Reference Points
Stranger within • Generation gap • Midwinter spring • Silent revolution • Trees, travelling • Under the wave • Magnolia • Augury • Four elements • Peacocks • Old house • Rainbird • Apocalypse
Histories
Historian • Portraits • The janitor • Ancestors • Yesterday's loss • Counter-revolution • Prayer of an elder • Robert Lowell • Social control • Waitomo • Parihaka • Rongopai
Myths and Emblems
Counter talk • The empty chair • The candle • Wave and shell • Increase and multiply • November 1978 • Rumpelstiltskin • Thumbelina • The swineherd • A Japanese tale • Solstice
Source: Out of Season: Poems. Wellington; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
Electronic source: Out of Season: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
Magnolia
Longer than my lifetime this magnolia
has scattered its pink-white pulpy
petals over the grass, incapable
of death, miraculously never
tiring of making the same impermanent
statement each year. So like young flesh
its flowers, shapely and nearly translucent,
tempt image-making: not the gnarled
trunk and branches, not the sharp and brittle
foliage, brown shards even when fallen.
That's where the tree, immaculate, beyond
all images, has its true nature, harsh and old.
Yet, if I looked long enough, I might see
other images, of a kind not to be borne.