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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 37
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| The young poet, sleeping off his Burnsian frolics on
a bench in the town belt, the hours marked by the three clocks, discovers
himself at 'the absolute unmoving hub', with the sense of nada
that is 'the beginning of knowledge', so that the bench becomes another
symbolic place of revelation. A different place of revelation
is the Castle Street flat of his first love, the place where 'a certain
act' did occur, the place where he 'found the point of entry, / The place
where father Adam died'. When he returns to the site of flat
twenty years later, he finds that 'They've bricked up the arch' that used
to lead to the flat, symbolising his inability to return to that youthful
ardour. The holy places of Bohemia stand against the symbols of deathly
respectability, but the most powerful symbol in the city is a natural one,
the Leith, associated with sexuality and other natural forces that persist
even though channelled and charted. The 'crinkled labia of blossom
/ On the trees beside the weir' symbolise the sexual experiences that 'Captured
and held the fugitive / From time, from self, from the iron pyramid'.
'The Leith Stream's roar' (in most
unlikely fashion heard from his lover's flat on Royal Terrace) symbolises to the traveller of 'Henley Pub' the uncontrollable force of 'natural sexual power'. Outside the University buildings, the 'grey Leith water drum[s] / With laughter from a bird's beak at what their learning has left out'. She is contrasted to the authoritarian father clock tower, with its 'petrified phallus', for while the poet can only 'bless' somewhat equivocally the clock tower's 'house of learning or obfuscation', he loves 'the untouched breasts of my / mother, dark muse and succubus, / unconnected with our human knowledge', serenely 'flowing below the ledge / where gulls preen feather by feather / a whiteness that will die / soon'. The young poet observes how 'On smooth cylindrical weirs Leith-waters glister'. The middle-aged poet on a Sunday family walk sees the weirs as 'passionate almost beyond bearing', and the middle- aged narrator of 'Walking Up Castle Street' associates them with a 'girl ghost in an overcoat . . . waiting at the bridge, with dark hair and a voice like weir water'. But the passion seems mostly to be sexual pain There is a recurring image of 'a streetlight on / The muscled Leith water' associated with a lovers' quarrel, so that it becomes an 'ikon' that haunts and burns him, a symbol of the failure of love: For me it is the weirs that mention The love that we destroy By long evasion, politics and art, And speech that is a kind of contraception: A streetlight flashing down on muscled water, bodies in the shade, Tears on the moonwhite face, the voice Of time from the grave of water speaking to Those who are lucky to be sad. |
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