Allen Curnow

At nine fifteen a.m. on the first day of his eighty- first year. Why don’t I

first-person myself? I was hoping nobody would ask me that question

yet. The strong smell of chlorine for one thing, one thing at a time, please.

For instance, there’s always this file of exercyclists riding the gallery

over the pool. Bums on saddles, pommelled crotches. The feet rotate, the

hands grip,...

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever.

Pascal, Pensées

1 Refuge in San Remo won’t work out. Local health officialdom rulesLa signora èmalata. Not welcome this side of the frontier. France is not far: why don’t I try cousin Connie Beauchamp? Nice place they say they’ve got in...

i

Engaged too long too chastely. Was

that it? Anyway, she broke it off,

my father wrote ‘Pan’, earliest verse

of his, to make it into print

over his name, the god revealed

as Tremayne M., Syrinx as Maud.

Twenty-odd pages further on, more

forgotten poems between his lines

and hers (called ‘Song’), both plaintively

lovelorn, obscurely set down between

Oceanian winds and...

i

Not him – he’s where no fears can find

nor torments touch him – it’s his Mum

has the details, who told the head-

master, who talked to the press.

           Dad only just gone

for the takeaways at KFC,

when he says – quiet, sort of sudden,

you’d hardly know it was him speaking –

...