The gay psychologist quoting The Divine
Right of Kings and the lexicographer, his lifes
dream of the Great New Zealand Dictionary,
both entrenched alcoholics, both the originals
Dostoyevsky might have claimed, although
both stark losers by the worlds brute standards.
Yes, I was there too, that late Saturday night
after THE DUKE, riding the Kelburn cable-car up
under the shadowy, Gothic pile of Victoria
University, where furtive as hedgehogs, we found
a hand-hold to jemmy open an illegal window,
fossick the disused office for carton stacked upon
carton, each one packed with indexed filing
cards, meticulous references, NZ arcana, forgotten
dialects, fables rare as moose from Southland,
obscure derivations, etc., incalculable musings
of an idealist and dreamer (this he showed us) here
lay the singular industry of a reverential scholar,
abandoned yet thirty years on, The Oxford
Dictionary of New Zealand English first appeared,
penned by an academic of that selfsame city.
We are the last of the witnesses Geoff, like the
derelicts who took the sun sitting behind the Public
Library, or sheltered in Pigeon Park, days long
gone (along with THE DUKE and THE GRAND
HOTEL) a city newly syllabled, yet the light remains,
much the same milky white and pale as stone.