June
you were named after
an English summer
late at night as I lay the cards
down their clear ivory clatter
is interrupted by the rustle
of a cotton print dress
paisley hearts and spades
a splash of cheap colour
there was the sharpness
of cutty grass on a hillside
where I crouched among
rusty cans and brown bottles
trying to make some
kind of kingdom of it all
it was a different city
you had a different voice
already rough and a laugh
of corrugated cardboard
in another city I would take
codeine and water into the
dark room of your migraine
why do you keep coming
slipping yourself between
a black king and a red queen?
my memories really are so few
and so particular but you arrive
with a rustle and a nicotine
voice and the night becomes
varicose with you dying
in the month of your name
deep in a southern midwinter
Taken with kind permission from the recently published collection A Day Like No Other: Selected poems by James Norcliffe (Otago University Press, $25). Christchurch writer Erik Kennedy said in his launch speech, “The poems are relevant, psychologically compelling, quietly and loudly political, concerned with history and our place on the planet and in the cosmos. A Day Like No Other brings into focus just how frequently he shoots for and hits the difficult, high-value targets.”
