Nicholas Wright


Our Union

On the night of our union we woke
to the phone and left the fale to walk
back to the beach now flood-lit and live
for a gamer convention where men
were buried in fox-holes, wired-in
controlling shapes at sea, and as the sun
rose to signal the tournament’s end
a great wave, simple and luminous
reared tall like an archive’s moving wall
filled with the red and yellow bodies
of the surf-life-saving convention
among which passed some dark anak 
swift and finned, and in this moment
the pearl fishers singing wry songs of fish
the onion farmers quarrelling for treaties
and revelation’s wave above us all
the homeless dogs of gambolling hours before
began to line the cliffs and dunes
like magnificent gamecocks hailing dawn
their gums raised and wrinkled in human grin
knowing as we’d known all along
the next sentence would be an animal.



Horn and Club 

They flooded the chambers of the last fortress
the public library on Hereford and Gloucester.
They’d been on the books all along, he said
those lepidopterans (his word) emptying the books
of all their makings; they’d been in the borrowers’ details
all this time, had burrowed to spines, had waited
entire lives, one reading after another.
In their eclosion they blurred word for word.
Those stridulating masses (he made a face upon the word) 
set upon the leaves and shivered letters to air;
the inky smut, furred and speciose, was parts of speech and moth
and thick it was, made tongues wry with the falling scales;
clouds of authors and their thoughts, weighting 
every breath and the chambers choked 
on anecdote. Here he paused for sobering 
and gestured to the curate’s half-buried body
horned and clubbed but otherwise undigested; 
your moth, he said, has no mouth. 
Into the black dust we thrust our reader’s hands
to see the back of them shine in ancient soot.



Eeling, or Concert Going at the Christchurch Town Hall. 

Virgule, time’s arrow, a finger bending a river
an inkling among the anglers
or vowels queuing some moonlit flute
or a ruminant head aquiver with tongues. 
Here: a darkness flooding the roots
æl, el, aal, all – for tuna.
Or, between name and thing, form 
a hand’s width of history:
an organ ringing in the years
by a river writhing in descent.
These eyes set to fill sent tongues
to press for rivers run in reverse
as tongues return to term.
Here then, a riddling in the cursive reeds
ringing the civic oto
this gathering under the eyes
these hands brought together
here; for all there is an interval.
Now then to bend by a river, an eel
and all the world’s echo.



The Encompassing Eye 

‘…until at the last stage draw out of thee that dream power which every night shows thee is thine own; 
a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is a conductor of the whole 
river of electricity. Nothing … exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as an exponent 
of his meaning’—Emerson, ‘The Poet’.
The body in the water drew a community. 
Diverse interests swarmed the body, 
disoriented in the dark encompassing sound.
This must be the right body, 
we said, and became the chosen by choosing
the exceptional body, swelling with meaning.
The parasitic callosities clouded
the grand rostrum from which many 
spoke—you knew this was the right 
body, even before you saw 
the rivulets live streaming across 
the painted cryptics of origin, spots 
of time and phylum ever expanding. 
The tightening body seemed to grow 
younger, a divinity to carry us through
the world transcending limits and privacy, 
an augury to which we sent the romantics.
The local University raised
a campus in the baleen precincts; 
xylophiles burnt wooden forms
along the bluffs; the art of dildo 
scrimshaw rose and seemed to catch 
the age; we did not cease to stream 
through the body’s intimacies.
The encompassing eye at which we entered 
had somehow entered us and soon
it was impossible to speak of the body. 

Nicholas Wright is a lecturer in the English Department, University of Canterbury. He teaches New Zealand and American literature, and is currently working on a book of essays on contemporary poetry in Aotearoa. His poetry has been published in Landfall, Poetry New Zealand Year Book, and The Spinoff.

 
 

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