day To

It is after midnight.

My toes are bloodied from broken blisters.

I take my shoes off.

I arrive home.

Korean dinner with friends.

Five books in my bag, gifts, swaps. Jill Jones’ Dark Bright Doors, Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide, their exceptional combined anthology Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay & Lesbian Poets. Both of them are over here. Read with both of them tonight, a great pleasure. Jill’s book was also launched tonight. The other two books I’m also delighted to have: Wystan Curnow’s modern colours, & the book nobody thought would ever see the light of day, Steal Away Boy, the selected poems of Dave Mitchell, now desperately ill in Sydney, but my partner in a series of poetry readings in the late 1960s in Auckland. “Mark played intellectual Baudelaire to Dave’s anarchic Rimbaud”, an Ian Wedde quote in the introduction by the editors, Nigel Roberts & Martin Edmond.

A reading, preceded by the launch of Genji Monogatari, preceded by a day of talks, one of which was mine. Am pleased with the way all three went.

The first poems of the nzepc Home & Away digital bridge have gone up.
http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/home&away/bridge.asp

Pleasant surprise when Wystan Curnow boarded the bus I was on to go into the city. He’s probably the person around who I’ve known the longest, since the end of the 1950s. Yesterday, in catching up discussion, he told me how he was in New York with Nick Piombino when Nick got the proofs of Free Fall, his visual collage novel that I published. Small world.

I have done more walking in the three days since I’ve been here than I’ve done in the last three years.

My notebook is still on Queensland time.