Two poems
Seal Beach
Each of my footsteps through the kānuka scrub
over the abandoned pā site
feels footnoted, its passage registered;
while closer to the beach a shape resembling the tongue
of an old shoe dried by the sun
vibrates in sympathy,
as if it has a heartbeat’s soft thump;
and marks show where slitherings of flippers and tail
have pushed a seal pup through the dunes.
Now a bull seal raises its bulk and scuffs along,
as if pursuing; while huffing up the track
there’s a seal slobbering its way inland
towards a drone-in of blowflies.
Like a herd of boulders, they guard sandy hollows
between the marram grasses;
one nearby snorts and open-mouthed gazes
with big dark eyes, whiskers twitching.
Coming in from out beyond the breakwater
and the sandbar,
another scrapes and flops across the rocks,
doing sandpapery rolling moves;
then bellows and yawns, hove up on shore,
a stranded mariner at rest.
They beach like hull and keel, then bend
and sway in heavy serpentine ballet,
blue-black seals out of the swell and trough of the sea;
each dragging their sleek body to bask
near the yellow gorse that edges paddocks.
One seal wallows and stretches in rapture,
eyes shut, dreaming of swimming free
beneath the surface of the deep.
Slumber of the seals steals along the dunes,
as mist rolls in, and pied oystercatchers take flight.
The increasing mist places them out of reach;
they are settling on blankets of sand.
The great seals have taken over;
they lay around like logs washed ashore,
or the coolest of tourists, at ease on a ritzy beach.
A Guide to Art History
Art history bobs along on salt water’s tide.
Art is given the weight of Caesar’s marble foot.
Art history has the strength of theological mystery.
Art’s chaste abstraction has lost its cherry.
Art’s cubist flesh is sunk in liquefaction.
Risk-averse art is wading the Waitaki River.
When Hanly’s red paint canister dropped splat,
forty hippies applauded from the banister.
When Duchamp drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa,
he tried to take away its pricelessness.
Duchamp’s urinal was baked as a sponge cake,
and left out in the rain as the last word in tastelessness.
Art lists the Ten Commandments in white house paint.
For the gilded age of Cattelan, Hirst and Koons,
an age sardonic as a golden Billy Apple,
the hand of God has not staged an intervention.
Art paints a bullseye on the bull stood on a piano.
What they cooked up in their studios, streaky Bacon
and fried Freud, they painted for all our tomorrows,
which was yesterday, now art queues are much longer.
Six matchboxes of Giacometti carried his life.
Henry Moore’s hole in a rock connected one side
to the other, as Rodin’s kiss connected lover to lover.
Richard Serra said, If that’s not art, you are not my wife.
Critics decrypt the crypt where mummified remains
of women artists have languished, unrecognised
and unhonoured, then elevate the legend as art,
but our schools no longer teach art history.
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and is a former New Zealand poet laureate. His Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019–2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. Lifting the Island: Poems was published in the United States by Red Hen Press in 2025.