Kennedy - Sing-song

We got a cure for skin and for a long time watched the botched remedy at work, masked mortgage, sky, houses darkness, and all her baby song.

A Polynesian literature lecturer said Ah but the story of Maui isnt a myth its a legend, a history which may or may not be real. A myth on the other hand fossicks in the marketplace for fairy things to dress up strange phenomena which nobody can deny. The baby needed both both certainties and a ghost, at least the parents did, so they could say, See? This is merely one of the age-old stories nothing new under the sun, and point out its turning point, the fateful move from house to house and all the certainties will become joyful or sorrowful and the unknown so palpable you could put out your hand and touch it and the story will unfold like faith and they will be comforted.

Next thing you know theyve caught a bird, its song suddenly from the highest branches of a tree, in Grey Lynn. Hes a bit shocked, to tell the truth. Shes on cloud nine on K Road weaving away from the Family Planning clinic. Shes joining the human race after all and buys two balls of white wool to knit a baby jersey never finished which says a lot for God, that s/he can make a baby quicker than the woman knit a jumper even to an easy pattern, either that or shes a slow knitter. But hey, its okay! Theyre going to have a baby in a rented bucket seat in Grey Lynn and love. The birth was like a Roman party more and more people arriving and eating grapes and waiting for the show to start.

Babys father elbowed to the back by good friends, couldnt even see him sometimes. Its a great old time except for the pain and the out-of-body experience when she saw a tunnel and her eyes rolled back in her head and he thought she was dying in childbirth like this was childbirth in the nineteenth century, and pushed his way to the front in time to catch his Grey Lynn son coming home. He cradled him and whispered Boy-boy and it stuck and even now hell call him that, on occasion, sounding like an Australian town but this is Grey Lynn, all boiled down to Boy-boy.

The next, baby, that is, was deliberate, postmodern, exposed like coloured pipes on the Pompidou Centre Madonnas bra worn over her clothes. This inside-outness could only come as a reaction to modernist forms of contraception, interior monologue. Its heir. If youve had the lights out in the studio the guests might have gone home. You must lure them back with a new decisiveness. Everything apparent.

Out with the old sentimental order. Go to work, mean business.

If you find youre at this junction young small baby, small aspirations hold it gingerly dont rub it, the bourgeois genie lives inside. Yes, children plural, one extant and one in transit, theyre peering over the rope barrier travellers only beyond this point. Meantime two parents, two kids, I know I know they need a house. But look, the property markets mushroom-clouded, fine falling ash hungry for their bony deposit. Cant live here anymore here in Grey Lynn. This is perhaps a good place to take time out to think how the tangata whenua felt, this land theirs and they couldnt live on it.

The outrage! On with the story (its still happening). Its true theyre getting nuclear but I promise you they wont be like their half-life parents, stable for fifty years in suburban wastelands. Nevertheless they buy a house load up a truck, sway out along the big North Western Motorway. Completely normal. The mothers glimpsing lilies, their blur makes her carsick, driving away from all her gains, going back in time, all the way.

There on the flatlands of Auckland, a bright house its long passage, milky, a kinetic highway of children, once stardust, filling in space with the combustion of their voices, their plastic vehicles and just as small things exist as if they were large, there was a room for this and for that, a room. For sitting, sleeping, thinking, for the several things of going on. These states waited round corners like the folded ears of books to return to or not, but ruined anyway. Outside where there had been an Arizona of black polythene and clean bark they planted a leafy garden. The Kennedia somethingorother spilled silently its white frilly trumpets up and over the wall. As good as a wedding, rigorous desire crushed into a dress.

They did it backwards, Maxwell Smart disappearing down the corridor, doors closing behind him: babies, house, nuptial feast. On midsummer night the datura gave out its semen scent.

In the still late afternoons and evenings when in winter mist rose breathlessly he operated a Skilsaw with great They ate 450 dinners or thereabouts to the tune of it. No conversation. Do you remember Poetry with Chainsaw, Sonic Circus, Wellington, 1975? The poetry not audible of course but it was there. First exposure to performance art. Ah well, anyway the neighbours: the big wife screamed at the small husband night and day, every day. The nadir was Christmas Day.