Collected Poems 1951–2006-Index of First Lines

1 x 1 = 1 1
25 shells 1
A catheter was the last straw. My sister 1
A Catholic Bishop 1
A clear night, still water, bird-calls from the forest 1
A free and flexible action 1
A good student, ‘The place is lumbered,’ he tells me 1
A grass processor 1
A great war, my country sending young men 1
A lost tribe is found 1
A quarter for Jean, a dime for little Barry 1
A shelley 1
A skein of ducks 1
A student stumbling upon a blind mountain 1
A sunny morning early summer 1
A theft began it 1
Admetus, your walls have seen 1
Affairs of state weigh heavy 1
After a night of storm 1
After the wedding comparing notes with 1
After two centuries 1
Air New Zealand 1
All day the shouts, cracking of leather whip 1
All night it bullied you 1
All over the plain of the world lovers are being hurt 1
Already forgotten the men and women whose journey 1
Already the second month 1
Alzheimered 1
Aminatta Forna 1
An elbow of grass where the stream ran down to meet 1
An image in the vice of abstract thought 1
Anagram 1
And could he now go back? – to the milky mornings 1
Andromache, it’s you I think of – and of that river 1
Angels are never average and seldom avenging 1
Apollo was a god 1
April leaks from leaf to leaf into May 1
April, and a fool’s good day 1
As the train pulled out of Nice she offered you a sandwich 1
Assured of my own sobriety, the first lurch 1
At 4 a.m. remembering reading Frost at midnight 1
At sixty Cicero 1
At the Green Café in Charleroi 1
Aurelius 1
Aurelius, you big prick 1

Baited carnivorous flowers 1
Barefoot in shallows 1
Bathurst, New South Wales, New Year’s Eve 1
Battered, dirty 1
Bees in the weatherboards 1

Big Daddy-in-the-Sky 1
Boss of men in football socks 1
Brassbound Fijians blow up the band rotunda! 1
Bright children 1
Bristol buzzes. Autumn chills the skies 1
Brother in poetry 1

Caesar is still Caesar 1
Caesar, you were everybody’s baby 1
Cal in Santa Monica 1
Calvus of miniscule talent 1
Calvus sends me his book 1
Castro and Cuba 1
Catullus, you seem to think 1
Chicken, pipi, puha, kumara, peaches 1
Christmas morning 1
City so long announced come home to my dreams 1
Cleopatra, Helen and the Mother of God 1
Clodia 1
Clodia, when you haven’t 1
Clodia’s pigeon pair 1
Cloud piling on cloud 1
Cold moon in velvet, Europe’s moon 1
Constriction is the mother of altitude 1
Cornificius 1
Corporate raider 1
‘Countless’ as they say also of 1
Crossing Cook Strait 1

d o g o d o g o d o g o d o g o d o 1
Daphne, your size tens 1
Dear X, expatriate 1
Death, you clever bugger 1
Deception. Is that what it is? – to seem a man 1
Did grandfather Stead 1
‘Did you write that sharp-tongued letter?’ Yes, I wrote it 1
Dogs bark me from sleep. Pale light through an open flap 1
‘Don’t believe that,’ is what the Missionary said 1
Don’t forget, Catullus 1
Don’t imagine 1
Down here’s the Henderson Valley 1
Drunk with pleasure 1
Drying dishes with 1

Each cubicle, every theoretical base 1
Each day is wedded to what might have been 1
Earth, you are frozen now 1
End of scene Catullus 1
Eucalypt scent disperses in blue smoke 1
Evening where Taieri moved 1
Every Dog has his day 1

Faber and Faber 1
Fading, sensitive to light, the pencilled head 1
Far and wide 1
First build four stone ramparts, then fire an arrow 1

First light 1
Five children and a shag are fishing from the wharf 1
Flying in 1
For longitude 1
‘Forgetfulness’ 1
Friend Flavius 1
‘Frightened, bored, yes 1
From a low hill I saw the Ringatu pennon 1
From that middle-class riverside garden 1
Frost on the angle-iron of roofs 1
Fucking, I feel at one with the world 1
Furius and Aurelion 1

Garance! Garance! 1
Gathering under a hill 1
Geoff Walker at Penguin 1
Germany, the 1920s 1
‘Get well soon and write for the Revolution’ 1
Getting up in the night, a pain in the balls, nausea 1
Girls croon outside the booth, ‘Enlist today!’ 1
‘Good morning, good morning, good morning everyone!’ 1
Grief – or if what’s expected and accepted 1

Half on the flat crown 1
Hard. Bright. Clean. Particular 1
Has he a name 1
‘Have you cracked 1
Have you left at last, my Clodia? 1
He calls you his Auntie 1
He dreamed he was the world’s 1
He grabbed the gunwale, stared in my face, shouted 1
He liked to put it on record – a dream of jungle 1
He moves 1
He saw them as leaves 1
He thought the whole fucking discourse 1
He walks where they have spent 1
He’d tamed the Sun 1
Heaven was it 1
Heaven’s infinity 1
Here come the stores. Three days it takes the drover 1
Here’s another grumbling letter from Wittgenstein 1
Here’s Catherine Deneuve she’s walking under klieg lights 1
Here’s the Star photograph – my parents heading the group 1
Here’s the street lamp 1
High on the afternoon a violin 1
His passport feared the man from the Embassy 1
Home after three years he thinks 1
‘Home’ for the boy had meant 1
Hotel Récamier 1
hullo death 1
Hymenaeus 1

I am 1
‘I am a Jew. Please save me,’ 1
I cracked down on your rising 1
I fucked her 1

I give you these lines 1
I had the chair but 1
I have led my five senses like hungry children 1
I hope you got that stuff 1
I knew a bald whoremonger once 1
I know that talk: ‘It’s time to drive the British 1
I look at my Dad’s picture. I think I remember 1
I see you 1
I shedding tears 1
I try to give them the scene: Crete under starlight 1
I turn the light on a poem 1
I used to call her 1
I walk Muriwai beach 1
I wanted to write you a poem 1
I was caned often at school 1
I wrote that swallows 1
I’m telling Bill 1
Ianus I’m camped a hundred yards from your bones 1
Ice islands, taller sometimes 1
‘If I should die think only this of me 1
If I shut my eyes here to the violent death 1
‘If our fake Abbé bangs out 1
If you insist the heart is the source of feeling 1
In bed Sunday morning 1
In Ladbroke Square the light on waxen branches 1
In my game (and yours, reader) it was always the Frogmen 1
In the night 1
In the refectory 1
In this state 1
In winter sun 1
Inside you 1
Irish Thomas MacDonagh 1
Irish-English and Catholic, I hoped for glory 1
It is because we’re all to die that we visit Paris 1
‘It may not be God exactly’ 1
It was one of my many mistakes 1
It was the white stretch 1
It’s an old story. Catullus just back from ‘overseas’ 1
It’s called the Memory Station 1
It’s close to sunrise. That mist low on the sea is thinning 1
It’s of a woman 1

Jealous Catullus 1
‘Jesus! I’d like to lay down lines of cold melodic fire 1
July is when the fingers 1
Just think if he’d died 1

Karekare windless and the trees 1
Katherine believed I despised her 1
Khaki tunics, riding trousers, leggings 1
King of Comparison, clever as the Reverend Moon 1

Large lunch 1
Last night I met the Capital’s captains of Art 1
Late for the very last time called to your bedside 1
Lights on water. Under-echo. Wharves 1

Long ago / A girl whose gift 1
Long ago / I crossed the rust-red river 1
Long before the sun goes out for ever 1
Longed for so long 1
Looking at the fountain from the park’s lower slopes 1
Lord Gannet glides along his arc of air 1
Losing yourself you keep your hold on grammar 1
Lost in my head 1
Lovely for the long ago 1
Low sky 1
Lucan loudly chanting Lucan while the suicidal blood 1

Magic you are, Mr Muscle, magic you have always been 1
Mamuko’s Master 1
Marcello in the wind 1
married one 1
Maurice, I dreamed of you last night. You wore 1
Moon bathes the land in death, throws shadows down 1
Moon moon moon moon this 1
Morning confusion. Missionaries, chiefs, all wait 1
Mrs Martin 1
Mud knows how water slides 1
murmur 1
Music was my God, Wagner 1
Must poems have always the extravagance 1
My father 1
My life in summary 1
My name is No Man 1
‘My neighbour tried to arrest me 1

Nature’s a temple whose pillars, because they’re alive 1
Necklace, ear-ornament 1
News from Dresden catches him 1
Nightwake 1
No the tui won’t shut up 1
No Venus 1
None better knows what hunts us all 1
Not its railtracks and freeways – they go through it 1
Not the taste of peach but its hard wrinkled stone 1
Now is the night we used to call Symbol of Death 1
Now it was time for the drawing of curtains 1

O chicheto O chicheto mattala 1
October 1
October, and the kowhais declare themselves through parks 1
Old girlie Brother Ignaz 1
On an April evening 1
On matters of food, Horace 1
On the 25th, Captain Cook was taken ill of the bilious cholic 1
On the floor our fire 1
On the night plane back from Napier I sort out images 1
On the river it seemed it was always late afternoon 1
On turning 70, Hokusai 1
One daughter had borrowed the other daughter’s shirt 1
One of the Hassadim 1
One who could sleep on horseback 1

Our biggest march came late. It was ’71 1
Our friend the novelist seventy 1
Our friends’ wedding 1
Our glassed-in shell is busy trapping sun 1
Our job, he said, was to take the battle forward 1
Our party ends in the kitchen. Haley unleashes 1
Out they came in their double canoes with prows turned up 1
outside the thin rain falls 1
Over dessert he sank low beside me 1

Pampas heads 1
Paris, you don’t know yourself, haven’t spent time 1
Passion’s advocate who fears 1
Perhaps you hoped to lose an old despair 1
Phoebus burning the curtains 1
Pirandello 1
Poems have been written on roof-slates, starlings 1
Poetry is sometimes 1
Poetry: second best 1
Pompallier in Romish purple gave us no look 1
Praise be to our God 1
Purposed to see the new road nudging aside 1

Rain, and a flurry of wind shaking the pear’s white blossom 1
Reading a poet 1
Recall those wartime 1
Remember how thunder 1
Remember writing a story ten 1
Remember, poor ghost of Furius 1
Remembering the General Store, post-office above 1
Round moon sank in the sash frame 1

Salt smell and the green green daylight 1
Scientists discover 1
Secretary of many committees my handsome father 1
Seeing you weeping at the graveside 1
Sexy with grass, groggy with sex, and happy 1
She used to sit on that springy turf 1
She wore the novice habit, a dull grey 1
Since Juliet’s on ice, and Joan 1
Sir fox in the garden 1
Sitting alone in a ‘high-class Chinese restaurant’ 1
Sky is hard in which the hawk hangs fire 1
Small towns unwoken pitted meagre lights 1
Snow wraps a harsh and gum-grey land 1
So long in the water 1
So long since I slept so long! The slatted light 1
So old friend you’ve come to it at last 1
So thin, my school-friend’s mother, I had her confused 1
Sometimes I climbed the aromatic tree 1
Sonorous 1
Sorry for yourself 1
Spring hides scars on Dickens Street but the old cottages 1
Spring is a recurring astonishment – like poetry 1
Stanley thought I might be first in the South to own 1
Storm Bird out in the roads. Must we wait 1

Strange flowers and shrubs, nice lawns, a big flame-tree 1
Strange, but I go on seeing this empty building 1
Street lights are marbling designs on the rain-glazed eye 1
Student in a strange city 1
Suburb or Sabine farm, no human talents 1
Suffenia opens her legs to life 1
Suffenia, feminist in fiction 1
Summer arriving late 1
Summer has come. It’s time for the national act 1
Sunbrowned 1
Suppose the bird ruffled below your pines 1

Takanini horses don’t dream of winning at Trentham 1
Tap. Tap 1
Ten bon points were rewarded with a belle image 1
Ten days after he was, you were born 1
Ten men to hold the wheel, children screaming 1
That day you burned my book 1
That morning ‘making’ (as he 1
That prow drawn up on shingle 1
That seal pup George had spotted 1
That story I wanted to tell – it was how I rode 1
That was no ordinary season – both rivers iced 1
The days they run, they run 1
The dead don’t write 1
The dead man’s bach 1
The donkey stands 1
The gods of weather who dislike this town 1
The Grub Street dogs are yapping after their tails 1
‘The known appearing fully itself,’ Denise said 1
The lake is a glass 1
The leaves on the tower 1
The Lord is my caregiver so I’m OK 1
The moon roosts high 1
The nails of rain are driven, the clouds cross 1
the nice old stones 1
The plum tree is 1
The Press complain of defeats. They say his men 1
The silence wakes me early. We’re winning our war 1
The sky has gone dead 1
The sparrows understand but do they fear? 1
The swallows are 1
The tomb of the unknown soldier, le tombeau 1
The Treaty of Waitangi 1
The visiting celebrity who’s not a poet’s arse 1
The wind billowed the drapes at 4 a.m. at 1
The young man on the door, reading her novel 1
Their men in black whose God is most powerful 1
There are dreamscapes 1
There are times (not many) when your whole life seems 1
There are two poets for example 1
There was only one Faber 1
There were four in the café 1
There’s a pool table 1
There’s a prescient movie 1
There’s a Stead I 1

These are the gifts 1
These are the stars of poetry 1
These months always one question: was he really dying 1
These trees that hang over the bay 1
these white flowers grow only in the moonlight 1
Think sea 1
Thinking of the Mediterranean blue beyond yellow walls 1
Thirty-nine men 1
‘This is the Late Key – use it only 1
This is where the President of the Republic spends his afternoons 1
This minute after midnight 1
This morning in bed it was 1
This tiny flower 1
This was the dream 1
‘This will abate. Then will come the time 1
Through phones in darkness 1
Timid Kate 1
To greet 1
To make real 1
To Maurice and to Maurice and to Maurice 1
Today it a do-nothin day 1
Today it’s revealed 1
Today there’s something in the winter sky 1
Tomorrow as dawn whitens the landscape 1
Tonight the T. S. Eliots 1
Trapped by my appetites again! 1
Trust me 1
Twirling an angry necklace on her fingers under the 1
Two years ago on a visit I prayed to the gods 1

Under my eaves untiring all the spring day 1
Under the clean sky at evening, beyond gum trees and the 1
Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine flows 1
Up early churning, I hope to sell my butter 1
Up in the night to free the cat that 1

Verania 1
Visiting his father Phoebus 1
Voznesensky 1

Waking to the desert stillness 1
Walk, girl, the dead sand 1
Walking to the village 1
Walking westward 1
Was her face dirty – or bruised? Her heavy swag 1
Waterfront Drive that morning 1
Wave lifts; late-angled sunlight frames 1
We knew it was Tom’s hand 1
We were talking about gender 1
What a poet you are 1
‘What have I to use?’ 1
What stays in mind is the scrape of boots charging 1
What stays with me most 1
‘What we can’t speak about’ 1
Whatever answers to a name 1
When his mistress jumped 1

When it came time for old ‘G’ to go 1
When one joked 1
When teacher lets the stylus down 1
When the rabbit rattled the drag of a grasping trap 1
When we gathered on the foredeck 1
‘Where is your theory?’ 1
While the sailor, doubting his calculations 1
Who asks the gods for glory 1
Who cares what the poets think? 1
Whom do we write for 1
Why else but ‘because it was 1
Why should we cheer? One hard-earned pound per acre 1
Widowed, I came north with three small girls 1
Will you sing 1
Willemstad’s Dutch facades teach colours to meet and debate 1
With its blue crackling paper 1

Xuan Loc fallen, Danang fallen, we wait for the fall of Saigon 1

Yes please 1
You are the music of another time 1
You know of course the saddleback’s a kind of bird 1
You might have done this 1
You started it all. Here for you it ended 1
You used to mow your own lawns 1
You were creased, bawdy, modest 1
‘Young man,’ she used to say 1
Young poets before us 1
Your letter on my desk. I imagine now 1

Zac’s dead 1