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    Breaking the Surface
    Breaking the Surface
    Breaking the Surface
    Ebook105 pages57 minutes

    Breaking the Surface

    By Ian Reid

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    About this ebook

    Praise from reviewers of Ian Reid's previous books

    Rhumbs, Woods Hole, Mass. (USA), Pourboire Press

    'I like best his tough humorous approach and nearly epigrammatic style, his intelligence in using words and his width of focus - taking in not just the immediate situation but its context too. That's rare, now that so muc

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGinninderra Press
    Release dateOct 5, 2023
    ISBN9781761096211
    Breaking the Surface
    Author

    Ian Reid

    Ian Reid is a widely published author of literary and historical non-fiction whose writings have been translated into several languages. His poetry has earned him the Antipodes prize in the USA. His acclaimed first novel, The End of Longing, was published by UWA Publishing in 2011. Originally from New Zealand he now lives in Perth, where he is a Winthrop Professor at The University of Western Australia and Emeritus Professor at Curtin University. www.ianreid-author.com

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      Book preview

      Breaking the Surface - Ian Reid

      Breaking the Surface

      BREAKING THE SURFACE

      IAN REID

      Ginninderra Press

      Breaking the Surface

      ISBN 978 1 76109 620 4

      Copyright © text Ian Reid 2023

      Cover image: Ian Reid

      All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

      First published 2023 by

      Ginninderra Press

      PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

      www.ginninderrapress.com.au

      CONTENTS

      Ruffled Edges

      Riffled Pages

      Perching Ghosts

      Filial Shadows

      Speaking Pictures

      Other Bodies

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      RUFFLED EDGES

      Wherever the body is

      As rain falls hard on the military funeral

      (ashes to slush, sods to silt)

      President Umbrella tells those who’re stiff

      to attention

      Americans will never forget lives lost to protect

      freedom in Iraq, Afghanistan,

      wherever.

      They believe that’s true in a country where

      extinction is never seen as final.

      They believe it because their mighty eagle

      even when almost expunged from skies

      figures unflappably on every greenback.

      They believe it because at the local stadium

      a hundred thousand voices cheer the Wolverines

      whose originals buckled to bullets decades ago.

      Museums call this kind of history natural

      and so it seems to people totally stuffed

      with memory, still gorging out on hope.

      Witness a sign in a truckers’ roadside café:

      GOD, GUNS AND GUTS MADE THIS COUNTRY –

      LET’S KEEP IT THAT WAY.

      Witness another, beside a suburban chapel:

      WHEREVER THE BODY IS,

      THERE WILL THE EAGLES GATHER.

      Easy to mock, but where do you stand to say ‘they’?

      What’s your position?

      Consider a creature of the French Pacific,

      its freely amphibious life: how enviable

      to be in your element not only here but there!

      Yet nobody yearns for the stranded end of longing.

      Imagine turning turtle, turning under

      the bluest of enfolding waters, waiting

      for darkness near this nickel island coast

      before breaking the surface,

      tottering ashore, gut-lumbered,

      labouring on up the gritty slope

      driven by a birth clock’s tick

      into sudden lights, a shudder, an overturning,

      poles, ropes, shouts, a butchering knife.

      Changes places now,

      stand over here, and say in the flare of morning –

      that blade hammered in between the belly plates,

      is it theirs or yours, and whose

      are the thick blood bubbles, the ripped-out eggs?

      On a hill near that same bay, a memorial graveyard

      for misplaced servicemen from the old Pacific War.

      Pacific they are these days: gravel keeps them that way.

      The slab lines curve like a great bird’s gathering wing,

      and each name is listed, wherever the body is.

      Snapshot exotica? Not so entirely remote,

      those grey souvenirs, from your own collective presumptions.

      Here are you; there are corpses.

      ‘They’ and ‘we’ have no place.

      Wherever the body is,

      the plural’s too large an umbrella.

      (The opening lines refer to Arlington National Cemetery in the USA. The graves depicted later in the poem are those of New Zealand soldiers within a war cemetery in Bourail, New Caledonia, located near the Baie des Tortues, where I once saw a large turtle killed by local Kanak people for their food.)

      Shifty shorelines

      Line of shore

      the single thing it made of him

      this line of shore.

      – Barry Hill

      High seas are on the move again – not sudden

      stormy surges, but a slow deepening flood

      that laps now at new levels of old lives,

      submerging bluffs, seeping up valley floors,

      refilling stranded gorges with the stealth

      of a swollen grudge, ruthless in search of reasons.

      People rise differently to this occasion

      or slouch indifferently, as the case may be.

      Some disregard the forecasts altogether.

      The seals, giant sea-garden swayback slugs,

      are curling over the Kaikoura rocks

      while seagulls, loutish, loud bodgie patrols

      loiter on beaches where futures loll in the shallows.

      But the change is too insidious for those

      who like a crisis to be grand, and Messrs

      Canute and Gilgamesh are with us always.

      Off stomps a former friend – looks a bit like you? –

      making a fist of resentment, to punch at the sand.

      Loyalty drains. Runnels of rage rush in.

      The line that is being redrawn singles him out.

      Those dreams of inundation, all the swirling

      angular bodies… Where did the children go?

      PROCEED WITH (says the sign) – and someone’s hand

      has crossed out CAUTION, substituted HAVOC!

      Head fast, headfirst, for the highest ground.

      In Wellington, when southerlies rip and wrench

      at the window in this bay above the harbour

      while spiders crouch half-pissed behind the soap,

      it’s time to run up the hill that’s like a flag.

      Cobwebs blow away as you open the door

      and your blood goes

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