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104 MARY MCCALLUM Southern Man for Penny The mouth of the harbor and the mountains are bleached table linen, starched peaks—I run to keep our meeting at Heketara Street, to go with you to the mouth bright with fallen linen, to hold our hands out to the steep sweep of land and the deep strait between. Your land, the South. Walk with me, speak of your blue house built on the hillside here, speak of the sheets he hung out each Saturday, bleached and flapping, of the cabbage trees clapping in the southerly the day Rose was born, George who keeps building with driftwood on the beach—teepees with steep angles that stand the storms, Elsie with her cook’s mouth chasing the combination of sweet and sour so the mouth pinches and smiles all at once. Old Molly’s lagging, you speak to her gently, tie her lead to the tree and turning, find a steeple, George’s careful construction—the wood clean, bleached by the sea, a place of safety, a place to keep watch. He knows to make it strong, face it south like the house on the hillside with the southfacing beech trees crowding the windows, the yellow-mouthed gorse, the two fat kereru; part tree house, part keep— its casement windows built to speak to the linen mountains, to the pressing sky, to the bleached confounding light. And how to describe the steep of your grief, after four years away, to find steeper than mountains, sky-blue roofing blocking the south? Behind the faded curtains, the bleached window frames, all you left there safe to return to, lost. The mouth of your grief is sour: you speak of vertigo, pale children, peaks in sight only up at the clothesline. Back to the sheets—we keep coming back—to Alan hanging them out to dry, needing to keep a weather eye on the mountains, undeterred by the steep climb, the clapping cabbage trees. He wouldn’t speak of it but you knew: how the mountains coming and going to the south moored him here at this harbor’s rim, his mouth crammed with pegs, something eating his innards like bleach. We’re nearly home when you tell me of the last bleached sheet, steeped in sour and sweet—not a thing to keep—used to wrap this southern man: his breastbone, eyes, mouth, feet, valleys, constellations, peaks. ...

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