Salt breeze

Sue Wootton

for Marjorie Evasco. After her poem 'La Condition Humaine' in Skin of Water

When I open your book and my eye falls
on your dedication, the doors to that other room 
in another time are flung wide. We stand 

in white-walled cavernous coolness beneath 
tall pillars. Voices float across the flagstones. 
A babble of poets lilting. You bend  

to the page, inscribe my copy of your Skin:
‘Everything is written on water. Enjoy 
the salt breeze.’ Your words are a far cry 

from the blasting Nicaraguan heat;
the south salt breeze is brisk. Let open
in you now my view in showery spring: 

bare wisteria, blood camellias, sunlight 
that visits and retreats. At the gate 
the golden kōwhai clicks and chuckles

as the tūī feast. The world is a huge
whispering gallery (if I may raise
your Keats by one George Eliot). Now

and then today I’ve swept the dustmotes 
in these rooms of love to set them turning.
In no time I am elsewhere, here. We have

only the one waterskin on which to write 
and vanish. I slip these words into the flow.
And — regarding your imperative — I do.

Notes:

Kōwhai: a tree native to New Zealand Aotearoa, which in spring is covered with yellow flowers.

Tūī (singular and plural): a bird native to New Zealand Aotearoa. The tūī has two voice boxes and a wide repertoire of songs.

Sue Wootton is a New Zealand writer, whose first poetry collection, Hourglass, was published in 2005. Her works have appeared in numerous poetry anthologies and other publications, among them Under Flagstaff: An Anthology of Dunedin Poetry (University of Otago Press, 2004); Landfall, Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood (Random House, 2008); and Poetry Pudding (Reed, 2007). 

Strip, her first novel, was published by Mākaro in 2016. Strip was longlisted in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Three of her short stories appeared in the anthology The Happiest Music on Earth (Rosa Mira Books, 2013).

She won the 2007 Inverawe Poetry Competition in Tasmania, and was a finalist in the 2008 The Sunday Star-Times short story competition. Wootton was also awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship in 2008 by the University of Otago. She won in the 2010 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry competition. Moreover, she was a runner-up in the BNZ Katherine Mansfield short story awards in 2009. And in 2013 she won Cancer Council Victoria Arts Awards poetry prize.