The New Zealand Poet Laureate blog: November 2009

Hotdog 2

Pierre Curie’s skull was eggshell on the cobblestones of Paris, thought Doris, flipping pikelets.

Three people weighing and packing eggs
Reference Number: 1/1-008480-G

Hotdog 1

Serial is an ongoing publication by Cilla McQueen with images from the collections of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa.

The first chapter of Serial is titled 'Higgs'; it was published in full on 23 November 2009.

Chapter 2 is titled 'Hotdog'. Keep an eye on this blog for installments every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Hotdog 1

Marie Curie stirred sludge in a cauldron with an iron bar as tall as herself, reducing pitchblende to a grain of light.

c-axis rotation photographs of hyacinth from Snowy River
C. Osborne Hutton, 'Contributions to the Mineralogy of New Zealand—Part V'. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 88, 1960-61.

Higgs

'Higgs' is the first part of Cilla McQueen's 'Serial', which is being published on this blog in small sections every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Here is the full text of 'Higgs'. Next, we begin 'Hotdog'.

Through waist-high grass cut through the empty section.
Bend to retrieve the glossy supplement falling out of the newspaper.
Slip ankle-deep in muddy water

Jump the stream, land in tough bracken.
A narrow track through lupins up the bank to the road, not a short cut.

One wet shoe, damp pages stick together, gold high heels dancing,
a dress the colour of wild lupins, mascara, holidays, bin it.

Feel for keys, braille-fingered over pen, lipstick, purse, phone, cards, diary, paper-clip. Not a jingle.

Hurry back down the bank steeper from above,
retrace the slippery track under the lupins,
brush off lupin flowers in a clearing edged with serried russet stalks,
no passage visible.

Until a tabby cat
appears, stares, disappears.

Find the opening, stride through tall resistance, arms covering the face;
slide into the stream.
The keys unseen. Nor palpable among the boggy roots.

Go home. With a chisel ruin the frame, climb through the window.
A duplicate, a duplicate,

A cup of tea, make scones for Eric the Red
who might turn up tonight with his telescope.
The almanac open at the page on Caelum,
etched in the heavens between Columba and Eridanus.

Look up, affected by the gaze from the apple tree outside the window
of the same tabby cat, or one similar.

Nought but the grin etched in mind,
the last miaow of Blossom who died bolt upright like a Queen.

Alpha Caeli, Eric states, has a diminutive M-class red dwarf companion
in a very wide orbit.
Lacaille saw a pair of chisels tied with ribbon

He cleans his glasses on his tie and puts them on again straight.
We might just be looking at NGC 1595 or NGC 1598!

The scones are satisfying.

Murphy’s particle, he repeats emphatically.
You have to allow for the Higgs, sine qua non,
absolutely nothing at all.

The more imagination grasps at the idea the greater the void created.

The arches of Eric’s eyebrows uphold three horizontal lines across his freckled forehead. The wrinkles deepen as he glances up, keen-eyed.
Are you with me?