The truth about Palmerston North

People like to mock my town, they mock it

for being too provincial and too boring

and it’s true, not much of import happens here

but I don’t mind. Some people say, when they are asked

what they like about Palmerston North,

that you can always find a park and that’s true,

too, you can always find a park just a short walk

from where you want to go, sometimes right outside,

you don’t have to walk at all, you’re right there.

Of course only people who live in New Zealand

mock Palmerston North, as people who live

outside New Zealand know nothing about it.

People who don’t live in New Zealand mock

our entire little country as a 1950s

throwback with honest, rural folk and unspoilt

scenery which isn’t quite true, our scenery

is spoilt from being looked at too often

and freedom campers, they say, are a problem,

but me, I blame dairy cows. When I lived

in the UK people there thought New Zealand

was a state of Australia, and they would

ask me what was coming up on Neighbours,

thinking I had some kind of inside knowledge,

but the truth is I don’t even watch Neighbours

or indeed any soap operas. Actually

the whole Southern Hemisphere is more or less

written off by people who don’t live here,

as somewhere elsewhere, insignificant,

like Palmerston North, where as I said nothing

much happens. And it’s an undeniable

fact that the magazines I subscribe to

come from exotic places that they flaunt

in their titles, magazines like The New Yorker

and London Review of Books and The Paris Review

but not The Palmerston Northerner.

It’s another fact that The Paris Review

isn’t even published in Paris

and has nothing to say about that city

but it has insightful interviews with famous

writers, some of whom I have read. I have been

to Paris and apart from the architecture

and the food and some very fine cemeteries

and of course the language it’s quite like Palmerston

North, though parking is a nightmare. I never

visited the Louvre but one fine afternoon

I went to the Musée d’Orsay which in the opinion

of many educated people really

is just as good if you like Impressionist

and Post-Impressionist art, which I do.

Still it was nice to come home again, home

to Palmerston North, New Zealand, and to see

the good brown Manawatū River moving

sluggishly under the bridge. It’s not the Seine,

but water is water. Paul Celan threw himself — 

odd phrase, as if he were both baseball and pitcher —

into the Seine. John Cleese said Palmerston North

is the suicide capital of New Zealand,

yet you don’t hear of people throwing themselves

into the Manawatū, which would be a risky

business, but only because of the effluent

from those dairy cows leaching into the river.

We live on a floodplain, and the river is ever

in our thoughts and sometimes our houses.

At such times we are downcast but we lift up

our eyes unto the hills and the windmills

perched on them that turn and turn. One time

I saw a middle-aged woman in the Plaza,

our only shopping mall, with her head tilted

to where the sky would have been, but for the ceiling

and the mood lighting, a stout middle-aged woman

with black mascara, elegantly dressed,

her wet mouth a dark, soundless O, and the crowd

not unsympathetically parting

and reforming around her — rock in the river — 

noticing and not noticing, which is our way.