Poem 419

I visualise this in Aro Valley even though I can’t remember going to any parties there – plenty round the wider Victoria student catchment though … the Flintstones reference is to the end of each episode’s credit sequence when Fred is locked out shouting for Wilma and lights go on all up the hillside behind him – living in a flat town as a boy that always struck me as exotic, I had to come to Wellington to really experience a nighttime vista like that …
… the idea of joining people with a thread is also found in Poem 65 and Poem 219 …

( I like the title’s wordplay on party guests (something I also used in my playscript for The Great Gatsby), how porch light plays on torchlight marches … and the triple meaning of spirits … )

Party Ghosts

These parties clinging tenuously along the cliffs
and terraces
                          cubes of light on the Flintstone hillside
are not all happening at once
I crush time to bring them together
I flick on all the lights and the musics of different years
and the haunted houses play

drifting up and down driveways
overcoats and scarves paper bag twisted round a bottle
we march by porch light
                                                 somehow failing to feel
it has been left on for us

                                                  it's now you think
you would rather not go in
that the night and the cold
and the clear sound of your feet
have been enjoyable
but laying your coat across a bed you join in
and forget

how is it you can say anything
in the privacy of everyone talking at once
music to stop the gaps

   I'm drunk but I've wanted to do that to you
   for over a year

one party past too many
crammed with jangling spirits
a confusion of phantom desires
where if only 
                           someone 
would connect us with cotton
finger to finger along the lines
of who wants who
we could finally see
what we were doing