The Gift by C. K. Stead
Allen Curnow 1911 - 2001 Brasch in his velvet voice and signature purple tie complained to his journal that you had 'interrupted'. I wasn't sorry. That was Somervell's coffee shop nineteen fifty-three. Eighteen months later you and I were skidding on the tide-out inner- harbour shelvings below your house from whose 'small room with large windows' you saw that geranium 'wild on a wet bank'