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
The empty chair
Who shall sit in the empty chair with its candle
carefully placed for reading on the arm-rest
filling the bare room with its radiance?
Some self-taught labourer from the age of improvement
has been picking his way through the book – Looking
Backward Unto this Last The Martyrdom of Man?
But he has been called away, down into
the dreamless dust to mingle with his mentors
Ingersoll Paine Ruskin Bellamy Reade
leaving the chair empty and the door standing open.
Who will walk in? A child with a slate and a primer,
an adolescent with someone's collected poems,
the author with his proofs? The fit is never exact.
Neither the radiance nor the bare simplicity
is matched by any imaginable occupant.