Those thorn trees in your poems, Alistair,
we have them here. Also the white cauldron,
the basin of your waterfall. I stare
at Stock Ghyll Force and can’t escape your words.
You’d love this place: it’s your Central Otago
in English dress – the bony land’s the same;
and if the Cromwell Gorge is doomed to go
under a lake, submerging its brave orchards
for cheap electric power, this is where
you’d find a subtly altered image of it,
its cousin in another hemisphere:
the rivers gentler, hills more widely splayed
but craggy enough. Well. Some year you’ll manage
to travel north, as I two years ago
went south. Meanwhile our sons are of an age
to do it for us: Andrew’s been with you
in Wellington. Now I’m about to welcome
our firstborn Gregory to England. Soon,
if Andrew will surrender him, he’ll come
from grimy fetid London – still my base,
I grant you, still my centre, but with air
that chokes me now each time I enter it –
to this pure valley where no haze but weather
obscures the peaks from time to time, clean rain
or tender mist (forgive my lyrical
effusiveness: Wordsworthian locutions
are carried on the winds in what I call
my this year’s home. You’ve had such fits yourself.)
So: Gregory will come to Ambleside
and see the lakes, the Rothay, all these waters.
Two years ago he sat with me beside
the Clutha, on those rocks where you and I
did our first timid courting. Symmetry
pleases me; correspondences and chimes
are not just ornament. And if I try
too hard to emphasise the visual echoes
between a place of mine and one of yours
it’s not only for art’s sake but for friendship:
five years of marriage, twenty of divorce
are our foundation. It occurred to me
in August, round about the twenty-third,
that we’d deprived ourselves of cake, champagne,
a silver tea-service, the family gathered –
I almost felt I ought to send a card.
Well, that can wait: it won’t be long before
you have my blessings on your twentieth year
with Meg; but let this, in the meantime, be for
our older link through places and your poems.