Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
AUCKLAND POEMS
It is somehow
easier to imagine an alien city than the city in which you live. In your mind,
and thanks to the printed page, you can wander in Baudelaire’s Paris or Walt
Whitman’s New York more easily than you can wander in Auckland.
Now why is this?
Because your
city is a mundane thing. You take it for granted. It is the dull everyday, the
drive to work, the view out the window, the thing routinely noisy and annoying
and battered by rain, or too hot and crowded in the sunshine. It does not spark
your imagination as much as the stink and mystery that somebody else has caught
in memorable words. Why should you memorialise the diesel fumes of your
commuter bus when you can ride Whitman’s ferry or follow les sept vieillards to their rendezvous? Bland city, city filled
with ads, where in broad daylight nobody in particular grabs the passer-by.
But you try. You
try even if some of your efforts are overwhelmed by European imagery. Some
mystery can be caught in this derivative, gulch-filling metropolis. And your
efforts do have the merit of being based
on personal experience.
FROM
THE SKY TOWER
From the Sky
Tower, it’s a planner’s map.
Each boulevard
is flattened, Albert Park
is a smooth
greensward with no cranky hill.
20 degrees from
upright, the near roofs
are mould- and
rust-specked, grimy, but beyond,
at 45, they’re
architects’ templates.
On arrowed
arteries, the matchbox cars
slide silent
journeys past homunculi
scaled to the
bath-tub yachts and bonsai trees.
Ideal city on
an ideal plane
Toytown to the
horizon, dropped among
volcanoes,
greenery and shipping lanes.
Unreal city
from a tower-top
where laws of
gravity are put aside
by abseilers,
whose risk is pocket-deep.
Time for those
fantasies from table-top
and childhood
bedspread, when each fold and crease
was a defile
for ambush and broadside.
The men of
Ponsonby, with shields and spears,
do war with
galleys from the Howick coast
and fuel 20
books of epic verse.
Condottiere,
paid by Ellerslie,
force-march
their way to Northcote in mere weeks
and pillage to
their mercenary code.
A Grande Armee plods up the motorway
to Remuera
Borodino where
Mt Hobson is
the aristos’ grandstand.
The wind that
shakes the tower is a mob
of
orator-enraged Parisians
called out to
sack casino or Bastille.
Unreal Toytown
from a tower-top.
We Harry Lime
it on our Ferris wheel
with cash-value
assigned to human dots.
Till down the
baculum we drop at last
to noise,
humanity, the proper scale.
Reality. The city
on the ground.
MIRROR
GLASS
They make us
catch the bus outside the law courts now.
It can be
louche. Last week some vandal had smashed
the bus
timetable out of its frame. We had to pick the placard up
off the
pavement to check the times, even though
we really knew
them already.
You meet some
interesting people there, though.
I had my bum
planted on that shop-window frame
where you sit
because the council can’t be bothered providing seats
and this Samoan
guy came and sat next to me
and we got
talking.
A city bus came
hurtling down the road past us.
We could hear
its gears crunching and then its brakes
going
squeak-squeak-squeak when the driver had to stop for the light,
and this guy
said “You’d think they’d put some money
into servicing them, wouldn’t you?”
A few moments
later a young couple came walking past us,
him long-haired
and leather-jacketed, her tattooed on
one cheek,
and we were
almost pushed through the plate glass by the pong of marijuana.
We both laughed
and this guy said “They probably lit up
coming out of court.”
I looked across
the road. In the tinted mirror glass of an office block,
jigsawed up in
the uneven squares of the separate windows,
I saw reflected
the Catholic cathedral spire behind us, on Wyndham Street.
The tinting
made the sky and clouds look unreal,
you know, that
ideal mirror world.
So of course I
went off wool-gathering in it for a few beats.
Like, was the
world better when they built that spire?
Or if not, did
they think it was going to be better? And did they hope more,
and imagine
their little city would one day be
a metropolis of
worship and justice?
Really, of
course, it was just the colour of the clouds
in the tinting
that was making me go like this, trying to jump
into neverland,
away from the courts and the pong and the squeaking brakes,
until I heard
that familiar decelerating sound
and this guy
said “Your bus”.
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