Brasch in his velvet
voice and signature
purple tie
complained to his
journal that you had
‘interrupted’.
I wasn’t sorry.
That was Somervell’s
coffee shop
nineteen-fifty-three.
Eighteen months
later you and I
were skidding on the
tide-out inner-
harbour shelvings
below your house
from whose ‘small room with
large windows’ you saw
that geranium ‘wild
on a wet bank’
you suggested
was ‘the reality
prior to the
poem’. Son of
Christchurch and the
church you’d come north
to be free perhaps,
to be employed and
in love, and were
making the most
of it in poems that
gave to old ‘summer’
new meanings.
Ten years ago
we launched your last
book, The Bells of St
Babel’s, overlooking
that same inner
harbour with
its shallow bays
and touch-and-go
tides. You wrote in
my copy (sure I
wouldn’t have
forgotten the source)
‘To Karl, always
“somewhere in earshot”.’
What you left out
was ‘for the story’s
end’. You must have
guessed it was close.
Today no end
to your occupation
of the bland
Waitemata
nor of wild
Karekare where we
shared Lone Kauri
Road. The pipe across
Hobson Bay is
replaced by a
tunnel. Tohunga
Crescent has some
new polish but
nothing you would
deplore. The tuis
still quote you
and even cicadas
manage a phrase
that sounds like yours.
Storms too in wooden
houses sometimes
creak of you. But
this ‘blood-noon breathless’
Auckland summer
is the season you
gave us in making
it your own.
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