Then the lift opens and the girl steps out.
She steps into his arms.
I remember it all. How they were held there. It was the day our friend went into the hospice.
(2007)
Chris Orsman, ‘The Polar Captain’s Wife’
I imagine you are much
preoccupied with the cold,
inching your way between
icebergs of a menacing blue.
This picture satisfies us both;
it is your duty to sound out
the buoyant and laden,
and think betimes of your wife
stranded amidst the furniture.
Being a little drunk I wander
from room to room,
touching temperate surfaces
a book, a clock, a chair
missing the body heat
we stowed in that chamber
our last night together.
(2008)
Ashleigh Young, ‘A Swim with Mum’
She abandoned the boat one summer
and began to swim
a careful, clumsy breast-stroke through the river. From the jetty
to the bridge, from the bridge to the jetty and
back again: patient as a beaver.
At twilight
the one light
is mum, swimming.
She wears a black whale-skin one-piece
and her strange pale skin,
her hair a slow-moving beacon
through the mildew of trees.
She tells me the garden looks different, is smaller
from the river
and that one never grows familiar
with the soft tongues of weed that browse the skin.
Each breath when she swims is held and let go like a precious thing,
a pushed swing:
this is the only time she is not talking.
The river that runs past the house is darker, is quieter
when mum is swimming.
(2005)
Personal Effects
Bill Manhire, ‘Kevin’
I don’t know where the dead go, Kevin.
The one far place I know
is inside the heavy radio. If I listen late at night,
there’s that dark, celestial glow,
heaviness of the cave, the hive.
Music. Someone warms his hands at the fire,
breaking off the arms of chairs,
breaking the brute bodies of beds, burning his comfort
surely to keep alive. Soon he can hardly see,
and so, quietly, he listens: then someone lifts him
and it’s some terrible breakfast show.
There are mothers and fathers, Kevin, whom we barely know.
They lift us. Eventually we all shall go
into the dark furniture of the radio.
(2005)
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Undone’
We watch as all becomes undone.
Your life an unfamiliar house
you live in. Ordinary things sometimes are things of wonder.
Or confusion. Fun done
away with. Others douse
the flames. We watch as all becomes undone.
The seam of every day unpicked to lie among
the others; don’t fuss about the mess—
sometimes this too can be a thing of wonder.
The first day of the week’s no longer Monday—
all days and weeks are one to those of us
for whom all has become undone.
A watch is of no use to them, nor moon nor sun
for all is one and all is all and they will cast
aside those things that once were things of wonder.
Nothing, now, is clear. All’s become con-
fusion. All falls dark. The house closed fast
to light. We watch as everything becomes undone.
Ordinary things that used to be so full of wonder.
(2011)
Andrew Johnston, ‘The Present’
I’d given my father a humble figure
carved from dark stone, smooth as if river-worn,
face drawn in with fine white lines;
fine white lines ran down its limbs.
It was a crystalline day in spring
or autumn; he was walking
down Salamanca Road where it turns
and runs above the rose garden—
glint of harbour in the distance,
spring in his step because he’d discovered
a whole new place to park—
a wide street lined with pohutukawa
and angle spaces—all of them empty—
marked with clean white lines.
He was wearing his fine grey suit—
pink cheeks, grey suit—
and was heading
down into the city
as if he had business
to attend to.
My father was surprised—
not, as I would have expected
to receive a carved stone figure—
but that I thought it necessary
to give him a present at all—
it wasn’t Christmas, it wasn’t
his birthday, it was just
a fine clear day in spring or autumn
so I told him
it was because he’d had a rough year,
what with his having
died and everything.
(2007)
Ian Wedde, ‘4.2 To death’ from The Commonplace Odes
Death takes them all, that’s why
We never see it. Death’s never in
The picture. But everything we see, we see
Because death has. Death took the pictures.
Death looked at Chloe whom the poet
Begged not to run to her mother. Chloe
Ran into the oblivious arms of death.
Quintilius lies in the sleep that goes on
Without ever ending, and the music has faded away
That could have restored blood to the veins of the shade
Death saw. Lydia no longer
Wakes up to hear the sound of gravel thrown
Against her shuttered windows in the night.
Death pictured what lay behind the shutters
And Lydia grew old on the journey between
Her chamber and the dark street where death waited.
O passerby, do not refuse a few
Handfuls of sand to cover up the corpse
Of Archytas. It may be you who needs these rites
Some day, when death has viewed you as he did Archytas,
Who counted all the uncountable grains of sand
On the lonely beach. Death pictured my mother
And my father on the Picton foreshore, cheek by cheek
Under Gemini, twin sons unborn, tinkle
Of jazz from the ferryboat. And death looked at their sons.
(2001)
Kate Camp, ‘Personal Effects’
I went to the Kilbirnie Watchtower to pick up your personal
effects from a policeman with your name.
The faint sun made me sweat a little in the car
in my cream rabbit-fur jacket you’ve never seen.
The policeman was absent so a woman not in uniform
gave me the brown envelope, the size of a foot,
and I held it against my stomach, in the fur,
as I walked back to the car.
And there wasn’t much in it:
a wallet, and $3.15 in change, and a white cigarette lighter.
It was all there, as they’d promised, and the lighter was still going strong,
good as new, and the wallet from Kingston leather was soft
and moulded like someone made a cast of your pocket,
and there were cards in there, a tiny stack of cards, so I laid
them out in a line on the table and didn’t try to divine
anything from the
m.
There was a student ID, community services card and a ten-trip
bus ticket, three sections, with one clip left on it.
There were cop cards, national and city library cards
and phone cards and one read IRIDOLOGY:
EYES SHOW YOUR ENTIRE BODY’S HEALTH.
And I looked to see which sector of the iris denoted irony
and which despair but the closest I could find was Reality Coping
and Chest Cavity, and then, just as I was about to put the cards away,
I saw the little key that showed the location of the heart—
according to iridology—right in close to the pupil.
(2001)
Longing
Cliff Fell, ‘The Adulterer Becomes a Roadie for the Clash and Thinks About Sleeping with their Girlfriends’
A Marshall amp on the back seat.
The cymbals like collecting plates in church.
Faces lit by smoketip glow.
The gig, and now it’s over—
the limo glides through London’s grubby snow.
He knows that Topper won’t mind.
Nor Simenon, nor Jones.
Joe might be a problem, though.
But here comes Julie, walking down the hall.
Her hair hangs over her shoulders,
and as each step displaces it
the light ripples behind her
like rivers of chiffon flowing from her scars.
(2003)
Eleanor Catton, from The Rehearsal
Was he supposed to undress her first, or wait to be undressed? He didn’t like the idea of undressing her first—it seemed greedy, and the thought of remaining clothed while stripping her naked unnerved him—he imagined someone walking in, and what they would think. Would it happen piece by piece, like a polite duel—her shirt then his, her bra then his singlet, all the way down? Or were they supposed to undress themselves separately, and then come together after they had both been transformed? Stanley’s heart was thumping as he led her to the bed and they sat down on its edge, kicking off their shoes in tandem and shuffling sideways to embrace each other and lie down.
He had imagined this moment many times previously, but Stanley realised now that he had imagined the scene mostly in close-up, arching and rearing and heavy breathing and skin. What was supposed to happen now? He tried to negotiate swinging himself on top of the girl without kneeing her in the groin. He was wooden, like someone obeying a director’s instruction or responding to a cue. He floundered, shifting his weight to one side and back again, and he had a sudden, unflattering vision of himself from above, kneeling with one arm thrashing behind his back to find the slipping duvet and pull it back over his shoulders against the draught. He felt a surge of anger at his own ineptitude, and almost viciously he slipped a hand inside her shirt, just to prove he was up to the task. He felt her ribs rise up sharply at his touch.
Stanley was wishing that he was much older than he was. He wished that he was a man, and not a boy, a man who was easy with himself and could strip a girl and laugh and know that what he was doing was right. He wished that he was a man who could place his finger on this girl’s lips and say, Now I am going to make you come. He wished that he was a man who could use the word ‘cunt’, who could speak it aloud and easily, in a way that would make a girl admire and worship him. He wished that he was a man at home with his body, a man who could say, You are beautiful, and know that the words would have meaning because he spoke as a man and not a boy.
Stanley slithered his hand down her belly, down past the little scooped slit of the girl’s navel, hatted by a fold of skin that shrank to a tight little nib as she raised her arms up above her head. She reached to pull his head down to hers and craned up to kiss his mouth. His hand was scrabbling at the button of her fly. He was ashamed at himself for moving so quickly but impelled all the same by a helpless wish for self-annihilation, a desire for the scene to somehow go on without him so he could withdraw. The denim was stretched tight and flat over the bones of her pelvis, and he had to bend the buttonhole cruelly sideways to wrench the button through. It gave. He drew down the zipper and with his fingers felt the thin cotton of her briefs, buoyed up by the tufted whorl of her pubic hair. He felt surprise. Had he imagined her hairless, like a doll?
The girl was breathing faster. He slipped his hand inside her briefs and cupped the wiry mound of her pubis with the heel of his hand, arching his wrist to loosen the waistband of her jeans. Carefully he moved to part the seam of her, hot against the cool of his fingers. He wanted to speak. He wanted to whisper something that would break the awful fumbling quick-breathed silence that was filling the room, the mousy rustle of his hand.
Stanley found himself watching the scene from the position of a camera, and he began caring too deeply about what he might look like from above, or from the side—he tried to be sleeker, to thrash less, to push the hair gently off the girl’s face and let his fingers trail around her jawbone and touch the soft furry pouch of her earlobe, like he had seen done in the cinema so many times. It didn’t seem to be working.
‘My arm’s dead, sorry,’ the girl whispered apologetically, and wiggled it free.
‘Shit,’ Stanley said.
‘What’s wrong?’ the girl said in surprise, drawing the duvet up around her and tucking it carefully under her arms as she withdrew.
‘I don’t—’
‘You don’t know what to do?’
‘No,’ Stanley said, a little too savagely. ‘No, I know what to do.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the girl said, pushing his hair off his face with the rough heel of her hand. The action was coarse and tender at the same time, and Stanley was humbled, feeling her easily achieve the truth of the action when he had found it so difficult. ‘Just give me a cuddle. Come here.’
He crept across the bed and she opened up the duvet to let him in. They lay there for a while, Stanley’s heart thumping, the girl’s hands moving up and down the curve of his shoulder blade and into the thin hair at the nape of his neck.
‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ Stanley said, without thinking.
The girl raised herself up on an elbow and said, ‘What?’
Stanley realised he had sounded rude, and said hastily, ‘I mean me. I didn’t think I would be like this.’
That sounded even worse, and he seethed for a moment in frustration and self-contempt. What he had meant to say was that all the films and television programmes he had ever seen that might have schooled him for this moment had placed him in the position of the outsider, the snug and confident voyeur who is able to imagine himself in place of the hero but is never physically required to act. Now he felt utterly unscripted, marooned, desperate for the girl to act first so that he would only have to follow and the burden of decision would not fall to him.
‘It’s your first time,’ the girl said, and a note in her voice changed, becoming softer, even maternal. She gathered him up closer to her and he burrowed in. ‘Silly old duffer,’ she said, and rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. ‘You’ll be all right.’
They lay there for a while, listening as the ice-cream truck pulled into the street and sounded its theme tune for the children to hear. The truck whined away down the road, and it was quiet again.
‘That was it,’ Stanley said, looking up for the first time, into the lights.
‘That was what, Stanley?’ the girl said, rolling over and touching him lightly on the lower curve of his back with her fingertips. ‘That was what?’
‘That was the most intimate scene of my life,’ Stanley said. ‘Right then. That was it.’
(2008)
Alice Tawhai, ‘Luminous’
Joel had met her at a nightclub. The beat of the music pounded through his head like the drumming of horse’s hooves galloping across the ground. She wore a two-dollar fake flower lei around her neck, and it glowed in the half-dark of the special lights. Fluorescent yellow and green
petals, each flower with a dark red centre. Her stomach was rounded then, but later she had lost the baby, born halfway through the pregnancy with no back to his head. When he thought of the lei now, he thought of the dark red centres, and the crimson lumps of placenta, which had made him think of rotting meat.
They didn’t have sex during her period. He hated blood. ‘Blood smells sour,’ he said.
‘It’s only clean blood, from inside me,’ she told him. And she put her fingers between her legs and got blood on their tips, tracing his name on the smoothness and the new flatness of her own stomach.
She liked sex to be like the sour green-apple Zombie Chews that children buy from dairies. She liked a little bit of pain; being bitten or being scratched, or having her hair pulled. A little bit of sour with the sweet, a little bit of edge. He refused to hurt her like that.
When she was younger, another girl had taught her to douche after sex to wash the sperm away, and the diseases, if there were any. She still did it when there were no condoms, using a small bottle of Coca-Cola, shaking the liquid inside, darker than old tea, until it bubbled and fizzled to a burnt golden-brown. Each bubble was as shiny as if she’d licked it herself. It whooshed up inside her when she took her finger off the bottle neck. She wondered if this had affected the baby when it had failed to wash away the sperm. She wondered if that was why he hadn’t been born right.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 142