A borrowed room

This one was temporary, as they all are. By the time Ben Clement came to photograph it the floor had become the desk. What looks like mess was a kind of filing: notebooks of anthropological research, of ethnographic interviews, of sketches and of poems, laid open in the order I needed to read them. A poem next to the conversation that set it off. A drawing next to the interview it was trying to remember. Above them, four white pelts on coat hangers, waiting to see what I would ask of them.

I like to work quietly, and I like to work in strange places. A room that isn’t mine asks less of me. Nothing in it has been there long enough to disappear; the light is new every morning; I can’t pretend to be anywhere other than where I am. An interview reads differently on a stranger’s floorboards. So does a poem.

In Aotearoa we speak of tūrangawaewae, a place to stand. I have come to think that mine folds shut and fits in a bag. Wherever the notebooks lie open, I know where I am.

The room has gone back to whoever it belonged to. The notebooks came with me.