hostilities. A semi-believed in love
tried but haunted by its past. A
self-deceiving hope posturing the loss
of lives that went before of youth,
of partners had & names forgotten.
What holds at the seasons close
is passion flogged to life like a
single-piston engine, a sputtering
exchange of plenitude, the usual run
of days & dishes. The couple come home
to roost at last, tense & too aware.

2.

Squinting back down the telescoped
years as he had once through bombsights
to that recently freed city, after the
war & burnt out trams to how they
first met. He posted to Berlin and the
American sector, she from Baden Baden where
he had fallen for her. So agile & aerial,
a mermaid of the trapeze, star act of
an old fashioned circus. A picture framed in
time within the bleak cabaret of youth:
he uniform crisp & she in sequined tights
with her angels Wings of Desire
flared from bared shoulder-blades. They are
holding hands in celebration of the letter
M. Now, married into age & ageless
on an ancient Island, theirs is a love
old as childhood & wise as water. Solidly
based as the fist-backed rock of Uluru.

Brilliant Losers

On reading Geoff Cochranes Tin Nimbus

The gay psychologist quoting The Divine
Right of Kings and the lexicographer, his lifes
dream of the Great New Zealand Dictionary,

both entrenched alcoholics, both the originals
Dostoyevsky might have claimed, although
both stark losers by the worlds brute standards.

Yes, I was there too, that late Saturday night
after THE DUKE, riding the Kelburn cable-car up
under the shadowy, Gothic pile of Victoria

University, where furtive as hedgehogs, we found
a hand-hold to jemmy open an illegal window,
fossick the disused office for carton stacked upon

carton, each one packed with indexed filing
cards, meticulous references, NZ arcana, forgotten
dialects, fables rare as moose from Southland,

obscure derivations, etc., incalculable musings
of an idealist and dreamer (this he showed us) here
lay the singular industry of a reverential scholar,

abandoned yet thirty years on, The Oxford
Dictionary of New Zealand English first appeared,
penned by an academic of that selfsame city.

We are the last of the witnesses Geoff, like the
derelicts who took the sun sitting behind the Public
Library, or sheltered in Pigeon Park, days long

gone (along with THE DUKE and THE GRAND
HOTEL) a city newly syllabled, yet the light