Native Rock
This pale rock in my hand, so
strangely lightweight, came back
with me to Melbourne last week
from my homeland, New Zealand.
Three years since the last short visit.
Expatriated forty-five years,
I wondered: what might tell me
Iım no former New Zealanderı
but a returned native?
In the old Auckland haunts
I was an invisible revenant.
The gorgeous girls on the streets
were like the gorgeous girls
I once yearned after.
These would be the granddaughters.
The occasional reunion gave
the painful pleasure of
occasional reunions. How
(while we denied it)
could everyone have aged so!
How come we were all
such back numbers?
(Time to write your memoirs.ı
Who would print them,
who would read them?)
The hills were all steeper,
the traffic faster thicker shinier,
the prices so not what they were.
My favourite old shops were gone
or spruced up beyond recognition.
A crowd of happy theatre patrons
flowed out of the art deco Civicı.
Remember how tawdry it was?
I pushed against the tide to see inside.
The gilt lionsı eyes twinkled exceedingly.
Refurbished more expensively
than what it cost originally.
2
Trudged up through the steep
park colonial statues,
field gun, English specimen trees,
young lovers rehearsing
in sunlight what I and another
performed there once in darkness
prolonged kissing, that is.
Princes Street: my not very
alma mater, its wedding cakeı tower
(Lloyd Wrightıs studentıs ferro-concrete).
In my time even the library
fitted in beneath it, and most
of its Oxbridge-gowned professors.
There I stood once pink-faced
in my blue college blazer
peddling my topical verse satire.
Smudged pages (old duplicator),
couplets more off-rhymed than rhymed.
Across in the park, the floral clock
survives planted freshly, but without
those two vast metal hands (rusted away
or vandalized or both) that
moved (I wrote) with iron jar and shockı
my time, my vanished season.
3
Suburban Aucklandıs
green old volcanic cones
with quaint colonial names,
Mount Eden, Albert, Victoria
believe me, I used to run
(though well behind the pack)
in school races up, over
and down dear Albert.
(Must I reluctant
post-colonialiser
now call it Owairaka?)
Donıt suggest we walk up it.
Eden Park weıll see it from the train.
Five years I barracked for the light blue
at the boysı high school sports,
never quite making the team.
Oops! Canıt see it now for its
great cantilevered grandstands.
The train passes my old dentistıs
back wall. While he tortured me
Iıd ponder the paint on the window-ledge,
thoroughly chipped by the boot-toes
of my and earlier generations.
To the left, the steep street down which
my sister lost control of her bike.
When we meet soon, shall I ask
to check the dent on her aged knee?
while she recalls my bee-sting day.
Those streets I biked down in the rain
delivering sodden Sunday papers.
Those sundown hills in the west.
She opens her door welcome, stranger.ı
4
Southwards the country opens up,
green and healing. Soon the big river,
the hints of the erratic wars
that made Maori land no longer theirs.
The big lake spreads wide and long,
three snow mountains far beyond.
Walking one pebble beach when young
I stooped, retrieved a weathered white
smooth rock floating, to my surprise.
Porous, cool from old lava flows
pumice, as in auntsı bathrooms,
it smoothed time from dry elbows.
Gripping it reminds: I once lived here.
Wednesday 18 June 2008
Max Richards
Doncaster, Victoria
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