FELIX BORNHOLDT

He was in the room, I took him to the sentence

after Gerald Murnane

We were, by coincidence
in the very room where
the sentence lived
quietly, third drawer
down, fourth cabinet
from the door –
one of the great successes
of my life, a summit I barely
registered, so short a time was I
there – minutes, perhaps
then over the other side
carrying on,
descending

We stood and
looked at it
together / bright
atop the table
in the sun
under the window
– he put a hand
on my shoulder –
the whole thing
fresh and complete
as the day I wrote it.

A photo of poet Felix Bornholdt against a blank, beige background

Felix Bornholdt was born in Wellington. A writer and musician, he released his debut solo piano record Man Overboard in 2023.

Bornholdt comments: 'I pinched the title from an interview I heard with Murnane, describing an encounter in his studio. I loved this; the sentence existing in space, a discrete object, a destination. Murnane doesn't specify which sentence it was, only that it appears early in his novel A Million Windows, and that he thought it might have been the high point of his writing career (he wrote immediately, in the margins, "this may be the best sentence I've ever written"). I liked this too, the way those peak moments can be so fleeting; you can never be certain they will come again, whether they will ever be met or surpassed. In the meantime they sit quietly in the cabinet, the bottom of a drawer.'

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