The Excursion

On that first morning we found something left for us on the cabin’s steps; a small pink glove of a thing, curling on itself in the morning sun. Some private part or organ, not meant for seeing—ex, one might say, formerly, out of, or disembodied. For the next three days the burning Foehn ripped through the beech. Our voices were carried away; our phones lay low, useless on the heartwood table. On the last day we took the car and made a run for Coleridge and to waters we imagined flat and map-blue. We wanted to get away from the getting away but knew we’d have to account for what we did and did not do. In the car we listened to a radio play, something pioneering in the first person; the gifted human voice, stuffed with privacies, asked nothing of us. Wrapped in our transparent eye we filled the gaping acres beyond the glass, made of local complexities a kind of district green; with the voice inside us we fattened all else. At Coleridge we entered the Pleistocene. The winds returned. The water turned away, opaque with the glacial milk of all the years. A brutal place to experiment. Down at the lake’s edge some ancestor fisherman had possession of it. Hooked in he called up something the ear couldn’t catch.

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Nicholas Wright teaches literature and creative writing at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Ōtautahi. His poetry has appeared in Landfall, Otoliths, The Spinoff, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. He is currently writing a book of essays on poetry in Aotearoa.