PoemHunter, interestingly, has the bitchy response to James Baxter’s Poem in it, but not the poem that Hall responded to. Her line you are too reliable to be a god, together with her hurt at Baxter’s humility tells us more about her than him.

And the fact that Baxter’s poem, though better, is not in Poemhunter reeks of convergence. We don’t judge poets by their skin or their genitals, but by their truth.

Poem in the Matukituki Valley

Some few yards from the hut the standing beeches
Let fall their dead limbs, overgrown
With feathered moss and filigree of bracken.
The rotted wood splits clean and hard
Close-grained to the driven axe; with sound of water
Sibilant falling and high nested birds.

In winter blind with snow; but in full summer
The forest blanket sheds its cloudy pollen
And cloaks a range in undevouring fire.
Remote the land’s heart; though the wild scrub cattle
Acclimatized, may learn
Shreds of her purpose, or the taloned kea.

For those who come as I do, half-aware,
Wading the swollen
Matukituki waist-high in snow water,
And stumbling where the mountains throw their dice
Of boulders huge as houses, or the smoking
Cataract flings its arrows on our path –

For us the land is matrix and destroyer,
Resentful, darkly known
By sunset omens, low words heard in branches;
Or where the red deer lift their innocent heads
Snuffing the wind for danger,
And from our footfall’s menace bound in terror.

Three emblems of the heart I carry folded
As charms against flood water, sliding shale:
Pale gentian, lily, and bush orchid.
The peaks too have names to suit their whiteness,
Stargazer and Moonraker,
A sailor’s language and a mountaineer’s.

And those who sleep in close bags fitfully
Besieged by wind in a snowline bivouac –
The carrion parrot with red underwing
Clangs on the roof by night, and daybreak brings
Raincloud on purple ranges, light reflected
Stainless from crumbling glacier, dazzling snow,

Do they not, clay in that unearthly furnace,
Endure the hermit’s peace
And mindless ecstasy? Blue-lipped crevasse
And smooth rock chimney straddling – a communion
With what eludes our net – Leviathan
Stirring to ocean birth our inland waters?

Sky’s purity; the altar cloth of snow
On deathly summits laid; or avalanche
That shakes the rough moraine with giant laughter;
Snowplume and whirlwind – what are these
But His flawed mirror who gave the mountain strength
And dwells in holy calm, undying freshness?

Therefore we turn, hiding our souls’ dullness
From that too blinding glass: turn to the gentle
Dark of our human daydream, child and wife,
Patience of stone and soil, the lawful city
Where man may live, and no wild trespass
Of what’s eternal shake his grave of time.

James K. Baxter

Poem In The Matukituki Valley

I know some things
like you’d rather have seen a rotary
clothesline in my garden than roses

and when I dedicated my book of poems
to you, you hammed it up, mock horror,
with ‘Jesus, what next!’

So coming down from the mountains
when Rae asked me what you would have thought
of it all, the grandeur, the excess,

the jade water, the yellow starred flats,
the black peaks with snow like orca leaping,
I had to say that I didn’t have a clue,

perhaps something like what a fuss about nothing!

and now at night, as the comet works its way
across the greybright sky, I see no sign
that you like Caesar have become a god,

you are far too reliable to be a god,

but rather the gauzy face of a woman,
hair streaming, running with a baby in her arms,
saving me again and again from the burning house.

Bernadette Hall

Hall writes a rejection. It is bitter. And it is as if she has never seen the valley, as I have, and I hope to again. For if the wild in us is tamed, there is nothing but her rotary washing line.