I found you first in Windsor
I was burning bridges over the Thames.
You were too square for my backpack
too familiar not to own.

I remember you best in Spain
a simple twist in Barcelona
found me tangled up in bus rides
you said Meet me in the morning in Grenada.

You were my wise advice in love
my mother’s voice in Tangier
my idiot wind map flapping me off course
and buckets of rain back to England again.

After a message from my Jack of Hearts
you were shelter from the storm
telling me no-nonsense
You’re a Big Girl Now. I carried on

and every time I left a town whispered
… lonesome when you go.

This is a very old poem. I wrote it as an exercise in 2007 about my O.E in 2003. This version marks ten years since I was lost in Spain and Morocco. ‘Blood on the Tracks’ is one of my all-time favourite albums and I find comforting references to it all over the place. The book I’m now reading mentions it in paragraph one and the book I’m writing...? Well we’ll have to wait and see.

More Tuesday Poems here.

At the Nelson launch of Tear Water Tea in August, I told an anecdote about my mum. It seemed only fair – the crowd was a friendly bunch who had known both my mum and I for many years, plus she had just told an equally revealing story about me out on the deck of the Nelson Museum, moments before I was about to read to the crowd. Actually, let’s have her story first: One day when I was about three years old I emerged from the corner of the room where I had been busy and serious with a crayon (I imagine) and a piece of paper. I had written a story. I showed it to my mum and she said yes yes very nice dear and sent me on my way. She hadn’t looked properly! So I told her it was writing and demanded she read it. She held the paper and read it aloud, “it says I O I O I O I O I O” and I duly had a tantrum and stormed off. Classic stuff. The truth was of course I hadn’t written a word but had filled a page with shapes I thought were writing. I also like to think that as I was writing it I had a story in mind that I felt I was articulating letter by letter. Pretty frustrating for small person and mother alike.

So anyway, my own anecdote: One day when I was in high school – probably about 15 years old – my mum said “are you coming straight home after school? I need to talk to you about something. I’m worried about you.” I heard the question as a command and didn’t argue (but no doubt rolled my eyes). Secretly I was crapping myself. What on earth did she want to talk to me about? Was this going to be the “birds and the bees” talk? Does she think I’m getting too fat? Too skinny? Doing drugs? Somehow I knew it was going to be that advice-that-sounds-like-judgement kind of talk and never once did I think it wasn’t going to be about something I had done or it was imagined I was doing. Needless to say I stressed out all day. My friends made fun of me; balked at the idea of anyone thinking I was having sex or taking drugs and we swapped horror stories about mother-daughter chats. At the end of the day I came home as instructed and my mum sat me down. I probably avoided eye-contact or practised my signature eye-roll. “So,” she said, “I’m a bit worried about you.” (eye-roll out of fear) “I just really don’t think you’re … reading enough.” Tension released, flippant remark from me, eye-roll of relief, storm off. Phew. It’s funny for a number of reasons: The undue stress of course, but also my mum was serious about this. I mean drugs, sex, who cares as long as you’re reading books.

And of course she was right. It’s hard to imagine now though how I couldn’t find the time to read. Admittedly I was being a teenager, watching movies (much more social), listening to music, playing my violin and bass, writing angsty poetry… and really what was there to read anyway? As a young teenager there seemed to be masses of books for me – Judy Blume, Beverly Dunlop, Gaelyn Gordon, Maurice Gee, Roald Dahl plus classics like ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Secret Garden’, ‘Harriet the Spy’ and ‘Charlotte Sometimes’. And that was before raiding my brother’s collection of  Willard Price and Choose-your-own Adventures. But what was there for the nerdy older (but obviously not into sex and drugs) teen? Thank god for Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, I guess.  Maybe I was making excuses, but it does seem like teens these days have a much better selection of literature. I mean there are some seriously good young adult writers out there. Currently I’m reading Mandy Hager’s ‘Dear Vincent’ – not just for myself, but for my 15 year old self (and, I guess, for her overly-worried mum). Here’s a random page I just turned to: “My fingers itch to paint. I shut the door and turn on the radio. It’s playing a piece from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. I close my eyes. A chorus gently hums together, yearning voices building over the delicate massed plucking of violins and clear-throated flutes. They rise and swell, intermingling, soaring, filled with pain. It’s the saddest, sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.” It’s beautiful writing and a compelling story. And hey, a teen protagonist who paints, loves Van Gogh and is moved to tears by opera…? If anything was going to confirm my angsty, nerdy self as OK this would have had potential.

The “talk” my mum had with me nearly 20 years ago has obviously stayed with me. Not just as anecdote or a way to point out her bookishness, but as a constant reminder to see reading as something that’s as important as eating properly. Maybe if my mum had handed me a copy of ‘Dear Vincent’ when I was 15 I would have rolled my eyes, but I like to think secretly I would have devoured it, lived in it, mulled over it, sought out more.

Sunday afternoons
I migrated continents
to sit by your fire
look out to the sliver of ocean
we knew we could step across.

Our land-locked huddle
gradually loosened
weekly visits spread
to months
nomadic years.

Now looking out at the green bush of Wilton
I  s  t  r  e  t  c  h
to fill the space I’ve been given.

No longer compacted into single rooms
or forced to the footpath
a pile of native creatures struggling     for     air.

Up here the rubbish truck doesn’t come
until after the trek to work
and up here

the silence

at night

could part seas.

Tuis call their digital tune to a distant invisible shore
ask, do you remember drifting plates?
– a subtle shift –
that slow separation home?

More Tuesday Poems here

I would bike to the pear trees each morning
and stretch into their leaves, pulling out fruit.
I developed a taste for Winter Cole
Doyenne Du Comice and Taylor’s Gold.
When the pears ran out I moved on to apples.
Cox’s Orange were small in thick trees,
Granny Smiths green among gnarly branches
and Fuji, red bulbs hanging within reach.
Apples were harder than pears, resistant
and once I had shed my picking bag, I’d
head to the main road, extend a pleading thumb
and make my way back into Nelson
to paint abstractions in the garage
and read in the shade of the plum tree.

from Wit of the staircase, 2009

One of the many things I love about a poem is how it can shift under a change of circumstances. Poppy, whose pear orchard I once worked on 10 years ago, passed away on Friday. She was a dear friend to my mum, who visited her regularly throughout her long illness.

The phrases “among gnarly branches,” “harder… resistant,” “stretch…pulling…extend,” “within reach” and then the final rest beneath the “shade of the plum tree” now stand out to me in this old poem, in a way I never intended them to. The poem’s title too seems to have been steeped in poignancy. Language is magical in that way. I will remember Poppy among the pear trees, her curly black hair, her sharp wit and often surprising sense of humour. She will be missed.

The city I love at night and miss
all week as I work up the line
in a classroom at the edge
of development

reveals a stranded few who
I can’t help with leaking pen
stray thoughts unmorphed awaiting
the tatty notebook
tucked under my arm.

Tall and tough but out of luck
out of gas with kids in the car
she’s fleeing something
I’ve got nothing to give
redden to be so unprepared.

Or, here, sobbing into shopping bag
gym bag or running-away-from-it-all bag.
I stop and stoop to offer, well nothing
I guess, nothing here to dab at red eyes
empty notebook, dangling thoughts
and ink-stained finger tips.

This is not my reality or the stuff of poetry.
This city I miss
as I work up the line
this city leaves us empty and dry.

Read more Tuesday Poems here

Thanks to everyone who helped launch Tear Water Tea last week! It was a fantastic event held at Quilters Bookshop in Wellington, celebrating both my book and Latika Vasil’s Rising to the Surface, also published by Steele Roberts Ltd.

Over and over they told me the story:
A boy, an imagined wolf.

As if sorrow can be likened to mischief.

I hold the teapot in both hands
another satisfying, salty brew.

This is the first poem in my soon to be launched collection,  Tear Water Tea. The final poem in the book is at the Tuesday Poem hub today, thanks to Harvey Molloy. And Mary McCallum has also posted a poem from Tear Water Tea  on her blog!

From Tear Water Tea

Tassel

The action of giving turns out
to be a gesture for making a deal
the promise of discount, save or Be Saved.
I gather what I can
listen for insights from passing chatter
squint the world into a spin.

An elderly couple walk side by side
a tassel of her shawl caught in his cufflink
well-dressed for this time of day.
I roll the image between finger and thumb:
the cufflinks, the shawl the slow pace of their walk
spin the world into a gilded string.

More Tuesday Poems here