PO'S MA

Po's mother fell into a well while looking at the flowers
it is said, and that is how she died. How Tang
that euphemism is ! I can't help thinking of her as I lower
myself along the rope into the tomo at Te Tahi,
and at such a height a little while, appear to hang
in space. A hundred feet below me, at the bottom of the fluted
shaft, a little group of people peer up, partly
lighted by their caving lamps. And overhead, the ferns,
some jade-like in the penetrating light, some silhouetted, rooted
around the hole's rim. Drops of water come down faster
than I do, and land before me with a splatter among up-turned
faces. So I might be rising, even falling up, away from them,
with the mossy limestone sliding imperturbably into the past.
Remember how the pink flowers grew inside the well
at Les Chateignes, in chinks between the stones ? And dimness
luminously from above them and beneath them, quietly fell ?

PROVINCIALE

The placid ocean, brilliant as a brand
new motor bonnet, ripples to the gulls'
red paddles on the tidy sand,
and licks the china sea-shells.
Too clean ! The horizon
altogether too trim-sailed and straight !
Too bright to rest your eyes on :
sunglass-season on the promenade.
The gardens seesaw, swing, and slide
down oopsa-ringa-roundabout !
while painted poultry feather-dust inside
the fences, and the chimpanzee politely pouts.
The sky is paint-box-crossed with monoplanes
and gliders' pirouettes; puffed parachutes
descend on pansy-coloured rooves and lanes
resplendent with the gleam, the glide, the toots
of traffic. More sedate, the park
trees, pointilist, illuminate the gallery's
long windows; warm the delicately dark
prints, and the bloom on healthy pottery.
Though where a chess set has been placed
in passionless display, some reprobate
has opened play, then come below to taste
the seedy buns and cheese-cake, crusty pie
where olives grace the oily salad bowls
and acorn cups and red leaves decoratively lie
on out-door tables. Where the families stroll
beyond the gemmed lake and the lacy boughs
you glimpse the founder sun-flowered on his plinth :
hygienic gentleman ! So eminently satisfied with how
proprietors of leash and pet have rinsed
their pekes and Siamese; and with the polish
on their vehicles. And we too, trekking
up out of the river-rains and bush
across a range, our engines racketing
and oozing rusty steam, to reach the sun,
appreciate the elegance of panel-work,
upholstery and various eastern wonders
shop-bright under the bonnet; but the smirk
of the mechanic cannot encourage us to hope
that underneath the spick and spanking
sheen, the same black damaged shapes
and ominous metal shavings might not clank
together in the same corroded channels;
and might not find all these
from up-to-the-minute innards to the mirrored panels,
living for the same incurable disease.

Nicholas Messenger had his first poems published in New Zealand as a schoolboy. He won the Glover Poetry award in the 1970’s. In recent years he has had work published in a good number of online magazines. He was born in 1945, completed a degree at Auckland University, travelled extensively, and lived at various times in France, England and Japan. He has worked at many jobs, including seaman, security guard and demolition worker, and for a long time made his living as a teacher, of science, art, and languages, in High Schools in New Zealand, and of English in Japan. Now he is running a home-stay business in Hokitika. He has been married twice and has two grown-up children.

Email: Nicholas Messenger

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