Driving across town
she feels plain
and botanical.

At a crossing
there’s a man
with a cake, girl
with a tune.
Four young people
wheel a bed,
headed for a house
where a young woman
might read, love a man/some
men, might hold their bodies
close and welcome some parts
of those bodies
into hers.

Years later
she might see these men
in suits and on television and
many years later
might pass one, a house painter,
as she drives to buy
paint, for heaven’s sake.

Now, nearing sixty,
this woman loves her husband
ferociously.
When she turns the compost
and finds the flat wrinkled body
of a mouse,
she remembers the time
he rang her in Scotland
to say he’d seen one in the pile
and what should he do?

She shovels the remains
of the mouse with the rest
of the compost to beneath
the blossom, which bows
low and graceful over neglect,
which abounds, as it does,
wonderfully, in the garden of the
southern house they move to
for a time.

He’s up to his ears
in sadness, both of them aghast
at landscape. Being asthmatic
he is immediately attractive
to animals – at the lake
a fox terrier pup takes shelter
under his chest as he lies down
on a towel after a swim.
In the kitchen a mouse
bumps into his foot. Drama
in the house! Not for the first
time. These were rooms
of costume, scenery,
leading ladies and men
on the front terrace, leaning
on architect Ernst Plischke’s rail,
stone warm underfoot, snowed
mountains as backdrop
while the deep, broad river passed
below them, always
on its way.

 

 

when will we live like that again?
first there was a city with its moons and cars
lawless comets and such discontinuous delight
that even going for a walk around the galaxy
was icecream in the park, sweet momentum
like a scattering of stars arriving to read
the book of tears to a crowd expecting opera
what next but the caduceus, dazed
imperatives wrapped about a talking stick
face to face and turn by turn reared back
to flap the wings of vision overhead after this
the lily with its open mouth and ribbon spathes
bumpy erogeny bespeaking
the immaculate shape of things to come

We present this work in honor of Waitangi Day.

 

Dear Jimmy,

It’s not you, it’s me.

Well,
maybe it is you.

We’ve both changed.

When I first met you
you were my change.

Well, your ride
the Endeavour
was anyway
on my 50-cent coin.

Your handsome face
was plastered everywhere.

On money
on stamps
on all my world maps.

You were so Christian
you were second to Jesus
and both of you
came to save us.

But I’ve changed.

We need to see other people
other perspectives
other world views.

We’ve grown apart.

I need space.

We’re just at different points
in our lives —

compass points

that is.

I need to find myself
and I can’t do that with you
hanging around all the time.

Posters, book covers, tea cozies
every year, every anniversary.

You’re a legend.

I don’t know the real you
(your wife did burn all your personal papers
but that’s beside the point.)

I don’t think you’ve ever really seen me.

You’re too wrapped up in discovery.

I’m sorry
but there just isn’t room
in my life
for the two of you right now:

you and your drama
your possessive colonising Empire.

We’re worlds apart.

I just don’t want to be in a thing right now.

Besides, my friends don’t like you.

And I can’t break up with them so…

 

It has pink bricks and a big tree. This is the driveway, you can lie on it in the summer, it keeps you warm if you are wet. This is the screen door, swallow. Front green door, hold your chest. The carpet is dark grey and hurts your knees, it doesn’t show any blood. Here are the walls, be careful of the small girl in the corner. Here is the door into the hall, be careful of that too. Here is the line where the carpet stops and the kitchen starts, that is a different country-if you are in the kitchen you are safe, if you are in the lounge on your knees you are not. Watch out for the corners. She isn’t going anywhere. There is the piano. There is the ghost. Here is the hall, it is very dark. Here is the bedroom. Here is the other bedroom, babies come from there. Here is the last bedroom, it is very cold, there is a trapdoor in the wardrobe, it goes down under the floor and you can hide if there is a flood or a tornado. There is the bath. The aunty punched the uncle in the face till he bled, they lived in the small room, the cold one, that was before I was born. Here is the lounge again, here is the phone: ringthepoliceringthepolice. Here is the couch, it is brown, watch out for the man, he is dangerous. Here is the beginning of the lino in the kitchen again, here is the woman. Watch out for the girl in the corner, she is always here. There is the woman, she just watches and then she forgets.

I am cutting a big hole in the roof. Look down through the roof, there is the top of the man, you can’t see his face, but see his arm, see it moving fast.

I am removing the outside wall of the bedroom. Look inside, there are the Spirits, that’s where they live.

Stand outside in the dark and watch the rays come out through the holes-those are the people’s feelings.

 

My father is “having fun”
cleaning the floor
he uses the plugged in sink as a bucket
wears rags on his feet
and shimmies to a cleaning beat
he asks me to read the label
on the bottle for him
he wants our floor to shine
and laughs when (surprise)
it does
this is how I will remember him
moonwalking across our kitchen floor
rags under his feet
“that’s how my mother taught me”
he says
“but I never take any note
it takes me forty years to do what she say”