Braced on the landing stage in a gale

she will be waiting with her baby.

The ferry will be late, because of the weather.

 

It will thrash about offshore for a bit,

hurl a few packages at the beach,

and chug away without taking on passengers.

 

Phyllis and her brother will race up the hill

tripping over themselves with their story

about the teacher’s wife – the teacher’s wife –

 

who cried and threw her handbag in the sea.

Their mother will calm them down and tell them

never to speak about it again:

 

the teacher’s wife, poor lady, can’t help it.

She isn’t used to the solitude here;

she’s from the city…and, well… and, um…

 

But someone will speak about it. Gossip

will say what it hears. Gossip will joke:

‘Just as well she didn’t throw Fleur in the sea.’

 

Phyllis will write a story about it

eighty years later, and send it to Fleur,

in the nick of time; the very nick.

 

Fleur will explain about the dying father

on the other side of the Manukau harbour

waiting to meet his first grandchild.

 

Let’s have less talk of hysteria

by city people. There’s plenty home-grown.

(And anyway, they were from Drury.)

 

                               *

 

Do you remember, asks the teacher’s wife,

that woman who drowned herself at Graham’s Beach?

 

No, mother, I was only just born,

if that. You’ll have to tell me about it.

 

She walked into the sea, stood on a rock,

and hit herself on the head with a hammer

 

to knock herself out.

                                  Well, that would do it –

(why are we laughing?)  How do they know?

 

Did they find the hammer in her apron pocket

when she was washed up?  Or was that someone else?

 

And don’t call me the teacher’s wife.

 

                               *

 

Almost irresistible, you’d think,

New Zealand being surrounded by these

 

emerald/sapphire/leaden waters

waiting to be entered, one way or another.

 

For example, there was that widowed

second cousin – I don’t think we met her –

 

who slipped out of a care home in her nightie

and toddled across a road into the sea.

 

We call it the Shirley Brooks solution,

and cling to it for our own futures

 

(assuming one or other of us is fated

to be bunged into a bungalow facing a beach).

 

 

                                 *   

 

Naturally I think of Iris, walking

straight down Queen Street and into the harbour

 

(as soon as two boys had left the wharf),

her ‘quite five cold struggling minutes’ before

 

she ‘went deeply down once and again,

and breathed in water as if it were life, not death’.

 

She felt her body roll slowly over,

with its face turned away from the sky:

 

‘peace: no green fields but just a green colour

and the sound of the waters, until they were dumb…’

 

But suddenly came a rushing moment,

some sort of vehicle, the police matron…

 

 

                                *

 

All drowners fight at the end, they say.

No, at those moments close to the end.

 

At the end another urge takes over:

our brains have a sympathetic lobe

 

that yearns towards water, intoxicated

with the longing to be absorbed in it,

 

as if we’d spent our lives in denial

of the substance we’re constructed from.

 

                               *

 

Have you noticed they’re all women?

I could cite some men if necessary,

 

but we are the sea for men to drown in,

the ravening tide. No wonder we scare them.

 

                                 *

 

Nothing could be easier, in Auckland

or indeed Wellington, than to cross a road

from the city centre and walk on to the wharf.                                                                              

 

Green, green swilling under your feet;

seen through the cracks a deep green darkness

inviting you to step up and step down.

 

What could be easier

                                  what could be easier

nothing to stop you

                                  nothing to stop you;

nothing could be easier than

                                             nothing.

 

They’d fish you out, of course; the CCTV

(which was not a thing in the 1930s

for Iris) would have its fish-eye on you.

 

                                *

 

No such aqueous yearnings for the teacher’s wife;

next time she finds herself aboard an ocean

it will be her care to keep an eye on Fleur

 

who is after all still a child, even

if she fancies herself as Juliet

and gazes too meltingly over the rail

 

(don’t worry, mother: it’s mostly fiction),

while in her sensible daytime mode

she’s letting her father teach her to swim

 

between the strained and bulging canvas sides

of the pool erected on an upper deck

like an upside-down marquee full of water:

 

a capsule of Atlantic or Pacific

for the sea-deprived from post-war Britain

migrating to where seas are everywhere.