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It seems to have traveled at night, Supremely ironic, lighting fires, Laying golden eggs in the midst of squalor, Its outer garments, in the latest version, Sumptuous, its linens more than shoddy, Drunk, moreover, at a seedy party The discriminating shunned, and, later, bawdy In a run-down neighborhood, with whores and sailors Chosen as companions while the queen went needy. Now that everything about it is known, Why does it come up purple or threadbare, Thrashing all its sunsets in a fit of pique, Or stripped, in the seamiest hayloft, ready To repeat dull anecdotes the millionth time, Its poise unquestionable, its voice unsteady? It is brilliant, androgynous, and stultifying With its threats and tears, dissembling always Its mad obsession with the blurred distinction. And yet who else Is so elementary and badly needed That fifty cultures rise at the merest rumor Of its presence, and, finally, punctually fall Whenever it departs, as if on schedule? Interviewed, Monday, in the city dump, Which turned, by magic, into a hotel tower, Shedding poems and paintings for its bath (It takes ten centuries of running water To wash it clean), it then emerged, all dirty Again, in a costume of ferocious splendor, A hat some milliner in old Vienna Sweated over, its pumps exchanged for sneakers, And raced across the city, breaking records, Just to prove its powers of endurance. It lies down anywhere, and loves the country, But is so unassuming it can even flourish Beneath electric signs and in railroad stations It goes to for the summer, estivating, It says, near fountains that escape our notice, And comes back in the fall, its ribbons flying, Wheeling through the leaves, singing all the voices Of every opera in the repertoire Plus one no one has ever dreamed of writing. Going about its gigantic business, It masks itself as any shape or hope, Appearing as a vicious telephone call, Or a flat, disturbing message in an envelope. It praises calmness but adores upheaval, Is most to be desired when it apes composure, And much to be distrusted when it boasts it has The only fingerprint that can be changed at will.

People like to mock my town, they mock it for being too provincial and too boring and it’s true, not much of import happens here but I don’t mind. Some people say, when they are asked what they like about Palmerston North, that you can always find a park and that’s true, too, you can always find a park just a short walk from where you want to go, sometimes right outside, you don’t have to walk at all, you’re right there. Of course only people who live in New Zealand mock Palmerston North, as people who live outside New Zealand know nothing about it. People who don’t live in New Zealand mock our entire little country as a 1950s throwback with honest, rural folk and unspoilt scenery which isn’t quite true, our scenery is spoilt from being looked at too often and freedom campers, they say, are a problem, but me, I blame dairy cows. When I lived in the UK people there thought New Zealand was a state of Australia, and they would ask me what was coming up on Neighbours, thinking I had some kind of inside knowledge, but the truth is I don’t even watch Neighbours or indeed any soap operas. Actually the whole Southern Hemisphere is more or less written off by people who don’t live here, as somewhere elsewhere, insignificant, like Palmerston North, where as I said nothing much happens. And it’s an undeniable fact that the magazines I subscribe to come from exotic places that they flaunt in their titles, magazines like The New Yorker and London Review of Books and The Paris Review but not The Palmerston Northerner. It’s another fact that The Paris Review isn’t even published in Paris and has nothing to say about that city but it has insightful interviews with famous writers, some of whom I have read. I have been to Paris and apart from the architecture and the food and some very fine cemeteries and of course the language it’s quite like Palmerston North, though parking is a nightmare. I never visited the Louvre but one fine afternoon I went to the Musée d’Orsay which in the opinion of many educated people really is just as good if you like Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, which I do. Still it was nice to come home again, home to Palmerston North, New Zealand, and to see the good brown Manawatū River moving sluggishly under the bridge. It’s not the Seine, but water is water. Paul Celan threw himself — odd phrase, as if he were both baseball and pitcher — into the Seine. John Cleese said Palmerston North is the suicide capital of New Zealand, yet you don’t hear of people throwing themselves into the Manawatū, which would be a risky business, but only because of the effluent from those dairy cows leaching into the river. We live on a floodplain, and the river is ever in our thoughts and sometimes our houses. At such times we are downcast but we lift up our eyes unto the hills and the windmills perched on them that turn and turn. One time I saw a middle-aged woman in the Plaza, our only shopping mall, with her head tilted to where the sky would have been, but for the ceiling and the mood lighting, a stout middle-aged woman with black mascara, elegantly dressed, her wet mouth a dark, soundless O, and the crowd not unsympathetically parting and reforming around her — rock in the river — noticing and not noticing, which is our way.

1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch. If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby. All you can eat for a buck at the diner is cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee. Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs in the war and walked with a limp at parade time. Until it burned, the old depot was a disco. A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines. Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge. If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains. 2. GRAVEYARD Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets lean on their guns. The score is one to one. Everybody’s nervous but the inmates, who joke around—they jostle, they hassle the team of boys in trouble and their dads. It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump. The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no one can recall the last time they got one over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose. And the warden springs for drinks all around— something he calls graveyard, which is five kinds of soda pop poured over ice into each one’s cup, until the cup overflows. 3. COUNCIL MEETING The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s to build another fast-food burger shack on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek, or to permit the conservationist well-to-do citizenry to keep their green space and thus assure long, unsullied views from their redwood decks, picture windows, and backyards chemically rich as golf greens. The paper’s rife with spats, accusations, pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too, but want it five miles away where people don’t care about egrets, willows, good views. Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call out for pizza, somebody brew some tea. Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe. 4. CHARMING The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself. Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang. Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make mushrooms out of plywood for the yard, and the corner grocery’s specialty this week is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh each morning at the small patisserie across the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me. Legend has it that the five chipped divots in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar— are what remains of the town’s last bad man. His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.

November wind. The feeling of knowing something before you said it, all over everything. As in,shadow take me into the side of the mountain. As in,open up the earth and get inside. Leaving doesn't mean much. Arriving means everything, how you came to be where you were, even if later it will hurt to think of it. And the forgotten, aren't they always the most remembered elsewhere, before they perish, when someone has their eye on them, and later when the shrines are made with local flowers and icons of heroes, roses in midsummer, angels on winter wings? I'll leave your local customs to your own imagination. Leaving, though, always a kind of unfolding of the act of staying. Last night I knew it was the East wind not asking for me arriving because the door to the kitchen blew open, last night, at the edge of sleep, like someone using only half the alphabet. The book about Brecht separating at the seam because my reading had been the last one it could take before breaking into Exile and After, California in the middle, with the playwright in short sleeves, bored on the PCH, looking at the dramatic cliff work with a friend who meant well, driving, arriving at the slumlord dockyards saying at last scenery. You must forgive me or forgive the book for breaking. It was tired, you see it was a paperback, from the time people actually wanted ones like that, thought books like that should be held in hands on beaches or in cars or in cafes. Sleepy, almost sleepy, falling asleep, awake, now, I admit it, I was completely awake, listening to the wind, which I cannot defend. Nothing in the mind but that reckless pleasure and somewhere in the book Brecht saying the truth is concrete

one should never play martyr there are martyrs beyond you one should never argue apocalypse without your whole lifetime before you, which is impossible Pushkin said, ‘my sadness is luminous’—this is his reason Ralph flew to Bristol to see her she said, ‘You’re not in touch with Eternity’ he said, ‘Gee, that’s true,’ then later sent a telegram, ‘meet me in Jerusalem,’ since he was going

Because he was 38, because this was his second job, because he had two daughters, because his hands looked like my father's, because at 7 he would walk to the furniture warehouse, unload trucks 'til 3 AM, because I was fourteen and training him, because he made $3.75 an hour, because he had a wife to look in the face, because he acted like he respected me, because he was sick and would not call out I didn't blink when the water dropped from his nose into the onion's perfectly circular mouth on the Whopper Jr. I coached him through preparing. I did not blink. Tell me this didn't happen. I dare you.

Nicanor Parra I’m not going to lie Through my teeth to you Like the poets from Minnesota, The South, and the West, And New York City. Most of all in life I would like to fuck a thirteen-year-old again, And I don’t have any hesitations About saying I’d rather be Marlon Brando Than I would T. S. Eliot, etc. I have more respect for Muhammad Ali Than any other living man. Of course I’ve tried Esquire, But my shoes aren’t platforms And I don’t know shit about canoes. Although I can’t prove it, Most poets work for the highway dept. There are more of them than there are Flies and engineers. And I stink like a dead mule under an overpass.

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

The boy and the girl were mostly gesture, a clouded outline, the pencil lifting, lowering to get at the idea of childhood, not the sour milk and scraped knee of it. Her skirt was a swoop of ink, his hand invisible in an undrawn pocket. Circles make up the majority of the face. We are all circles and planar suggestion. If  the girl wants to be a horse she need only walk into the outline of one and line up her body with the chest. We’ll fill in the rest, and before you know it, she’s a natural. Who will ride her? The boy doesn’t know how. He has a hankering to sketch in a saddle. When she tosses her head, he mocks up a bridle. He mocks her. A bridle for a bride, he says, which doesn’t seem like what little boys say, but he wasn’t so little, and she didn’t run away.

I make a knife of words. I sit here waiting. I play with crumbs. Her eyes that should look straight at me are toward the window, glazed— husband’s horizon? Not armored. Only armed with pots and pans. Not out of arm’s reach, beyond curtains of doorbells, garden gates. She puts up ironwork in her eyes; it draws a bolt over what’s real— then looks at me. I wish I’d brought my saw.