A Country Shaped like a Butterfly’s Wing
Beneath this giant pohutukawa
the cares of the world seem to cease.
Concrete steps zigzag from the street to a sandy beach
where rusty boat sheds stand on stilts
and women whose bodies are shaped like gourds
walk miraculously into and out of the sea.
You talk but I only half listen…some minutes since
you left me at a bay where the sun like a sword
plunges between the horns of blue breakers.
Beneath this summer’s slow travelling clouds
I am reminded that we both have ancestors
who once upon a time sailed across the world’s biggest oceans.
In their webs of latitude and longitude
like fishermen flinging a net
they caught this solitary planet
floating in blue space like a chrysalis.
Thank you for bringing me here
where the roots of a pohutukawa
like handrails lead down a cliff –
where the flight of seagulls is as eternal as hunger is.
Perhaps we should be like those Persians
beneath a swaying branch with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine –
watch clouds like a caravan of camels sauntering across the horizon.
Should we stay here until the night has fallen into the sea –
in the morning council workers
would find the imprint of our bodies
close together on a quilt of leaves.
I talk but you only half listen
as we lie beneath this tree
through whose branches life is whispering.
Its roots run right through the spicy earth to Spain.
As we lie beneath blossoms tinged with Garcia Lorca’s blood
do you dream of a country shaped like a butterfly’s wing?
About this poem
This poem was originally published online as part of a SPL project, supported by Creative New Zealand, which commissioned Scottish writers to introduce a New Zealand poem. The introduction is by poet and non-fiction writer Kapka Kassabova, who was born in Bulgaria but spent twelve years in New Zealand before settling in Edinburgh.
'A country shaped like a butterfly's wing': where is that? you may ask. But it is no use scanning the world's map. Butterflies' wings come in as many shapes as the countries of the world, and Bob Orr has been there to see them and sing about them.
That's right, we are in the presence of a travelling bard, in the unapologetically male tradition of poètes maudits such as Rimbaud and sailor poets such as Nikos Kavvadias.
Orr is not a fashionable poet. He is something of an auto-didact and a maverick in modern New Zealand poetry, which tends to favour ellipsis, understatement, kitchen-sink domesticity, or post-modern irony, sometimes all of the above. Orr's poetry, by contrast, wears its heart on its sleeve, and it is a wild, hungry, battered heart on a grubby deck-hand's sleeve. For this he makes no apologies – another thing that sets him apart from his contemporaries. For me, the freshness and vigour of his voice, combined with a thoughtful, unsentimental lyricism, make him one of the most enjoyable and exhilarating poets Down Under.
The giant pohutukawa in the first line of the poem tells us where we are: Aotearoa. But wherever we are in a Bob Orr poem, it is usually only a starting point for a restless reverie. One place mirrors another across the Pacific, the pohutukawa's roots run through the earth all the way to Spain, and we are catapulted into a heightened world of the senses and the mind. We are simultaneously in the company of an unnamed Latin lover, of gourd-shaped women who appear magical in the sharp Pacific light, and of Garcia Lorca's sacrificial blood. It's quite a crowd.
This constantly shifting poetic geography seduces because it is as much populated by real places and people as by places and people of the mind. A generous spirit of Pacific cosmopolitanism shapes this geography, and if you look closely, you will find glints of the Mediterranean on every Pacific beach and island. Valparaiso, the title of Orr's sixth book, is one of the world's great, decadent, post-colonial ports, but it is also a trope for the world's travelling oceans and their pungent flavours and constant self-renewal. It is a place of comings and goings, of breaking and mending. Neruda had a house there, and indeed the Chilean poet has taken permanent residence in Orr's poetry, where Chile itself appears as ‘the vertebrae of a continent'. While Neruda wrote of his ephemeral 'residence on Earth', Orr's residence in transit is the ocean, from one port of the imagination to another. It is an enchanted but disconsolate residence, for there is no end and no resolution to this haunted voyage:
…the islands
I dream of are islands unseen.
…..
These islands still shadow my blood
Although I was an inland child
Born under the reckoning of the Southern Cross.
from ‘Ancestors'
And here, in this shadow of a home yet unseen, we come to a vulnerable spot on this voyager's emotional map. There is a recurrent female presence in Orr's poems, a collective woman of the mind who is also, make no mistake, very much made of flesh and blood. She is the perfect lover, because she is always lost as soon as the ship sets sail. But just as the Baudelairean cliché of the lonesome poet and the exotic whore threatens to date Orr's vision, we enter another dimension of spiritual attachment and shared vision: ‘I am reminded that we both have ancestors/ who once upon a time sailed across the world's biggest oceans.'
In his blurb for Valparaiso, Orr asks rhetorically ‘Who can cross the ocean of the heart?' and indeed, the ocean of the heart is Orr's real uncharted territory. The home-coming dream of those unseen islands is perhaps, ultimately, a dream of another person.
But you alone will lift the hatches from my heart
(a rust-coloured ship tired of wandering)
and from its hold take tenderly
a cargo
for which I have already paid all duty.
from 'Cargo'
And perhaps that country shaped like a butterfly's wing is, in the end – if an end destination exists at all in the world of Valparaiso – a place of rest and belonging that can only be glimpsed by the 'we' lying under that international, blood-red pohutukawa.
