There’s an emptiness between the lines you’ll notice: an infinite space of no consolation —nothing we write is heavy enough to keep them near each stumbled phrase they’re further gone and we can only hang so long on a pause that won’t stop the expanding heavens.
Author Archives: Vaughan Gunson
Big Love Song #21
after Arthur Rimbaud It doesn’t mean a thing: the pyramid eye or the constellations, not night’s scattered verse. Smoking incense, the bride’s dress, the taste of dark wine— it doesn’t mean a thing. Neither does beautiful Paris: the elegant avenues, the asphyxiating decay, the distant nausea. Only your soft pure face and the warm bed of home.
Big Love Song #19
Better now we’re back from the war this room looks the same as before no one after us we’ve got all the time right here next to you so near can’t believe that now it’s clear what was has left all gone.
Big Love Song #12
You’ll always be over there, my feet only oceans away my head can be anywhere— too much to ask you to stay? * We’ll always be good at talking it round but if I could I’d bring you down from on top the Ferris Wheel.
Big Love Song #6
Away from voices on shore, we row into the limitless fog. Our bodies rock together: shoulders, thighs, touching —which is all we want to feel, flooding our heads. The tumid night blankets the water like an oil slick.
Sun worshippers
The sun has slid down the side of the hill, rolling past the time which signals the end of winter’s worst. And now, the best of spring we’ll receive on seats we’ve moved into position, simply lifted, without engineering. Just somewhere to sit in elevated repose, after we’ve finished levering through the day all our stones into place.
Big Love Song #5
I won’t say I understand you, but I’ll try somehow to find you. Like you I’ve wasted time and I’ll contemplate some more. Because it’s never quite right, we don’t finish anything as much as the times we begin. You’re as hard as the wind.
On sandwiches and other lunches
it’s 11.52
and I’ve long ago eaten my lunch of cheese
and lettuce sandwiches.
I could have added slices
of tomato or cucumber,
but then the bread gets soggy
and wet bread is like
cold jeans in the morning.
sandwiches are a family heirloom
passed down from my mother
who always made them,
with odd fillings too, like baked beans
or lasagne.
there aren’t as many sandwich eaters now;
we’re all grown up
with our credit cards and mortgages
and lunches
with rocket salad on the side.
at university
I bought nachos from the cafeteria
once a week,
served by Polynesian women
who ladled mince and hot cheese sauce like a syrup
over corn chips in a polystyrene bowl:
a meal that sticks in the memory
—and now I'm tempted
by hot food from the pie warmer:
the chips, the sausage rolls, the potato tops,
the kranskies and deep-fried sushi.
because if you’re going to buy lunch
it should be hot
and life
can’t be all sandwiches
in Tupperware containers.
Hot bread
Every drop-off then was the smell of hot bread from the ovens behind the factory walls, made grey in the memory by it always being wet and dark, head-lights on. When I drive past the road today the smell of fresh baked bread still breaks out of those same walls, now Newberry’s Funeral Home, where the ovens are hotter and sealed tight. For no more than the symmetry, it’s at Newberry’s I can be dropped-off on a weekday, when there’ll be a fight for parks, and everyone oblivious to the smells and memories of years ago.
Beneath Hikurangi
Cicadas singing in the fire of the sun. We used to think they lived so briefly and it was too easy for the mynahs to catch them in their yellow beaks, hold them for a moment, still singing; no wild struggle or hardly a change in pitch. After we learnt they lived for years underground, it wasn’t so bad. Now, listening to the cicadas in the crystal space of early summer, the hill, always there, cut-silhouette on the horizon, we’re happy enough in our grand mediocrity.
Vaughan Gunson : Writing 