Poem 205
Written in Menton in 2010, home thoughts from abroad and all that … but also as I was feeling my way into the project collaborating with Tim Finn that would become White Cloud which we produced with a band and actors at BATS Theatre in 2012 and was later toured by Tim as a solo show …
… when Tim expressed interest in doing something together I spent a bit of time thinking about what the commonalities in our lives were – and realised that we’d both been brought up in mid-North Island towns in a pakeha culture of the time … so we started making a show about what it meant to us to be pakeha – good and bad, old and new, sweet and sour … Tim wrote songs, I wrote spoken word sections and we pieced it together like a jigsaw organised on its own slightly mysterious cloudy intuitive internal thematic logic … the idea (which succeeded I think) was that the show was like a river, words flowed into songs and songs flowed back out into words – and sometimes synchronously my words were spoken over Tim’s music as with this piece that opened the show and was unaccompanied until a beautiful piano version of Tim’s White Cloud Black Shadow crept in behind … I loved the mood change that created and how it supported what I was writing about, it was really something special …
… most people have a house like this one which served as family home and however many years later they can still walk through it in their head … I intended my specific somewhat soft focus memories to spark same-but-different recollections in the audience, to welcome them into something that would become a shared experience …
… I can remember playing Tim’s early demo of this to my family in 2011 as we sat round my father’s bed in the last couple of days of his life …
21
My mother, passing through Rotorua on her honeymoon
thought it was a dump
but we came to live there
you don’t get a choice when climbing the ladder of success
at the TAB or when you’re born
or fall to earth somewhere
21 Larch Street was the where
my brother choosing the best bed in our long light room
a tree in the corner of the yard we never knew the name of
an oak I coaxed from an acorn
that has long since pushed the bricks
of the fence apart
frost on that lawn thick icing
we’d slide through in our bata bullets
while my mother rapped on the cold windows
you’ll kill the grass
thirties house on the corner
long lawns on the streets
I cursed the mowing of
flakes of volcanic glass black obsidian
in the blinding white grit of our driveway
on a seething summer day
the haunted hunched garage with its oil-stained boards
and oval portraits of some misplaced family
from long ago
sun rising red over the concrete boat
across the paddock on a winter’s morning
smell of sulphur in the rain
smoke from the chimney
the little door in the stucco to clean out the ashes
spindly yellow and white fences where the great fish hung
when my father came home triumphant
letterbox and front steps waiting
for School C results
our tortoiseshell cat sleeping
on the black and white tv
whose turn to get up and remove her tail
from the picture?
the dark hall gloom of the middle room lit
by the red eye of the freezer
knowing
in the middle of the night
as long as I could see that red glow
there was no black thing creeping up on me
leaves falling from the liquid amber the oak
and the nameless old tree
fuchsia flowering by the back door
blue hydrangeas
would there never be lemons or grapefruits
on the stunted shrubs?
not everything thrived in pumice clay and topsoil
in frost and sun
where a horse bumped the bedroom window one or two mornings
now the paddock was empty now built upon
we lived in a city
after all
a man from the council knocked on the door
with a plan to renumber us and place us
in James Street
all that day
we didn’t know where we were
spun free of our moorings
he came back to say
because we were on the corner
we could have the choice
we chose to stay
remain ourselves
forever 21
the key to the door
the Yale lock
of the front door
of the house
in Larch Street