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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 36
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In the unpublished 'The Clock Tower' it attempts 'to save / us from ourselves' with its 'fatherly' emphatic explanations, but to the poet it is merely a 'petrified phallus', to be blessed perhaps but not to be loved like the mother Leith. The church spire is not so much in evidence as the clock towers in most of the writings, but it too is associated with the phallic fathers, 'Being so finely built / On Calvin's masturbative guilt'. Horse takes note of its obscene parody when he walks 'quickly along the edge of the Queen's Gardens where the floodlit war memorial pointed a dead phallus at the stony heavens'. The poet in 'To a City Father' puts the point more bitterly, calling the cenotaph 'The great stone prick of Old Man Death' obscenely erected 'to celebrate / A million graves, a million rotting bones / That fertilise your interest and security'. Death is likewise associated with the images of secular repectability, the lights of suburban houses, as Horse looks at them: The lights of Anderson's Bay glittered steadily, each point of light indicating a suburban hutch where people talked and yawned and killed time, afraid of the graveyard night outside their windows. The young Baxter similarly watched as 'The lights of a mausoleum-to-be glittered on the hills beyond the harbour'. Opposed to the images of 'a culture kept alive by the drug death' in Baxter's symbolic City,'Calvin's town', are those asociated with Bohemian revolt, experienced by the poet when he 'made a mother of the keg, and 'the town split open like an owl's egg / Breaking the ladders down'. First there are those 'fat pubs of the harbour town' in which 'it seemed more safe to drown' than to stay in 'this boneyard peace / Of ceremonious dying' at home. They are there in profusion, the Green Island, the Grand, the Shamrock, the Oban, the City, the Royal Albert, the Robert Burns and, most important, the Bowling Green, the 'student's home from home. . . where Mahomet's coffin hangs between earth and heaven waiting for the six o'clock judgement', the place where Horse learned 'the basic metaphors by which the human spirit expresses and conceals its tenderness, is grief, and its longing to return to the Garden of Eden'. The patron saint of the pubs is Robbie Burns, 'King Robert' on his 'anvil stone / Above the lumbering Octagon', and Baxter identifies with him, feeling that the reason for Burns' ' mandrake groans / Is wrapped like wire around my bones'. The statue, 'dry on his stump above the Octagon, was waiting for the traffic to stop so that he could step down to the Oban Hotel, bang on the bar and order a bucket of gin and harpic'. The poet imagines 'the sad old rip' grunting 'upon his rain-washed stone / Above the empty Octagon' and saying "O that I had the strength / To slip yon lassie half a length!" |
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