Park Notes

Oh yes, she's been to London,

hasn't everyone?

Wasn't she born here?

You'll like this book then,

the one full of women

and the fall of weeping willow

branches, undulating leaf margins,

oaks, red, finished.

She said, I remember crocuses

up in Spring, I had days left

before I caught the plane.

She knew of Plath but hadn't

understood. She knew of Woolf

but hadn't read her books.

Smith was not a name, it was

a bad pseudonym.

Look - take your pick from

this book of art, poetry, vignettes,

the moth dies, it is inevitable,

the pigeon roosts, it is night,

the dogs walk and walk and walk

over the park's double cut lawns.

People multiply then leave,

the water's broken reflections

can't contain anyone for long,

wait, they seem to say,

whole then broken.

As if

the muscles in your back were extended as you slept, stretched out

as if you were going to shoot a basketball, but soft,

as if you were the last tiger walking empty red earth,

as if trust was never an issue,

as if I had bent over and brushed your cheek,

taken a memory you had shared with me once

as if it were mine, as if I'd been there, right out in front, looking at the camera.

Belinda Diepenheim

Belinda is a poet from the Manawatu. She has had poems published in magazines such as Poetry NZ, Takahe, and Landfall. She won the 2013 Kathleen Grattan for a sequence of poems.