India, ask any one non-resident non-Indian, is an unforgettable experience. And, if one has lived for five years, travelling and interacting with an entire diaspora, some part of this very real, often painful and at the same time exotic, oriental yet modern culture inevitably gets rooted in the psyche. Diana Bridge, wife of a former New Zealand High Commissioner to India, has transmuted some experiences of these five years in simple lines and often telling imagery. Not only India, even her experiences in the land of the inscrutable Chinese, and her very own New Zealand comprise the three sections of 'The Girls on the Wall'.

The poet explains in her introductory note that the first section 'The girls on the wall' reflects a "love, disillusion and growth contour" and is envisaged in terms of an interaction with Indian art. The second 'Unbidden images' moves around geographically through China, New Zealand and other places and contains a more scattered narrative, which revolves around ideas of dissolution and death.

The third section 'Closing the border', she says, is "closer to my own story. It traces a double trajectory of loss, crisscrossed with variations on the theme of exposure to difference. I wouldn't say it was a progress, more a recognition that new perspectives do come up, to help displace the pain of interruption and of detachment from things you had hoped to hold onto." Thus the elegant verses move from an Indian locale to a touch of China and the last section again lopes back to Buddha, Jagannath, Meera almost lamenting "But I am inside arms that/ will not hold me."

The lines use the past to raise contemporary issues of identity, gender and displacement and even dip into the spiritual and stroke through the various hues of love. The women on the ancient walls of India's temples, accompanied by their lovers, be it Konark in the east or a Dutch palace down South, snippets, perhaps, of a not much remembered folklore, has the poet almost awe-struck by the sheer richness of it all.

"To look for a god of your own
go first to that yard
with its army of girls
coaxed from the walls of Konark"
The lines in 'The Girls on the Wall of the 'Dutch' Palace, Cochin', too make interesting reading.
"we smell like all the spices of the trade
our ears nostrils navels toes
skewered by pearls
our clothes designed to frame
not like that yaksini
girdle lifted to expose
her whole native pudendum....
Like a tree house
the 'Dutch' Palace swings
on its stem,
on its walls
stories of love and war
seeking the moment that floods
out all others."

Both the Indian and Chinese settings and images of Bridge's poems reveal a delicate and sensitive amalgam of both Eastern and Western perceptions. While the 'Odalisque' evokes in her a certain sympathy for all womankind who experience "every day a Shangri-La", moving away, leaving a place too makers her sad.

"this spent house
hangs heavy from my hands....
We are swinging from the rim
of thoughts
whose soft centres
have long since drained away."

Bridges words are indolent with meaning, yet often paint an abstract picture of the world that was and that which is now. She hops from theme to theme, meandering through her travels and revelling in all that she has seen and felt deeply. The agony of a woman, the ache of a poet, the ecstasy of a musician, the 'boomerang' call of birds as they wait for the monsoon, the withdrawn warmth of midwinter --it is all there in the rich tapestry she weaves for all to relish.


Heartbeat of Siva

The only unguarded thing about him
is the sound of his heart,

leaping
massive and unconstrained
in the great sea cave

below her ear.

She, small scale,
perfectly
subordinate,

furled into his side.



The Poet

I cannot give up
the hand of that poet stretching

pale and effective through
the long back of his sleeve, holding out willow women
characters that sway and tremble
at the far edge of a tile, men excited by harsh codes, space brushed in drifts -
small deaths -
through the centre of his scroll.


Between

One morning when the air
is hung with
puns and possibilities

eggs scramble

and the washing aims sly
origami feet at the trees

he asks you directions in Chinese.

You push through the foliage of language
the view jolts and
opens

and there is the sea.

 
Lighter than a feather



I

His voice was a broken tile
in a classical setting,
a clay edge grating against sky.

Now his silence speaks to
the classified space
in the front of the square.


II

A man in a corduroy hat is spinning
over the sea. Gu Cheng,
feeling light with a poem.
 
This was in the early days when,
the glaze not yet dry,
he would sit watching sharp

incredible outlines
rise out of the harbour
needing such a harbour

to displace waves
of pale terracotta branded with
the tight stamp of a seal.

Did he think he was like
Any young man clearing out a pigsty
Or a property?

He was his mother's obstinate child.

 

III

He left behind a set of graded bells.

He left behind
the slow build of stories,
tiles placed across the centuries,

each one taking off diagonally
from the one before.

His pain trickled down
through the floor boards.

Though he left with a poem
in his arms, he left
behind too much.

 

IV

Now he's lighter than a feather,
less material than snow.

In the Duke's hunting lodge
the stories fall in cryptic patterns

Cold blows the north wind,
Thick falls the snow.
Take my hand and go, love

Until the striped deer is back
With its scholars and poets gather
in the garden once more.

Gu Cheng was a young Chinese poet, one of the group known as the 'Misty Poets'. He came to New Zealand in the late 1980s with his wife, taught at Auckland University and bought a property on Waiheke Island. He committed suicide there a few years later, after first killing his wife, and left behind a young son. Gu Cheng was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to raise pigs. 'Obstinate child' is a reference to one of his poems. The penultimate stanza is adapted from Waley's translation of 'North Wind', from 'The Book of Songs'.