Say I Do This: Poems 2018–2022


 
 By the same author
 Poetry
 Whether the Will is Free
 Crossing the Bar
 Quesada
 Walking Westward
 Geographies
 Poems of a Decade
 Paris
 Between
 Voices
 Straw into Gold
 The Right Thing
 Dog
 The Red Tram
 The Black River
 Collected Poems, 1951–2006
 The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007–2012
 In the Mirror, and Dancing
 That Derrida Whom I Derided Died: Poems 2013–2017
 Fiction
 Smith’s Dream
 Five for the Symbol (stories)
 All Visitors Ashore
 The Death of the Body
 Sister Hollywood
 The End of the Century at the End of the World
 The Singing Whakapapa
 Villa Vittoria
 The Blind Blonde with Candles in her Hair (stories)
 Talking about O’Dwyer
 The Secret History of Modernism
 Mansfield
 My Name Was Judas
 Risk
 The Name on the Door is Not Mine (stories)
 The Necessary Angel
 Memoir
 South-West of Eden: A Memoir 1932–1956
 You Have a Lot to Lose: A Memoir 1956–1986
 What You Made of It: A Memoir 1987–2020
 Criticism
 The New Poetic
 In the Glass Case
 Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement
 Answering to the Language
 The Writer at Work
 Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers
 Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic
 Shelf Life: Reviews, Replies and Reminiscences
 Edited
 Oxford New Zealand Short Stories (second series)
 Measure for Measure, a Casebook
 Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield
 Collected Stories of Maurice Duggan
 Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories
 Werner Forman’s New Zealand
 
 First published 2023
 Auckland University Press
 University of Auckland
 Private Bag 92019
 Auckland 1142
 New Zealand
 www.aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz
 © C. K. Stead, 2023
 ebook ISBN 978 1 77671 104 8
 A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
 This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
 Design by Greg Simpson
 For Kay
 ‘Just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do we find that grandeur.’
 – Gustave Flaubert
 ‘I know that half the audience might not understand this but I’m writing for the other half.’
 – Tom Stoppard
 ‘so long / as there’s a next, there’s no last.’
 – Allen Curnow
 ‘It is hard to renounce life once one is fond of it.’
 – Ludwig Wittgenstein
 Contents
 1. Home
 To be continued, perhaps
 Tohunga Crescent
 Ode to Autumn
 On a day late summer in a poem like wine
 Pastoral: Kaiwaka, 1941
 Say I do this
 Dombey & Son
 To ‘Amnesia, Muse of Deletions’
 Mary
 The corner
 Hobson Bay
 Waking in a Time of Trouble
 Haiku: Audiology
 Haiku
 Just Checking
 This side of silence
 Birthday Tercets for Kay
 Anonymity and Silence
 Something to tell
 After surgery
 To any gardener with a terminal prognosis
 Poem in October
 2. Away
 What Next?
 The Death of Orpheus
 Proses
 Movie review: The Misfits
 ‘At the Bay’
 David Mitchell in Menton
 Côte d’Azur
 Sonnet in a time of Lockdown
 October 16, 1817, Angostura, 5 p.m.
 The Dream of Carlos Amigo
 Sonnet: Paula Rego and an inn
 The thousand peaceful towns
 Fin
 Impromptu: Afghanistan
 Psalms of Judas, 1
 Psalms of Judas, 2
 Psalms of Judas, 3
 Psalms of Judas, 4
 The challenge
 National Anthems
 3. … and Friends
 Poem for Kevin
 Thelma
 For Jane Massey
 For Fleur Adcock
 MacSpaunday
 To John Berryman
 13-syllable tercets on behalf of Goats
 Murnane Country
 A Sonnet ending on a note of uncertainty
 Keri Hulme – The Bone People
 Smalls
 Crossing the Bar
 A sonnet for Peter Wells
 Iris
 Creative Writing Class: Syllabics
 An encounter in Belsize Park Gardens
 Just like that
 Sam
 Lines for a Granddaughter
 Solidarity
 Games at 14 Esmond Road, 1955
 Thirteen Ways of Looking at Tony Rudolf
 E = mc2
 The Money
 Ian
 And last
 Notes
 1. Home
 To be continued, perhaps
 Horace, Odes I, 11
 It’s said that to know too much
 displeases the gods, so for their sake, my love
 stop asking for the end of our story:
 no horoscopes, no animal entrails,
 forget weather gurus in this time
 of storms and climate disasters;
 don’t think of the waves at their worst
 smashing on the rocks at Karekare
 but share with me a bottle of Te Mata red.
 We’ll leave our grapevine and plum tree
 to blackbird and thrush and other
 untidy feeders, and to the wasps.
 Let’s talk together not about flashy Love
 but the brilliant books and poems it has inspired
 and the ones who wrote them –
 brainy gossip, and jokes about the times
 when there were still flowers to be picked.
 Forget tomorrow my love. Just live with me today.
 Tohunga Crescent
 Across the street the Allen Curnow house
 sold and garden-tidied and refurbished,
 respectably letting as Airbnb
 is home to wild parties, and just once
 a riot bringing cop cars, a paddy wagon,
 pepper spray and more than one arrest.
 Always there’s rubbish at the roadside when
 the random tenants leave. Tonight by morepork
 and moonlight while the neighbour cats patrol
 I’m watching Jeny walk in her ghostly gown
 smiling and weeping, and here comes Allen alert
 with a new poem needing to know at once
 what I will make of it – but as I read
 he seems to slide away among the trees
 all darkness and displeasure. There’s a light
 down at the Bay – that’s Graham with his spear,
 full tide at midnight, and the water still
 holding itself for something new to reflect.
 Morning will disclose the pōhutukawa
 know it’s December, time for spectacular blossom –
 but Jeny’s ambiguous tears have left me anxious
 about those flashing lines of Allen light
 seen and forgotten like the spell of weather
 just gone you hadn’t known might be a blessing.
 Ode to Autumn
 This day’s officially the first of autumn
 but