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McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where 
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints  
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light 
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate 
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards 
bullshitted among the kauri.

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf 
away from babblers at Bambina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff 
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross 
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos 
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt
Western Park where wee Bella bashed her head 
on some half-buried neoclassical nonsense
the great viewshaft to not-faux Maungawhau
and then turn left into the dandy defile of K Road
where you make your presence felt yet again
Colin through the window of Starkwhite
in building 19-G_W-13 where dear John Reynolds
has mapped your sad Sydney derives and defiles 
across the road from Herabridal’s windows all dressed up
in white broderie Anglaise like lovely frothy brushstrokes
or the curdled clouds and words you dragged into the light
fantastic along beaches and the blackness that was all
you saw when you opened your eyes sometimes
like the bleary early morning Thirsty Dogs 
and weary hookers a bit further along my walk.

I love the pink pathway below the K Road overbridge
a liquid dawn rivulet running down towards Waitemata’s riprap
but also the looking a bit smashed washing hung out
on the balcony above Carmen Jones
and over the road from Artspace and Michael Lett etc
there’s El Sizzling Lomito, Moustache, Popped, and Love Bucket
the Little Turkish Café has $5 beers
it’s like a multiverse botanical garden round here
you could lose yourself in the mad babble of it
like the Botanical Gardens at Woolloomooloo
with the clusterfucking rut-season fruit-bats 
screaming blue murder.

But it’s peaceful again down Myers Park
the mind empties and fills like a lung breathing
the happy chatter of kids swinging 
and my memory of you Colin 
sitting alone and forlorn on a bench
must have been about 1966
contemplating the twitchy cigarette between your fingers
as if it divined the buried waters of Waihorotiu
or the thoughts that flow beneath thought
in the mind’s defile at dawn when you open your eyes
and see that constant flow of light among the trees.

Ian Wedde

Note on

Ode to Auckland 1. McCahon’s Defile (For John Reynolds)

This is the first of five ‘Ode to Auckland’ sections/poems, themselves the first twenty-one-page section of a sixty-one-page book BEING HERE: SELECTED POEMS 2020 – 2025 looking to publish in 2026. The poems address a city I’ve loved for the many years I’ve lived in it at various times, including early on when I was a student at Auckland University in the 1960s when I lived in Wood Street, Ponsonby. It was a pretty rough neighbourhood then compared to the Ponsonby of today which is mostly upmarket and chic. Our part of it in Three Lamps is not in the wealthy space, a functionally convenient four-floor unit in a multi-unit apartment complex with office space on the top floor for my wife Donna and myself.  What this elevated space provides is the view out west from my panoramic fourth-floor windows to the Waitākare hills across the luxuriantly tree’d suburbs that stretch across that view. What’s just across the road from our inner-city place is one of my favourite dog-walks, it takes Maxi and me into the steep, sensational viewshaft down to the north-east harbour where we often walk in the morning via one of the little old-tree-planted parks that have survived from the 1960s Ponsonby I remember.  

Living here now in this folding-together of memory and present, I celebrate the huge old Chinaberry tree that stretches up past our office window on Donna’s northern side and is typical of the old plantings I can see stretching out west to the Waitākeres on my side, and I’m glad to have most of what I need within walking distance, but I’m annoyed by the homogenizing impacts of the suburb’s wealth and even find myself grumbling in an old-fuck way about why all the classic villas are getting painted the same white. But the frustration is really with myself. Back in the day when I was flatting in Wood Steet the scungy villas hardly mattered and Ponsonby was just a great place to live. It still is. The title of my prospective book, Being Here, should be where I stop whingeing.

The poems in the ‘Ode to Auckland’ section are mostly written to-and-fro across something like a give-or-take twelve-syllable line which I like because it gets the measuring mind in a focused but not stalled state – like walking with wide-open eyes and a sense of your foot-falls having an organic not regimented pace, mind and breath in synch, the lines reaching ahead but anticipating a transition that keeps the thing moving.

Ian Wedde, 21 October 2025