Title: Sport 16

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1996, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 16: Autumn 1996

Elizabeth Smither

page 9

Elizabeth Smither

The Lark Quartet

Four larks on an unseasonal evening
from their first notes made spring
from wands and deep low cello bowing
like a river under a subway.

New York, we said later. Those tenements
that yet give shelter to bold animals
the russet tail by the dustbin, the birds
of common breed but rare tenacity

and Mozart, following, reminded you of
wallpaper. Someone heaving up resolve
to begin another room, scoured by stains.
Definitely a sense of ‘here we go again’

in which after weariness came mastery.
The unavoidable good performance we discussed
later over cake and coffee. Once started
Mozart invariably knew where he was going:

into misunderstood pauperism. Shostakovich
wrestled like a chill wind just above the ground
a height so hard to obliterate or fold
into conformity. Last what we understood

most easily: a dance, a movement of folk tunes.
Disharmonies crossed over them like light showers
but we were at our ease now with how
the melody is greatest shown to emerge

page 10

a bow’s hair ahead of its sound of birth.
We are a generation of assemblers
who want the miracle not quite clear
but tuned to our attention and our inattentiveness.

Now I could confess I admired the shoes
of the first violinist and craned to see
through some notes’ pictures if the others
were similarly shod. And you could swear

the beautiful nape of the one with short hair
and her strong straight spine, glowing cummerbund
in gold and red and silver embroidery
was just exquisite going through the curtain.

A Stone Armadillo

for Sarah

Who would not love an ideal creature
conveyed to stone? A family ‘intermediate
between the sloths and the anteaters’
with a ‘variation of simple molars interlocking
when the mouth is shut’. Stone bands

stone flakes imitate the shields and plates
that encase them as they move by night
in a range between Texas and Patagonia.
From Texas you wrote: I can hear the armadillos
crashing through the undergrowth like myself

page 11

at summer camp. Armadillos became the
common word in letters. Any more sightings
of those adorable warriors whose persisting
became your leitmotif? They eat better
than the campers: worms, roots, fruit

and insects. By day they burrow as we
lolled beside the pool after horse trekking.
Some homesick girls cried. The armadillos
crashed night after night as if pushing aside
another Texan day. Many died in flight

caught in headlights or drowned. I lift
the stone armadillo in my arms and
almost fall into a pile of Aladdin pots.
Too dear to purchase legitimately I’d like to
steal back at night, smash glass, and grab

the dear creature for the garden. Have you round
far from Texas now to view. There’s a strange
creature just appeared, perhaps you can identify?
And on its stone ridges leaves would catch
rain stain and, like travel, evaporate again.

page 12

My Mother Looking at Stars

Each morning in the small hours
my mother pads from bed and back
with a pause for stargazing.

Her body wakes her. The stars watch her.
What connects them: this she puzzles
and finds pleasure in no answer

but three elements: flesh, spirit
and steely starlight. I count
she thinks, because I am aware

and care to look at stars for a moment
allowing them to wake me, more than
my body does, being a craft

merely. While their gaze judges
with benignity the watcher of the watchers.
I am close to stars in the night.

page 13

A Man Walking in White Shoes

From a panoramic window-seat
overlooking scores of streets I watch
the distant walking of white feet.

A man in white sandshoes follows a curve
on a grey pavement, a grey road
around which his white swollen feet go.

White swells, grey shrinks. His feet magnified
make walking magnificent. Entranced
I watch white doves rise and dip

or someone reverently handling plates
two white minims on stave-like legs
making that section of the road so sweet

to walk around a curve in white shoes seems
worth calling an angel down to peer
at motion made so pure and clear.

page 14

A Birdless Tree

Casually someone described a tree
that must have held three hundred birds
felled during the day. At dusk they returned
circling in phantom shape to the place

as though bewailing a giant limb.
A huge sketch of panic. Beating the bounds
where air was filled with shelter once. Some
cried some circled. A navigational blip?

But no the garden was the same, only lighter.
Here was the lawn on which crumbs appeared
so why was the whole tenement taken?
Some rose into the air, expecting ascension.

They circled for ages. Just like human shock.
And then they must have decided on other arrangements.
Scattered perhaps in groups. Darkness came on.
The tree sketch remained picked out by stars.