THE HOLE

Measure a black thread.
Roll one end between forefinger and ball of thumb
to a small knot tangle.
Thread the other, moistened by lips to a point,
through the eye of the needle.
Consider the hole in the heel.
Engage with the sock.
Mercury’s wing would fit.
There is no ironic distance between us, Sock,
for I must remove my glasses
to obtain a microscopic view
of you.

      Is what I perceive as a void,
such as the void in Eridanus that intrigues me,
so from your viewpoint? Do you know
that you have nothing in you –
an unravelling place,
a shirking, Sock, of the looping continuous
cause that defined you, shaped your ideal,
but for the hole,
the void wherein there is no matter, not a skerrick?
I’d like to go to Eridanus when I die.
Meanwhile darn it,
the steel tip needling in and out
between there and not there, defines
edge where there was none, fell whereon
the latticework will be attached,
                                                     as is,
between the gutter and the house,
tautened the pragmatic architecture of spiders.

Cilla McQueen
from The Radio Room Otago University Press, 2010 (also in poeta: selected and new poems, Otago University Press, 2018)

I adore poems that peer through ordinary things into the universe. Pull on the threads of this one and fascinating things happen. ‘The Hole’ starts as a poem of instructions. This is how to thread a needle as I remember my mother doing, as I did as a child, squinting with the effort. The poem has me at “Engage with the sock.” The voice sparkles with Cilla McQueen’s trademark humour and intelligence. I love the hint of a combat about to kick off between the speaker and recalcitrant matter. Or rather, the lack of matter: the hole.

One of the reasons this poem remains a favourite of mine is that it still generates questions. I’m not completely sure what Mercury is doing there, patching the gap with his hypothetical wing. But I’m fine with not knowing. That a deity associated with eloquence pops up just then feels right. Engaged with the sock, glasses off, the poet is gearing up for flights of imagination.

Poetry has long been fascinated with the borders of our perception at both ends of the scale, the microscopic and the majestic. The sock’s “void” brings us to the gap in Eridanus, which I learned from this poem is a constellation. I love that we’re prompted to muse on the mysteries of space by considering a sock. A black sock, the opening line suggests, with a black hole in its heel.

Sock is nothing special, a bit lacking. But engaging with Sock in open curiosity takes us vast distances. To me, the two questions at the heart of the poem are as confounding as koans, almost absurdly deep. Can a sock have a “viewpoint”? Of course, I can’t help turning the second-person “you” on myself: “Do you know / that you have nothing in you …?” That could be a lifetime’s meditation. Or it could be poking satirical fun at navel-gazing. Either works. There’s the creative cause with an ideal in mind, and then there’s reality wilfully “shirking” that destiny. There’s the beautiful hope of travelling into the stars after death—then we’re brought back to earth with a pun. I love this bouncing between the playful and the profound. From darning to dark matter.

Sewing becomes a metaphor for poetry or any act of creation at the edge “between there and not-there.” It’s both a daring act, the poem suggests, and one as “pragmatic” as a spider’s web. The closing simile is artfully natural, almost offhand, as if the poet has just glanced out the window. It also ties everything together beautifully. Yet the poem is named for the hole in the fabric of things, and that’s why it keeps bringing me back to wonder.

Megan Kitching 

Megan Kitching is an Ōtepoti Dunedin poet. Her debut collection At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023) won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the 2024 Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards and was awarded Best International First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize 2024. In 2021, Megan was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer in residence.

Cilla McQueen MNZM is a poet, teacher and artist, and a three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Otago in 2008 and was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Poetry). In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet. Cilla lives in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Otago University Press page