Tui Singing

Where the track lost its way in waterlogged grass  

we leaned above the electric fencing to peer

down the pumice pit's slopes and ledges

at summits of tree ferns dropping below us. 

 

Umbrellas across our shoulders struggled

to sheer off the rain and pummelling gales

that had sluiced the gulley since twelve o'clock. 

 

Of the five we'd plucked from a tub in the garage,

the one I held, if not the oldest, had rounded

on Bay of Plenty winds more often than the rest

and its sodden blue nylon wrinkled back

up the curve of a spoke it had given the slip. 

 

Although the gale swooped under all our umbrellas,

mine seemed the one it tormented most,

flipping it uncontrollably from a bluebell

into a drumming tulip that briefly  

endured a private winter and then,

with a whipcrack, shook rain at the rain. 

 

The storm had almost blown itself breathless

when night hung out a hammock of moon.

Now tui are gonging in drying branches

and melody tipples into the kitchen. 

 

Reading Anita Brookner

 

The eyes of the girl in turquoise shoes

seem not to be moving across the page

that she hasn't turned all the time she's been nestling

into the leather chair next to Self-Help:

she may be mulling over the line

she was reading when concentration flagged,

reprocessing words without looking back;

or something else might have occurred to her,

such as whether it's wiser to wait and watch,

why we say what we didn't expect to say,

why the teenager fingering Fantasy

with Necrophile on his T-shirt in pink

wasn't sent upstairs by his mother to change

or else he could cook his own spinach dhal.

 

Perhaps I'm guessing she's thinking these things

because I'm thinking about them myself

in the aisle between Art and Painful Lives

with a paperback Anita Brookner

that I breathed in the smell of before I sat down

on the sofa that's altered my view.

 

A couple in reading glasses unfold 

a red concertina with Portugal on it,

rotate it clockwise and pick out the place

where they camped in '08 that was very nice

but further inland might be nicer this year,

while the man at the table is picking up

books about aeroplanes from a small pile

and studying photographs on the jackets.

 

Buyers queue pensively at the tills,

skimming blurbs and first chapters or gazing ahead

with scents of espresso on their coats.

 

People I used to know or know now

float between lines by Anita Brookner

in daisy chains of ideas and pictures.

They recede when I concentrate on her words

to the margins and space that is always there

when we look up from reading now and then

to leave ourselves and our books behind

and live lives we live when we're not living this one.