Dear Tombs

Dear Tombs, I do not see anything here but dust.

Dust, dust, dust and beyond your hollows

and pillars, some trees still clinging to the dust

that gives them nothing, not a swallow

of water in it, a good winter one with rain,

a bad winter the one they have just had, and the one to follow.

Dear Tombs, here is my sweat falling like rain

onto your dust, I am wet outside and in,

I have always imagined after my death my remains

turning to wetness inside the worms, and in

the jaws of the beetles, and disintegrating into the wet

dirt, but here the dead are all dust, dust in

the Tombs where they were laid, if any of their dust is left

and not long since blown across the island, out to sea,

into the air we choke on, in the cities, on the roads. Yet

here we stand, while the poets hand out poetry

and the bravest start going down the stairs,

their candles filling the shadows with a flickering light that we,

Dear Tombs, can hardly see by, while they seem dazzled by the glare

within you, raising their hands to block it out.

The wine bottles they pass around are shining, their hair

gleams, their eyes glow. “Poetry readings ought

only ever take place in tombs,” I hear an English academic just

ahead of me, in his soft jacket, adamantly state.

Eleanor, on the beach

We’ve completely encircled our friend Eleanor on the beach

with little towers of stones, and although some of the towers

only have five or six stones, and only one has reached

as high as our record of ten, I do not think their power

has anything to do with their height,

any more than we should measure the value of an hour

by how many hours it is balanced on top of. It might

better be thought of in terms of a certain sympathy

between our chosen stones so that the tower just looks right,

ust as the right hour poised on the right hour can make a symphony

of hours, and the right day on the right day on the right day

can add up to such happiness it is no mystery

at all that a perfect stranger in Wellington might smile and say

“bonjour!” at you, something which happened to me once.

It isn’t, in the end, how high a number of days

you can pile up but who you pile them round that counts

and happily in this case it is Eleanor, her pale skin

burning faintly where I would have rubbed in more than an ounce

of sunblock if she had not thought the huge pool of it in

my palm an alarming extravagance, which

she fixed by getting the tube to somehow suck a lot of it back in.

Anna Jackson

Anna Jackson lectures in English at Victoria University of Wellington.  She has published six books of poetry with Auckland University Press, most recently I, Clodia (2014).  She has five fine hens and lives in Island Bay.