MICHELE LEGGOTT
matapouri
the magpies come to the corner of the house
and talk all morning to the figure on the flag that hangs
on the orange wall my fingers trace the sewn words
COME WIRELESS a voice fills in the rest and flashes
from my good right eye ALALU give back the black and white
but it’s the orange I want morning sunlight on the wall
the birds and their qwardle the bells in the painting
of KARANGAHAPE ROAD in a shed on the side of the hill
nothing more joyous than a dog in water except two dogs
paddling along beside us in the waist-deep water so clear
the estuary at full tide feet sinking through sandy crusts
WHOA the dogs turn back and we drift with the current WHOA
to where waves are coming over the bar WH-OA soft landing
against the side of a sand bank as in the dream one moment
out of my depth one moment a toe on the bottom I open my eyes
underwater so clear everything as it should be kicking along
post MERIDIAN the wall of sound is cicadas the shade sail
flaps one manta wing on the hot concrete and I’m off barefoot
to find the London planes whose whitewashed trunks
will lead me step by step out to the point an ALLÉE
a path to walk ALONE counting and listening marking off
each tree there and back the dog running free with her nose in
RABBITS sharp gravel springy kikuyu ALONE and seeing
the same pathway in moonlight under the morepork’s loony call
Michele Leggott was the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007–09 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. Her collections include Heartland (2014) and Mirabile Dictu (2009), both from Auckland University Press. She coordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) with Brian Flaherty at the University of Auckland, and recently co-edited Alan Brunton’s selected poems, Beyond the Ohlala Mountains (Titus Books, 2014), with Martin Edmond.
Leggott comments: 'Almost twenty-five years ago, Leigh and Susan Davis built a family place on the headland above Whale Bay in Northland. Here, in 2009, Leigh designed and flew the thirtieth and final flag of his magnum opus Station of Earth-bound Ghosts. And here, on an orange wall in the boatshed, hangs the first flag in that magnificent series of aerial poems. Five years after Leigh’s death the place on the headland still vibrates with tangible and intangible traces of his restless, enquiring mind. To walk into it is to engage all over again with possibility, counting and measuring light, time, steps, the hoist and the fly.
'One such possibility opened when Auckland artist and publisher Bronwyn Lloyd developed a textile response to my poem "matapouri" for the Art + Books symposium in Dunedin last year. Bronwyn’s response embodies in a different form the sewn words and flights of black and white caught from Leigh’s flags and present in my walk through the places on and around the headland.'
Links
New Zealand Book Council writer file
Auckland University Press author page
Leigh Davis’s flags from Station of Earth-bound Ghosts
Leigh Davis at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc)
Bronwyn Lloyd’s textile ‘matapouri’ at Mosehouse Studio