame,
    a crackle of paper, a white
    rustling in the leaves, a voice reading.
    We whisper a commonplace, locate
    a strip of already focused ground
    between gateposts and clothes-line.
    Our brows furrow and we listen
    as tidal movements of the air
    blend all our subtle kinships — what's
    breathed in and out, the chemistry
    of atoms and sub-atomic particles.

    Later, we draw back in threes and twos
    to take in the wider scene: the picture
    frame's a natural division of the wind.


    The Polar Captain's Wife

    I imagine you are much
    preoccupied with the cold,

    inching your way between
    icebergs of a menacing blue.

    This picture satisfies us both;
    it is your duty to sound out

    the buoyant and laden,
    and think betimes of your wife

    stranded amidst the furniture.
    Being a little drunk I wander

    from room to room, touching
    temperate surfaces —

    a book, a clock, a chair —
    missing the body heat

    we stowed in that chamber
    our last night together.


    A First Landing

       Cape Adare, Antarctica, 24 January 1895

    I

    Some twenty yards from the cockboat
    a killer whale ruddered and took our range,
    exhaling a hollow sanctus — fishy, lung-warm —
    on our enterprise.

         And with that benison
    one of the Tasmanians leapt from the gunwales
    and slipped where summer had made it treacherous
    underfoot; his shout and shoaled heave broke
    into the waters of the cape; his wetted knees
    were a supplication and finely judged gesture,
    and the sound was new there.

    II

    The bay's near-crescent made a threshold
    for our standing figures: Captain Henrik Bull
    in a tall hat, the crew disposed to be casual,
    lending scale to the scene, the ship as background.
    Yes, how cleanly the binding of glass and light
    — the shutter's fall, the meagre snick of plates —
    invented for us the afterlife. A clarity
    came into the picture from outside
    like a dangerous air over the shoulder.
    For what was moving was engaging us,
    and nothing could be seen of it that calm forenoon
    or heard above our clanking steps — the continent
    setting its range, closing in from fierce
    inland horizons of basalt and ice.

    We kept our minds on petty things after that.
    Our hands cupped and dipped in a cascade
    where icemelt over gravel was a lens
    on the secret, held-in life; knowledge brimmed
    in bare concavities, slipped through our hands.
    Soon the Captain waved us back to the shore;
    we discarded all that was low-natured
    or contingent: the Bosun held his phlegm,
    no one whistled or coughed; as the shutter was set
    we stiffened and drew breath.

    III

    'Whatever happened there was ordinary:
    the men formed their pairs and ventured out,

    collecting stones, making fire under a cliff;
    one man read aloud a letter from his wife.

    We grew serene and forgetful by degrees.
    As we sailed again into the Antarctic gyre

    we thought of severance from that bridal life;
    an exemplary hunger overtook us,

    we were the driven ship again — empowered
    to balance opposites, surprised at nothing.'


    Firmament

       Bill Culbert's Lightworks

    Light or heat — what reaches you first
    When you wear your skin as an organ of sense?

    What burns below you and above
    Tethered to its source?

    Come in from the winter,
    Warm your hands against a star,

    Where one with luminance has stowed
    The trestles of the universe.


    Alexis

       for Harry Orsman


    One law is
    mixing languages
    ancient & modern

    fifty or ten or eleven
    or six perhaps
    read from behind

    the whole is
    a total stock
    of words

    of course,
    a name, and
    split neatly

    a lexis is
    a humane
    preoccupation

    for two score
    years
    and six.


    Storm Warning

    If we could talk to each other
    We wouldn't need these

    Emblems of distress:
    The plague-flag nailed to a wall,

    A strip of canvas hung high,
    To glow in the burn-off

    Of its own painted hills.
    If we could talk to each other.

    * * *

    And if what persuades us
    Is not a bat's squeak of theory

    Honed like radar — but honest words
    thickened by an artist's brush

    We might still hear each other:
    A chain of voices on the ridge

    Like bird-song, making whole
    Within rain's sweet foreclosure.


    Cape Gooseberries


    for Lynn

    I think of the Cape Gooseberry
    In its little house of sighs,

    A lantern of good intentions
    Pulsing the veined husk,

    A flare-up on the tongue
    Extinguishing pleasure.


    Volunteer

       William Orsman, Nelson City Rifles

    1

    'We met no resistance throughout that country,
    everything we carried was a dead weight:

    sabres and carbines, the lumbering Armstrong gun
    ploughing a single furrow to Parihaka

    across the ripening fields. A salt wind
    nosed at the earth-wound in our wake.

    Some shucked ears of green wheat and scattered them
    — Sabbath-breakers on a weekday morning

    cursed back into line. Daybreak found us
    wading a ground mist on the western flank;

    a low scrub parted and closed on us again,
    and the boasting and big talk petered out.

    Parihaka lay under a bluish haze,
    deft with the chink chink of bit and rein;

    on the perimeter you could hear
    rifles being cocked like knuckles cracking.

    * * *

    'The sun reached us first as a mock fusillade
    on the terraced hillside; in the valley below

    it seemed that earth lifted, as on a sheet,
    into brightening air. The mist dispersed;

    we heard children singing, and saw the town
    laid out before us like a cleared brow

    on the face of the morning. Then hooves and shouts
    as Bryce's Cavalry charged at the gates,

    and girls shied the horses with shoulder mats,
    deflecting sabres, and those kilted dogs

    — the Armed Constabulary — followed through,
    breaching the City of air and light!'

    2

    Hardly in whiskers, and true to your age,
    you aim your rifle across a felled tree

    into the crowded marae. Great-grandfather,
    you were high-minded enough at nineteen years

    to realise that the fight was no fight
    — though you longed for it. The enemy

    lodged within, crouched and defensive
    behind the heart's palisades.

    I volunteer you as a single figure
    in the tableau beyond, someone to set right

    in your youthful ignorance and hopes
    what you helped destroy. Bequeath to me

    your clear sight on that morning, whatever
    is necessary in your ignorance;

    for now I station myself beside you
    as you ease off the trigger, gazing out

    where you stand, watchful at daybreak,
    waiting for the ground mist to rise.


    Making Waves


        for Maurice Wilkins

    Light diffracted on a bedroom wall
    at 30 Kelburn Parade, making waves
    through a cloth blind, circa 1920;
    outside, pongas and cabbage trees
    lie just within memory's range,
    a pattern and a shadow.
    The silence here is qualified
    but it draws you out, four years old,
    or five. The world's a single room
    where fronds and wind tap a code
    against the window-pane.

    Next up you're wild, sprinting down
    a helix of concrete steps
    from the hills to the harbour.
    Or you're leaning into a gale
    commensurate to your incline
    and weight; the elements support you,
    and the blustery horizon
    is fresh with new information.

    * * *

    And now the landscape changes
    from island to continent to island again,
    and there's a sea-change as we fire off
    certain rays to form a transverse
    across your history.

         Acclimatised,
    you wintered over in laboratories
    and made a virtue of basements
    and arcane knowledge; you found
    a scientific silence or a calm
    in which things are worked out
    at a snail's pace, a slime
    stretched and scrutinised between
    forefinger and thumb to yield
    a feast of the truth, or a field
    ploughed with frustration, if that
    is where our guesses land us.
    For Science is a railway carriage
    rocking with big ideas, sometimes
    stalled on the sidings or slowed
    on branch lines near rural stations.

    And still the whole is too huge for us
    to comprehend, one metre long,
    wrapped around each cell,
    unread until it's unwound,
    the scarf and valence of our complexity,
    from which we derive our unique timbre
    to say: Well done! Well done!

    * * *

    To an amateur an x-ray plate
    looks like an old-fashioned
    gramophone disk: yet it plays
    scratchy music of the spheres,
    jazz of an original order.
    Or perhaps it's the ground-section
    of a Byzantine cathedral, or a basilica
    of double colonnades and semi-circular apse
    — and who builds upwards from that
    to discover the grand design? Who
    constructs with only a floor plan
    to find the elevations?
         Those
    who are neither architects nor masons
    but quiet archaeologists of the unseen
    hand and mind of God, digging upwards
    to the exquisite airy construction
    of the double helix. Gifted clumsiness?
    Genius? You are there at the start of it,
    a chiropractor of the biophysical,
    clicking the backbone of DNA into place.


    Dunedin Postcard

    On the way down to Tunnel Beach
    I thought of Baxter's grave, ambiguous brow

    and sighted it there on a slope few see
    in a clear upland of tussocky grass

    above pressure-bearing strata
    so dense and buckled

    you felt that if you prised a stone free
    it would zing like a bullet

    from the cliff face. Trope and guilt
    in equal measure! I thought

    how his poetry was like that
    kelp-stained finger of the sea,

    poking and poking a funnel
    to the arena beyond.

    We held our breath going through
    moist, ribbed sandstone

    that smelt faintly of urine.
    All the air was sucked out

    to return as a deep-voiced boom
    from the Pacific. I smoked,

    you took half a dozen photographs,
    we climbed back to the car.

    Later, over the city, drizzle set in,
    and I recall how the south wind

    tripped the electric door at the hotel,
    sending in jabs of the Antarctic.


    Primer of Ice and Stone


        for Raewyn Atkinson

    What language can we find
    for the true desert? Call it
    Terra Irredenta, land
    unrecovered, unredeemed

    without fame or renown
    until one walks here and claims it
    by right of vision,

         and returns
    through conscious art
    what has been felt and seen:

    a translation
         of elements,
    a survival
         of that original order.

    * * *

    What are the valences we speak of
    when water bonds as ice and snow,
    or rock forms in the deep furnace,
    a kiln of the earth long ago?

    Is it a lake in the granite hills,
    the iris of God in its wide bed
    of infinite gazing;

    or is it terra rossa,
    a hardening of soil from a climate
    Mediterranean and remote;

    or small craters of snow,
    cupped hands, a begging bowl
    in Bull Pass: or a spine
    of snow on stone,

    a crack, a piercing,
    a widening to the underworld
    to hold us in perpetuity.

    And the map itself,
    a nest of ceramic glazes
    between islands and mountains,
    and ice shelves,
    pooled on the plateau amid
    the reddish teething of mountains;
         seeping into valleys,
    the Pleistocene gravel
    buried far down.

    * * *

    Go back to the source,
    the original order, wind and sand
    working off each other,
    each facing-stone polished,
    a facet to the Plateau;

    rock hollowed out
    like a turtle's shell;

    or the hogback of stone
    cut like the plated spine
    of stegosaurus
         by that ancient
    irresistible wind
         that falls
    from great heights, the cold
    and dense air gravity moves
    high on the Plateau, to scour
    these valleys,
         katabatic:
    if only because it falls
    so long and heavy to the sea

    and strips the igneous rock
    into sinus or abdomen or shell,
    imitating the mineral ice.

    * * *

    Or pillow lava from Cape Royds:
    emblem
       of black and white,
         rounded
    like the buboes of plague
    in the land's groin
    or armpit;

    a camouflage, a revealing
         integument
    of Antarctica.

    * * *

    Core samples
    transformed, as if earth itself
    were fired, its cones cooling
    to the touch;
         or those
    diagonals, that lunging tilted
    imperialism
         of the linear
    that works its way somehow
    into each horizon:
    mountainside, glacier face,
    country of ascent.

    * * *

    And whether our view is deceived
    by what we hold in our hands,
    we lift
          this crafted scale
    against the light, measure it,
    gauge it, it is a return

    made, a recovery
    of land without fame and renown.

    * * *

    Last is the light
    filtered through ice, seepage
    and flow through the walls
    of a primal shelter:

    invasive and defining, lucent,
    a blue watermark, a survival:

    so build us a home of it,
    make it solid, the light
    of home, 'Homelight',

    a cold pressing
         on to paper
    on to clay,
         shaped,
fired.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Lakes of Mars by Chris Orsman. Copyright © 2008 Chris Orsman. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

1,
Grass,
Instamatic,
White Wind,
The Polar Captain's Wife,
A First Landing,
Firmament,
Alexis,
Storm Warning,
Cape Gooseberries,
Volunteer,
Making Waves,
Dunedin Postcard,
Primer of Ice and Stone,
2 The Lakes of Mars,
The Lakes of Mars,
The Book of the Dead,
Notes,

Editorial Reviews

"You feel as though the poems themselves have been chiselled from a block of ice, pared down until it is clear that every word left is crisp and necessary."  —The Lumiere Reader

From the Publisher

You feel as though the poems themselves have been chiseled from a block of ice, pared down until it is clear that every word left is crisp and necessary.

The Lumiere Reader