THE PALIMPSEST

trucks grunt and hit their air brakes
under yellow light
outside the all-night tyre repair
roughly where the stockyards were

cattle unloaded at night
raised panic dust in the glaring pens
while we stamped their brindle black or piebald
heaving backs with paint brands

these were the slaughterers' marks
before the morning bolt in the brain
and processes that seen a million times
assume the austerity of still life painting

there remains a sort of men
who have to stand about
shouting above the noise of equipment
in voices that carry clearly through the dark

stencilled as products while still on the hoof
and persisting somewhere now
as boots or schoolbags
the cattle mill in memory

REGARDS

the best sort of
home librarianship
sets r f brown on the shelf
next to baxter where he
would have loved to belong
and does by right of endurance
a mild man and fine poet
I knew in my youth
who still has the power
to pull the eye down a page

poet of high water
on the tauranga
after urewera rain
when shingle swirling
in the current cut the legs
out from under a river crossing
and of his arid
rabbit-bared home
territory in the south

poems you had to have lived

or taken a lifetime
to understand
where the pain of our
being and its radiance
embattle a man
yellow-skinned on a cancer bed
and leave us his voice
acute with light

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