NICK TWEMLOW

 

from Te Po-tahuri-atu (the night of restless turning)

*

And what I’m leaving out, for now, 
the part about Reefton, it’s better that way. 
Mum described her episodes 
as ‘premonitions’, the thrill, she said, of being 
right about something before it’s happened. 
Later, decades later, this is how we will talk 
politics. The president’s deputy council shows up dead 
in a park in a Virginia suburb just outside D.C., 
discovered by a triathlete 
getting her mileage in before work, a strangely 
immaculate suicide, his perfectly clean 
shirt blossoms with blood only after 
the medics lift his body, suggesting, along 
with the conflicting reports on the colour 
of his gun, he was dead before he killed 
himself. His suicide note, 
which some contend he didn’t write, 
suggests a man who had been living 
ablaze in the margins of political theory. 
Slowly, like two weeks slowly, it becomes clear 
that Mum is faking it when she walks down 
the wrong corridor, her dressing gown 
slitting open, revealing her unshaven legs. 
So when I ask her, working a crossword puzzle 
as she counts the marigolds in the hospital garden, 
for another word for paranoid, am I surprised 
when I ink in her reply, ‘Observant?’ 
 

*

Saw two dead pigeons being picked at 
by a buzzard, who looks at me 
with contempt for my song selection, 
but I’m pretty interested in how Karen Carpenter 
sounds in any other context than sung 
from a Barbie’s mouth. My father advised me 
to continue to think of divorce 
in a philosophical way, while he slept through 
a decade of surplus government funds. 
My patients, he explained, would freak out 
if I shaved my beard. They wouldn’t 
recognise themselves. 
 

*

I asked my wife if she bought into all that 
I-love-you-till-death-etc. business, and of course 
she does. Each time I ask her about this 
on this evening she reminds me of white geraniums. 
Then the old man who likes to mimic 
shaking a stick at me when I come home from work 
in tatters, some kind of day, some kind of weather, 
he shuts himself down, just like that, walks out 
of my life, leaves the stick in the bucket 
by the door, next to the umbrellas. 
 

*

Jumped over the hedge fronting 
134 London Street, Dunedin, 
my family’s first home. 
Two twenty-year-olds 
were doing bongers on the front porch. 
No, I’m sorry, when I said 
I didn’t want any, I meant that 
in a recuperative sense. I’m shallow enough 
as it is, you see, I’m not really hearing you 
but I’m nodding in the affirmative. 
The Anglophilia going around Christchurch 
has infected god knows how many. Epidemic. 
My uncle Tim, who lives there and works as a product manager, 
won’t admit it, but his topiary garden 
says it all. I’ll be leaving for the States soon, 
and I’ll be careful to leave 
all agronomic products behind, 
that part of me, you see, that thinks 
Milford Sound was a joke. 
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Twemlow was a Fulbright Fellow in residence at the IIML for 2005. While in New Zealand, he completed a manuscript of poems, and researched his Māori heritage and the life and writing of his great-aunt, novelist Joyce West. He lives in Chicago, in the United States, where he works as a freelance writer and co-edits The Canary, a poetry annual.