A South Island Night’s Entertainment

Somebody mistook
the day, or how

will we have found
ourselves denied

entry, by chained
gate, padlocked

bolted door of an
empty dark shed

of a hall, miles
from the next town-

ship, as many from
the last lit lamp?

The night itself
unpunctuated,

no Southern Cross,
no Pointers, no

cartwheeling, hand-
standing giant

Orion, aka
Urine (born cauled

in a sacrificial
Boeotian cow’s

pelt, pissed in by
no fewer than three

– 28 –

grateful gods) no
moon. Heavy cloud.

This my ninth year
under them all gets

darker by the minute.
What’s visible here?

Not the crab tropic’s
maidenliest stars

twinkle-twinkling
on my grandmother’s

East Anglian
wedding night, swapped

now, for a sphere
beyond the circuit

of the shuddering Bear.
Eastward our austral

Pacific sands,
our high snows west-

ward. Our meridian
threads a chained gate

which brings us up
all standing, my father,

my mother, her
mother, and me.

Shut out. Wrong day.
Wrong side of the screen

– 29 –

where the New Age
was to have unreeled

itself, stormed this
barn in drizzling light.

Unreeled the fat
man’s quaking back-

firing automobile.
Silent. His arse-

over-kite exit.
Silent. The Metro

Goldwyn lion’s jaws
parted. A World

War One great gun
discharged. Silent.

A cloud that was
the city. A painted

scream. Silent, only
for the lady playing

‘Rustle of Spring’
in an empty dark

shed of a hall.
Nobody comes.

Only our feet go
crunch-crunch in and out

of step as they fall,
all the way home.