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,...

Freshened by any wind, sanitised with pine and cypress, the slaughterhouse

is cool as a church inside. High rafters too. A gallery. The hooks hang ready.

Nothing else intercepts the day’s late blaze across the Seven Sleepers’ chins

and Cooper’s Knobs, on this point between adjacent bays, only a blotched light

can get past, as the wind in the trees, fidgeting to the doorway....

I

The light in the window blew out in a strong draught only to return wearing a black mask, behind William Woon’s chair, which he draws up close

to the desk. A roundhouse swing from the nor’east rocks the plank walls from blocks to purlins. He trims the Miller Vestal’s ragged flame, lays the scrap-

book open by the burning oil, finds a clean pen, writes Detained (flourishing...

The sun on its way down torched the clouds and left them to burn themselves out on the ground:

the north-west wind and the sun both drop at once behind the mountains. The foreground fills

with a fallen light which lies about the true colours of absconded things, among

which I place this child whose tenth birthday happens to have been my father’s, that will be

a hundred years next...

A small charge for admission. Believers only. Who present their tickets where a five- barred farm gate gapes on its chain

and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock. Out of afternoon pearl-dipped light the dung-green biplane descended

and will return later, and later, late as already it is. We are all born of cloud again, in a caul

of linen lashed to the air-frame of the age, smelling of...