Lunch Poem
It is 10:21 in Wellington a Thursday
last day on Fulbright’s payroll, ticket
to fly out on Saturday the 8:30 to Auckland that is if
Air New Zealand will bully past the ash
plume, volcanoes the only smokers in my poems.
In Moore Wilson’s I buy horopito for Atin and Tinni
and spend my last token in Unity on Jenny Bornholdt’s
The Rocky Shore, deciding that I want to write
about poetic conversations maybe instead of having them.
I stroll through a cloud on Kelburn Parade
and get out of the spit and wind into Murphy
where I can count tuatara for the second to last time
as Harry taught me, but red heat-lamps warm
blank rocks, the reptiles are hiding, it’s June
in a southerly for Chrissake. Bad omen.
Anna’s Thicket, advance copy’s woven shade,
is light in my pocket, most of it second-person
and italic gesticulation, that’s what I like about it,
that and the bits about sad teenagers and feeling
middle-of-the-wood (we’re older than Frank O’Hara
ever got) and her in-the-know references to evade
Americans though I could level a few guesses—
dedications, that’s another post, because this blog
does have a northern hemisphere future, probably after
two weeks in Hawai’i baking the creases
out of my forehead from packing selling cars and
saying goodbye to too many people, who goes
with Fergus now not me, no more flat white with Annemarie,
Bernadette’s in Australia I hear, Lex Luthor alias
Jonathan retreats to his icy lair on Mount Victoria,
no more books to trade with Rob or information
with Alice soon to be shrunk hehe to her cackle on FB,
still breathing, Frank, and listening, but for love
of you and some others, omitting terminal punctuation
Bon voyage, Lesley – I love your thoughtful blog, and find myself reading it as a delicious displacement activity – one that reminds me why we write, which at least in part is to have a kind of quiet conversation with people who have stimulated us…. I look forward to seeing how the Fulbright experience is digested over time. Travel safely, write freely!
Emma Neale
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