outside of our towns overrun with introduced-deciduous plants, the sense of spring, and even more delicately that of autumn, only come with experience, commitment and attention. They offer us a rather private, almost selfish, tribal satisfaction. Even at its fiercest, all we ever really have for a native spring is its signals, shy delights that sparkle in consciousness, like those glimpses you get of a precious wild thing (in our case that would be to see the timid nocturnal kiwi in his haunts at midnight — our birds too, you see, are in cahoots with the poetry of the land!). Thus the landscape here, as it appears in the seasonal poem, is peculiarly poetic in the very way I have been trying to explain in my previous answer. To give you a whiff of how that might be, here are excerpts from a couple of pieces; the first, “The Scented Orchid,” to show how closely we have to pay attention to our spring: “The first day we were coming home along the path / I smelled the honey, and stopped there in its sphere of influence . . . we searched among the branches / overhead, and on the wash-out for the cause, but couldn’t find it. / It was just the early summer making its presence / felt in its typical bashful manner . . . // Going back another day we noticed in the same place, / less of a honey smell perhaps, but more of the perfume / of the orchid. And we had another poke round in the lace / of the fern. A whiff of breeze came by . . . / there was a pool of air here, like an eddy in a room, / which kept it in suspension, in the same way sunshine gathered bees.” The poem goes on to describe bees found on the trail, and “just where we had smelled the scent, we found / another, bumbling through the maidenhair. / . . . // I watched him wander as it were by accident / into a hole, but from the time he took to reappear / I realised it had to be his hive. And it was suddenly evident / why we could smell the / orchid nectar. For these stalwart bees / had found them out somewhere along the clear / gold creek, and concentrated the delight of this discovery.” And one more, “Preparations,” to show you what a full-blooded spring poem might sound like! “Douglas, we have begun preparations for you. / We have installed the spring sou-wester / where it carries the repairing sound of breakers through / the fern-groves, and the sun-shafts slanted with it / as if they were hanging like silk dusters / down out of the canopy. The perching lilies / on the cantilevered rimus gently dip in it with / their green paddles, carried in a flock among them. / We have tethered fantails where they’ll dillydally / from the low boughs in the golden openings of the path. / Behind us, we have hung the gulls, and rung them / in the air above the dunes and tangled brine-blanched / timber that we piled to give the sea’s wrath / something definite to gnaw on. We unrolled a stream, / a tad untidily so here and there it branches / into hollows in the paddocks and the wading weeds / grow vain from looking in it. We have left its gleams / to secretive deliberations here in the foundations / of the forest. Through the tall bays of the trees ahead, / we have provided one hill with a headdress / of cloud feathers, but beyond it we have pitched the mountains’ steep white tents for you, in readiness.” TCE: March is thought of as the earliest month when, in many northern planting zones, scratching in the dirt to plant seeds is first possible. What month do you think of as the best in which to plant seeds, and which month do you find yourself most often planting the seeds of ideas for poems? How often do you write about new growth, such as sprouts in spring, or a budding relationship? Or do you find you more often write about the opposite concepts: end-of-life cycles or death? NM: March is, of course, the end of our summer. But as I have said, our winters are never so severe that we suffer that longing to escape them even in our Septembers. But I have now lived in several countries where we did, and coming to those winters first, as young antipodeans, we are puzzled to find spring evoked so early, in the darkest months; we tend to put it down to the creep in the traditional lunar calendar as superstition hangs back under the eaves of dark ages, afraid to come on into the present; we find ourselves easily duped by those false springs of February, and poignantly stirred to find the plum blossom buried in snow one morning. But it seems obvious after awhile, when we realize that spring is a memory and an expectation — that if you think you’ll ever actually live in one, you are dooming yourself to disappointment. But that is because we are adolescent in our distant colonies, and suffer their resentments and exaggerated notions of entitlement; and all our experiences are second-hand in the sense that we had them mapped out for us by literature and only tasted their reality after we had met their ideals. We find it easier to believe the sharpness of your autumns than the dodgy promises of your springs. So you see, your March really is our September!
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