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Submarine
Let me have only the noble mysteries of the deep.
I make the imperceptible transition from air-conditioned sleep
to curious wakefulness. There is no anxiety. I lie for a moment listening
to the tiny claws of bubbles around the hull, the soft eternal
tremble of a source of power many decks below, the whispering
of rotors ... Finding nobody but myself awake in the soft-lit passageways,
I come alone in the control-room. Sensors quiver with the hurtle
of silent phosphorescent things, more meteors than fish
more vortices than fish - not so much fish, as strange
arrangements of the difference : condensations ; thoughts dismissed
in the following instant. The recorders then recording only
after-ripples : deep returning softly to its deeps like sinking stones.
Ladders
The bird that found itself a ladder of wind
ascends the mountain, and the dwindling
thistledown has made do with the ladder of a sun-beam,
and the fish is going up there too
by way of the silver ladder of a stream
to look out of the window in a waterfall
at distance as it must imagine it : the blue
of far sea valleys. And the climber, looking at his hands,
is, in his mind's eye, tiny, moving up the wall
on the ladder of the crevices. The swimmer though, descends
along a rope of bubbles, eddying in the white
un-shaping water, passing, into an abysmal night.
Nicholas Messenger had his first poems published in New Zealand as a schoolboy. He won the Glover
Poetry award in the 1970’s. In recent years he has had work published in a good number of online magazines.
He has written plays for children, fairy tales, short stories and five novels which await a publisher.
He was born in 1945, completed a degree at Auckland University, travelled extensively, and
lived at various times in France, England and Japan. He has worked at many jobs,
including seaman, security guard, demolition worker and laboratory technician, and for
a long time made his living as a teacher, of science, art, and languages, in High Schools
in New Zealand, and of English in Japan. He is currently living in Nelson, making and selling
postcards that feature short “Instamatic” poems. He has been married twice and has two grown-up children.
Email: Nicholas Messenger
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