Jeffrey Harpeng: NIGHT JOURNEY

With her pillow and blanket she settles to sleep on her bedroom floor.

Later as I am heading off to bed, she is sleeping in her doorway, knees tucked under, bottom in the air, arms forward over her pillow. She is stretched, as in prayer, toward mummy’s bed in the room across the hall.

In the morning, on my way to breakfast, I find her on the floor just inside mummy’s room, still sleeping toward Mecca.

the long night journey
without wings
to morning
a chorus of crow
parrot and dove calls

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia

Jeffrey Harpeng: SAD TOYS

after Takuboku Ishikawa

in the weeping willows

of Takuboku's tanka

kanji leaves hang . . .

hear the soughing

of Takuboku's words

Setting the doll I bought for my child
By her bed where she naps,
I enjoy myself alone.

—Takuboku Ishikawa

.

In the biographical introduction to Sad Toys I read that Takuboku, his mother and wife all died of tuberculosis within thirteen months.

And the daughter not yet seven years old, nothing more is said of her.

only one or two
house lights this smoggy night
walking the streets
lighting one cigarette
from the glow of another

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia

Jeffrey Harpeng: LIBERATION

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On the mani stone by the pathway is a Buddhist prayer for the peace and liberation of all beings. A couple with dogs on leashes pass by. I am following the Avon down to the daffodil lawn where I said goodbye to her, five years ago. On top of the stone somebody has twined supple pine branches and set in feathers and a cone to form a kind of crown. For the once and future king.

Om mani padme hum, the prayer is written. The sky is frosted blue. There is a giddiness in me as if I had just filled with my breath a hundred balloons for a child’s party. Under the grass daffodil bulbs await the spring sun.

a frosted blue balloon
drifts into a vacant lot

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia

Jeffrey Harpeng: HORSE TALE

a wild horse
galloping toward me
granddad’s fingers

The mantle clock chimes as if it were an omen in a fairy tale. The opening notes of a slow waltz. Blue notes. How beautifully the mermaid dances on pain made out of daggers. How the tin soldier’s lead heart is heavy as ammunition. How the beanstalk winds toward heaven lithe as smoke from a smelter’s chimney. How I listen as my fingers gallop toward my granddaughter, off the table and on out the window.

Outside the almost laughter of a kookaburra, the supernatural quardle of magpies and her answering the “h-h-h-oo” welling from the hearts of the doves.

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia

Jeffrey Harpeng: MARKED

.

arms blue with prison tatts
on his shoulder a spider
stuck in its own web

After the bank robbery he went bush, roustabout and shearer. One job he lived in a tin shed an hour from town. Didn't drink with the crew in town. Shouldered slabs of tinnies and a bottle of whiskey back. Just in the door a termite floorboard cracked and he fell into. . . couldn't budge. So he drank a shout to himself and himself and himself.

The sun snailed twice across the sky.

And the kookaburras laughed, even at the brown snake that basked at the door...

Mid-fifties, he keeps his hair long, to flip in case he meets an old screw.

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia
first published in Quartet (Teneriffe, Qld.: Post Pressed, 2008)

Review of Jeffrey Harpeng's QUARTER PAST SOMETIME

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Quarter Past Sometime by Jeffrey Harpeng. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 9-78192121-4172. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 36 pp., $15 Aus.
.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
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New Zealander Jeffrey Harpeng, now resident in Australia, writes haibun in a rich voice akin to the rhythms of much modernist verse, say, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos or Basil Bunting’s Briggflats. The example of Bunting is most apropros because Harpeng’s haibun are not only replete with historical and cultural allusions a la Pound but also, like the Northumbrian Bunting, remain stubbornly loyal to their immediate locale, to regional history and to local speech-patterns and place-names, whether the chosen setting is a lush green headland on volcanic Banks Peninsula in New Zealand’s South Island or a desolate backcountry cemetery in an Australia brittle with drought.

On the low stone wall above the beach, there are a couple of rusty cauldrons once used for rendering whale blubber. They gather leaves, gather wind-drift, gather trash. My imagination rivets great copper handles to them, and a hotplate of magma rises to brew Turkish coffee. I spice it with cardamom and sweeten it with a sugar-bag of sugar, enough coffee, enough sugar to string out the minor gods of place, to stew all time in a sweet brown cloud. Let that be drunk and the ensuing dream be a clear blue sky and us walking, a child here and another there. How they run ahead.
.

The harbour is a caldera twelve million years old. An occasional tremor ripples the landscape. Seasons have poured into the harbour and receded like the tide. In a high altitude photo of Banks Peninsula, Akaroa appears little more than a lichen tracery on a crumpled map. (27)

So he writes in “Akaroa – Remote Viewing,” with the fine descriptive detail that is characteristic of his observation of landscape and his cognizance of that same land’s history.

In a prelude to “Australia Day 2007,” Harpeng begins, “Sitting on the back porch, looking south, a thousand miles and more of drought in that direction and to my right twice that much and more (31).” Deprivation and death are the main themes in this work wherein the drought-stricken terrain itself becomes an invasive force. Farther along, the poet introduces us to his deaf brother in a cemetery scene:

I am with my brother and mother. A man in a Hawaiian shirt asks directions. He seems to be subtitling himself, making shy sign language below his chest as he talks to us. We don’t know the suburb of the dead he is looking for. The base blue of his shirt is fathoms darker than the sky.
.

‘Do you know him?’ My mother signs to my brother and dubs her own soundtrack.
.

"No,” my brother says.

.
among the sleeping
so many
in unkempt beds

.
The man in the Hawaiian shirt is already a whole congregation away. (32)

The elegiac note is sounded and deepens as this haibun now progresses to Harpeng’s grief over his mother’s mortality:

Before the road winds up the Marburg Ranges, there’s a straight past the place selling potted roses.
.

‘Over there,’ (three houses at the foot of a hill) mum says, ‘is where the lady lived who made my wedding bouquet. That year was dry, florists had no flowers, but on the day a flower from here and a flower from there on our wedding date…’
.

The countryside is once again brittle.

.
drought
so much
forgotten (33)

.

One of the most endearing qualities of this book is found in the unguarded but unsentimental tenderness that the poet reserves for members of his family. We meet his brother, again, in “Kaikoura”:

At the sea’s edge, I estimate compass setting, point out from the rocks, push-mower roll one hand out from my heart toward tomorrow. In the grammatic space inhabited by my brother, I make him a thumb-winged plane, palm down, further and further out there. In reply he zig-zags a tutorial pointer across a map in the air. A map on which I see him already gone, barely arrived. Six years since last we met.

.
We cross the broken scripted rocks: geological glyphs smoothed and pooled by the tide. Surf-washed, wave-worn inlets are littoral character traits in the script. I wave for his attention. He responds, shrugging eyebrows and shoulders. I scoop bucket-fulls of air to my chest, sample it at my lips, then splay fingers from my lips with gastronomic gusto, and a Latin pout. My brother’s head and eyebrows rise, drop to a nod’s fading echo. (24)

Quarter Past Sometime collects thirteen haibun and two variations on the sonnet. another form that the poet shows an affinity for. Haibun by the baker’s dozen may strike the reader as a slender offering but Harpeng’s works are often longer than what one commonly reads in haikai journals. They also employ a complex association of images and very rich diction, circumstances which add to the gravity or density of the individual titles. If I were drawing up a list of the ten most interesting haikai books of the last year, Quarter Past Sometime would rate highly, and is therefore recommended to the reader.

reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Lynx, June 2008

Jeffrey Harpeng: AKAROA—REMOTE VIEWING

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A sleety spring day in the English end of Akaroa. A length of clean newsprint is taped to the bay window of a weekend rental. A 4B pencil traces the skyline of the southern harbour, rim and ridge and inclines to the sea, the sea line, houses, and trees in plantation and scattered.

spring trees
no two buds the same
your voice

.
Sunday morning, I walk down to the bakery. There is a road between it and the sea front: shell and stone beach under a low stone wall. Sleet drifts. It melts at contact. It is flavourless, it is icing sugar on the harbour’s hilltop rim. I want to clean my glasses, to clear that luminous grey smudge, that grubby tarp, that weather smudged and mouldy horse blanket, the sky.

In the moment the monologue is thin.

in my hooded jacket
the sound of my jacket
and walking

The Comte de Paris is at anchor in the harbor. Sails furled, a few rolled clouds are snagged in the cross spars. The Comte de Paris has decking of shoreline and hills and a hulk of blue grey water, is transparent, a heart ghost. Longboats have been lowered and row shoreward. The Comte de Paris is a faded glass plate negative. The view predates the camera. It is 1840. In a few months Pytor Illyich Tchaikovsky will be born. Somebody in the longboat is humming the bones of a melody from his Pathetique.

One word is thistle is the dagger of an exclamation: ‘Bitch!’ Thistle-down in the updraft of time.

A winged heart-flight higher, even Germanic consonants usually snapped to attention become soft as a kiss, ‘Liebchen’, the beloved becomes a cherub, the flush of life in a dear one’s cheeks, the light of the inner life in a flush.

icy wind –
loves flush or
windburn

There are poets in the bakery, drinking coffee, breakfasting on pastries. One is buttering a croissant. Ten years from now he will tell me about his dieting and medication and jogging in a race against cholesterol.

A thought has come ashore from the longboat, a ghost in the liquid air of invention. He is my wife’s grand grand granpere. It is already 1847 or thereabouts, the settlement has moved on from canvas. He is strolling north to the French end of town to visit a friend in Rue Grehan. The house will later be called Rose Cottage. In the living room there is a plate glass view into the wall shows the mud straw construction. A hundred years and more there are roses.

Rose Cottage
pruning roses she
prunes a thumb

On the low stone wall above the beach, there are a couple of rusty cauldrons once used for rendering whale blubber. They gather leaves, gather wind-drift, gather trash. My imagination rivets great copper handles to them, and a hotplate of magma rises to brew Turkish coffee. I spice it with cardamom and sweeten it with a sugar-bag of sugar, enough coffee, enough coffee to string out the minor gods of place, to stew all time in a sweet brown swirl. Let that be d drunk and the ensuing dream be a clear blue sky and us walking, a child here and another there. How they run ahead.

The harbour rim is a caldera, twelve million years old. An occasional tremor ripples the landscape. Seasons have poured into the harbour and receded like the tide. In a high altitude photo of Banks Peninsula, Akaroa appears little more than a lichen tracery on a crumpled map.

On the ride home, on the climb up from Deavauchelle out of the long harbour, we pass the sacred spring, I am told is tucked in a wooded bend on the climb. We never stop there. It is always a few words in passing, as if it was never there.

Rolled up in the back seat is a tracing of the harbour's southern rim. In the carpark of the hotel at hilltop, a small fright, a dark glimpse in the periphery of vision, a gent dressed like it was eighteen forty- something or other.

hillcrest
the descent
to the future
.

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia
first published in Quarter Past Sometime (2007)

Jeffrey Harpeng: WHAT IT IS

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for Lochlan 29/1/08 - 6/4/08

How early it is to be so tired.
A machine reminds him when to breathe.
It whispers life is brief as a sigh.

Today his mother bathed him
and sis tickled and teased with what they’d do
when he grows up.

One eye heavily winks
as if he knows a wicked joke.
He'll tell you later.

The way his hand wraps
around dad's finger, loosely as if:
what more is there to know about love.

night fishing

ripples from the line

scatter the stars

.by Jeffrey Harpeng

Macgregor, Qld., Australia

Jeffrey Harpeng: A KNIFE IN THE HEAD

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From K Road to the wind-eddied Post Office square, Queen Street is strung like a flying fox cable. In Post Office square a mime is Falcon Scott advancing against a catabatic wind. Amundsen has already reached the pole and returned and caught the ferry home, across the Waitemata to a bungalow in Devonport.

The mime in Post Office square straightens with pneumatic smoothness, shifts gear and bows, elegant as a Musketeer. Children in the front row are tickled by the great feather in his hat. That exaggerated feather duster sweep is the on your mark to me, up on Karangahape Road. There I am reaching for the crossbar of the flying fox wheel that glides the cable’s sagging arc.

Before you get to glide you could get fronted outside a late night café. ‘Would you like to make a threesome?’

Just as the wheel gets up whirr on the theoretical rope, I pass the Theosophical Society and drop ballast from my diving belt. How easily I forgot I was wearing that. From then on I continue passing the Theosophical Society Hall, and don’t quite get past that Edwardian edifice. Did I just see Krishnamurti closing the door? If I let go I will not float, for I did not get past the first joke in the levity handbook. My heart is low on helium.

Theosophical Hall
lights out… its silences
locked in

Just recovered from a dizzy fall, the Fee Fi Fo Fum giant stands, groggily looking south. His feet are in the harbour behind the Custom House Ferry Terminus, across the road from Post Office square. His gaze is toward the crest of K Rd and beyond. Half a sprawling city south the ashes of the travel stop café crest the distant Bombay Hills. The view beyond is foreshortened in a squint. All the sleepy suburbs between have been switched off tonight and Manukau Harbour’s mudflatness is dark as an iris.

the moon clouds over
itself wrinkled
in the harbour

Gazing south, latitudes at a time, one blink to the mesmerised flow of the Waikato: a film of luminous clouds poured over a dark mirror. Huntley power plant, smoking black cigars, puts on a front of cubist indifference. A flutter further, the giant’s remote gazing views a great lake, then winks past a line of snow capped volcanoes pretending to be liner funnels steaming south through an ocean of fog. They struggle through geological time to reach a harbour city where the wind struggles to remember some ancient melody as it rushes tunelessly over hills and across the harbour. Whetukairangi*, wakeful at the harbour mouth, feels the giant’s gaze, and almost turns from the light tattoo of stars on the black skin of night. Then there is water and more hills and clouds.

The giant, back behind the Custom House, gazes and listens for a squawking goose. There are flickers of gold in the far off rivers, as far south as the Shotover where the goose pecked gravel for nuggets. There is not a sound from prospectors buried in rough graves or from all the Chinamen dug up and shipped home for a reburial where the immortals might whisper into their bony earhole and their dry bones be stirred by those sweet nothings. They soak sea water. They were lost at sea, shipwrecked off the Hokianga, far to the north.

mouths full of earth
the ancients
opinions

The giant is titanically pensive, attentive for the squawk of his golden goose. He hears only the useless honk of a lone moa among the primeval sprawl of beech forests. Somewhere in Arthurs Pass it seems to be, but his hearing isn’t what it used to be! Other than extinct moa he hears sweet nothing.

A couple of gargantuan paces out under the giant’s gaze the flying fox whirrs through ghostly traffic. Raise your eyes and you can see storm clouds gathering under the giants kilt, which hangs more awesome than any cinema curtain. P T Barnum would turn in his grave and raise himself to draw the curtain for that show.

Behind some door, along some off-street corridor, in a downstairs space, my left ear hears a projector’s clatter. Cinema buffs flicker, watching foreign flicks with characters that run into each other while out shopping, then merge with the shoppers outside on Friday night. Some wander down past Aotea Square where a band is playing anthems for the shaky isles. All the sheet glass around here is nervous, haunted by the ghost of riots past. Farmers enlisted for the occasion and police on horseback advance on watersiders. Tenuous as a few lines of history they get lost in the traffic.

Wind is whistling round my heart, coming down the chimney, between the timbers of this old house. I am not a house. There is a house, there are houses in me, large as life and small as memory. What does it mean, that there are untrue ways of saying true things. Somebody is knocking at the door.

I glide the flying fox cable, past the chemist shop built into the back of a palatial cinema constructed in an Art Nouveau cum Arcadian blend. Indian gods nap in alcoves in the foyer, Baghdad balconies are halfway to the starry ceiling above the stalls. When Bruno Ganz, on the silver screen, enters the building where he gets a knife in the head, he is entering the back room of the chemist shop to get his script filled: a knife in the head for the irritating memories, and a powder for the headache. For the rest of the film he’s trying to piece together what happened, and where his life was when he went. The chemist slipped a tincture of drama in Bruno’s script, a tincture of unknown danger, and a deep amnesia at the facts we’ve passed and haven’t arrived at yet.

after the movie
coffee steam drifts
to nirvana

Tributaries of streets and lanes feed down to Queen Street, a witching hour dry gulch prone, by day, to flash floods of traffic that wash memories and dreams away. Dipped headlights ride the gleaming tarmac.

Up Vulcan Lane a bluesman slide fingers a gleaming Dobro and chugs through ‘Jezuz is on thee main lion, tell him watch you want. My Jezuz is on the main lion, tell him watch you want. You can call him up and tell him watch you want.’

summer afternoon
in the pubs long shadow
we listen to the blues
drink shandies
drink coke on ice

There’s an archaeology, comatose below the bitumen and concrete floors, the wreck of a sunken shop, pylons of old wharves under a tide of landfill. An unsprung bell from over a haberdashery door is mute with mud. Unglazed bricks are leached by time’s runoff seeping down into the forgotten. Even with your feet firmly on the ground, the memory of that does not seep up into you.

Finally I glide to an exclamation mark in front of the Custom House. After that long glide, that migratory flight, my thoughts have lost their equilibrium. Nothing new there, but worse than that, now I want to squawk, to honk, to lay golden eggs. I need a word with Freud about all this.

Two great hands descend. One plucks me up, and places me in a pouch in the other hand. At that handy altitude I spy a glance of beanstalk at the giants back, then scan all the vertigo around.

post office
clock face and the moon
yellow with time

Swaying in the soft leather pouch I constantly pinch my nose, purse my lips and blow to depressurise, and struggle against the drug of memory, that other knife in the head.

a street mime
climbs a rope of air finds
there is no more

by Jeffrey Harpeng

Macgregor, Queensland, Australia

first published in Quarter Past Sometime (PostPressed), 2007

Note: Whetukairangi – Star Gazer

Jeffrey Harpeng: GREETINGS FROM THE AFTERLIFE

1 ― Purging the story

The weather here runs on a different set of variables: the collective sum total of wish intensity. Oddly, the least common weather is a clear blue sky. Here, speculation about a God is more intense than ever.

House and forest merge. My bed is a downy tree canopy. At first I thought there was no sleep here, until I found that night must be invited. A nut on the limb of the lowest branch rolls under my sleep, rubs me with earthy dreams.

Destinations are intentions. Tomorrow I will travel to 1912 to see where that photo of my grandfather was taken: somewhere in Deutschland, port town, river town, corner of a brick building, nondescript reflections in the windows. I also want to meet that old spark of his. What is that book, held loose in her hands, hung loose over a peasant smock?

on leave photo
hand on mother's chair ― 1917
the world in their faces

They say that from each point in time you can test the crossroads and see what else might have been, even the hazy blue where you never were. Those who have visited there report the sound of a great spacious note, quavering with a fifth above, something like a bell, but in a vocal space, and giddy with a constant sense of expansion.

I was told it is the voice of the muse. Others claim it is deity. Some just say it is what it is.

Today, a red frog hopped into the kitchen, sat on the white tiles and all my turmoil of the jobs I hated flowed out of me. “Yes!” I said “you sure were hungry.” “Croak!” said the bloated frog and hopped away.


2 ― Limbo

The dance as a form of transport ― we arrive where we started, but lighter with dizziness, almost childlike. Sometimes I see wings come out of people's mouths when they speak. I met a man who spoke bat wings, a woman who spoke hummingbird. I'm told my dialect is a mixture of albatross and crow with some occasional cockatoo.

We are no longer tone deaf in our conversations: - A sister of my grandfather said to me, “Sing along with the bouncing heart.”

country road
in the irrigation ditch
the moon follows

One of the favoured pastimes here is to ride the slippery slide. There is always a happy queue. There I met the boy who fell off the slippery slide in the school playground when we were in grade two. He broke his arm. He was with his twin brother. They invited me to go and play in the old quarry. Visiting that filled in place, I caught a glimpse of myself talking to the sky, “Are you there God, are you there?”

I felt like I was at the edge of a whirlpool, and nothing but blue sky ringing back tones of blue.

old factory
beams and joists and weeds ― sound
a car starting


3 ― Fading echoes

I woke up with that rushing sound you get when you are about to faint. Only twice in my life had I known it. First, when giving blood and the other was like some omen the heart would tell about my son's future. I was talking to the paediatrician late in my wife's first pregnancy, when suddenly the air was let out of the valve that pressurises the senses. Now, though, I wasn't fading to black.

There was a fine corona around everything. It seemed to me the meaning of everything was expanding like the universe. Talking to the universe, I said “The afterlife is no more than perceiving the expansion of meaning.” Another voice in me added, “So you say!”

hands in coat pockets
through marram grass dunes
gray sky gray sea

As if I was the pebble bed of a clear stream, shudders of light on the surface. As if I was some place years away, thousands of miles away, a child or the memory of childhood. Sheets are pulled up to my nose in frosty darkness. The rest of the world could be thousands of miles away, in the next room and I was receiving faint crystal-set-radio-voices. Those voices expanded through my life, and now...

4 am
the frost breaker
booms

by Jeffrey Harpeng

Macgregor, Queensland, Australia