Otūrehua Hills

 

Press your hands to those velvety shadows,

pleated ridges,

your finger

to that glittering peak.

Sleep amongst stars

a hundred years.

​

 

Firstly, many thanks for the residency, which has been such a gift and a revelation and for your wonderful support and hospitality over the time Jim and I were in Otūrehua.

​

While, I’m physically back in Dunedin with all the happiness and busyness of my life here it feels as if a good proportion of my spirit is left behind amongst the hills and the skies and valleys.

 

 As you will know, my application for the residency was to write my memoir. Over the past years, I’ve been writing novels and, though I began writing all those years ago with poetry, I hadn’t written a poem in years or imagined  that this would be part of my writing in Otūrehua.  But it was poetry and short fragments of prose that filled my head and flowed out onto my screen while I was there and since leaving. It was as if being there in that landscape, the hills  with all those pockets of shadows and colours, the skies always altering in shapes and shades was giving me a freedom to dispense with the ideas of plot and structure and all the wonderful but pressing demands of writing a novel and just write; it was rather like returning to that slightly anxious but joyous time of becoming a writer and letting it happen.

 

The residency gave me a time of reckoning and reflection. I realised again some of the important elements of writing. It’s difficult not to get caught up in the problems that publishing poses. As a writer should you write what is important and honest for you or should you be aware of that commercial element and write with that in mind? With my past two novels, Through the Lonesome Dark and By the Green of the Spring, I very much followed my heart and despite the good reviews had the most enormous problem with publication, distribution and sales. It was difficult to know what to do afterwards. While I was and am proud of the books, I felt a little shell-shocked and definitely disappointed.

 

Reckoning and reflection. Walking with the dogs along the road, turning down towards the rail trail, walking towards the hills, watching them, back to the main road, pause by the church and back. Walking around Blackstone Cemetery, looking down across the valley, reading the stones, thinking about the grandeur of some of them, the sadness of children lost. Thinking about the women who came here first and made homes in this isolation, tried to keep their families fed and warm during a bleak winter.

 

At Blackstone Cemetery

 

It’ll be a new start, lass.

 

And that’s the one thing you had was right,

our wedding china in the wagon

with not so much as a shelf to put it on

nor a front doorstep to polish

a door to shut.

 

These skies, they say,

these wide skies

the sunsets, stars,

would you feel the heat

in that sun?

did you hear that wind last night

the fine keening shriek of it?

Ah, the spread of this valley

you can see forever.

 

I say try looking at stars

from the depth of a night with a bairn come too soon

too weak to cry, a wee lad barely able to get his breath

with the croup and a girl

so pale and fine you hardly dare love her.

 

I say seeing forever doesn’t come into it

when all the hope is

you’ll see them through a night.

 

But I know those first frail buds pinking up

the sky that’s every scrap and ribbon of blue you’ve ever seen

the yellow singe of that sun.

The great sheets of billowing white

and children squealing joy.

I know the clamp and pull of a dear child at my breast

then going out, the chill scorching my face

to behold the sliver of a white moon

the haze of stars across black- blue heavens

 

Clasped by earth

this valley is where I’m stopping. 

 

It’ll be a new start

A new start lass.

 

Driving to Waipiata, coming across the sanitorium there, huge and spreading. Wondering about those who were there; all those stories. Seeing snow sifting, settling. Walking with the dogs in the snow, the white spread of it, the brilliant blue sky. Jillian’s place with the fire and the talk and laughter. Jim playing for the cows standing so sedately and observantly. Driving back from Alexandra, that road I knew and know so well, my eyes again looking up at those hills, thinking of a conversation with Grahame Sydney about snow and how he loves it and suddenly a title pops into my head, How to Paint Snow. Followed, almost miraculously, by words.

 

How to Paint Snow

 

Since every flake is unique

take your most delicate brush

and paint each prism, star

and floating wisp

of lace

 

The feel of kneeling

on a bed, your hand pressed to

a cold window-pane

watching the slide and slip

and drift

against a black sky

​

The flurry and fuse

of clouds engorged and distended

with the bloat of snow

bursting out

a hundred million

wonders

airborne

 

The joyousness

of a black dog

on a white-spread paddock

 

Or take your biggest brush

and paint it out, all of it,

roads, hills, fields

until there is nothing left

but cushions and pillows and paddings

and consider those below and those above

who knew and know this magnificent impenetrability

and those to come who will lift their faces

to see and taste and feel and wonder

how to paint snow.

 

Where to next? I’m not altogether certain but I’ve come back to that recognition of the importance of creating what I love and what I’m proud of.  My time in Otūrehua and within your community took me back to that time when I would sit at the table and write simply for the joy and challenge and mystery of finding and arranging the right words on paper.  Maybe a memoir of poetry. And we will be back. How could we stay away?