Anxieties Our classroom in the school up on the jagged hill was often buffeted every whichway by the southerly and then the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The creek cooling our soft drink on strings stole one bottle…
This lovely hand of yours The fine warmth and pulse of it – beauty gets a sounding in the oldest skin, it takes the flutterings of veins and chimes them through. The mind slows and alters – as in…
Sonnet Fuck your simile. Fuck your elegy for. Fuck your homily, your extended metaphor. Fuck your metonymy. Fuck your exquisite language economy. Fuck your metre, your keeping time. Fuck your vers libre. Fuck your rhyme. Fuck your Elizabethan men…
We call it winter We call it winter, this Northland chill with its one-bar heater, its woollen cap, its hint of frost on the roof. But you have to laugh when you think of Eskimos crowding round a whale-oil…
At the Frankfurt Book Fair: a triolet We do our best to do our stuff, our quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle. A Lion in the Meadow meets Alan Duff: We do our best to do our stuff. The things…
The Transit of Venus They will lift their pencils and angle them like life drawers, sizing up Venus against Sól with abstract sums, stiff deductions. They may see the lead and sniff at how far we have arisen. They may…
The Silence The dead we think are gone except when dreams return them. So it was Frank Sargeson took me aside in Hell and said, “You know, my friend, the ways the wind among the reeds is used by shaman…
Beachfront So much advice coming your way like wind-blown leaves. ‘Never give up until you see indifference,’ one says; another, a woman recently split from her husband ‘for no good reason’, tells you ‘few women ignore persistence, so keep…
A return after Milosz Stuff I believed in, gone; rules and other things – the stuff of song. I woke up feeling funny with no clothes on. Professors paraded in Greek, dreaming of oak and pine; the Leith wandered its…
1984 Copernicus has no idea what to cook for dinner or whether to change into something cooler. He can’t stop thinking about books that have changed his life. You were twenty-nine and saw no signs of mind control 24 hour…
