apital & far-flung country,

far from Covent Garden. A 1930s London
partied on amongst black & white photographs
plastered to the wall above a battered Steinway.

On Brooklyn hills toi toi waved war plumes
to the southerly gusts with unceasing applause.
Through a hundred, sunblown wintry afternoons

he coached opera singers, actors, newsreaders,
plucked notes off the yellow stained keys:
he guided, rolled golden vowels, before them.

Bruno Lawrence

Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories,
way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow cocky
was a bastard you met on gravelly roads? Recall
the nights playing community halls, and days making
a few records, only to break a few more? Ricky
Mays Jazz Combo, Max Merritt & The Meteors,

Quincy Conserve, plus, the all-stars-road-show
Blerta1, travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks,
down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus t
seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer
extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape
Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain you backed

the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave
off cancer. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman,
film star (didnt Jack Nicholson say get on over
to Hollywood?) but you preferred back blocks, sought
small towns, river shingle, the hollows of the land,
and a home around Waimarama in the Hawkes Bay.

A shifting romantic, hoon & hangman, a real joker
you played yourself sans bullshit in a heap of movies;
The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art
without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet
Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load,
produced that classic my 12 inch, record of the blues.

1 Bruno Lawrences Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition.

II

The Still Watches

I

Autumn tinsel floats gold on
July leaves and up goes the memory
flare. The carbon rod of winter
burns low and the dark is a mammoth
locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous
reels of the seasons spinning before
your eyes. A plane passes, and
upsets the late sun to a shadow-print
upon the wall. With barely a
movement we come from the bleaker months
to where the picture pans briefly,
dissolves upon the softer ores
of spring. Ah, but the Captains of
Industry are wheeling! A building boom
amongst the trees after the first
few casual blossoms had fallen along
suburban driveways. Observe the birds
investing in the green