The corrugated iron door
                has been pulled down over Café Cezanne
                and I’m sitting across the road
                in Expresso Love
                    A Network of Dissolving Threads, AUP, 1991
I am on the old link bus in 2008 travelling along Ponsonby Road before it turns down Pompallier Terrace, not far from Café Cezanne and Expresso Love, and I am reading A Network of Dissolving Threads. I have no idea if this bus ride was ever true, but when I read ‘This is Why I Read’, the bus is my vantage point to see Richard von Sturmer sitting in the café window receiving a packet of plastic explosives in the form of a book. For me that book was A Network of Dissolving Threads.

The haiban – the Japanese haiku/prose hybrid genre – rattled in my ribcage and unlocked my heart. While the threads were apparently dissolving, the series of small detonations, the tiny moments – the park, the fog, the ocean, the fountain, the night, the lake, the garden, and the university – bloomed a new network of threads: the avalanche.

This is why we read.

I found my copy this afternoon on the bookshelf. Not the copy I possibly read on the bus in the late 2000s, that one came from the library. This copy has the pencilled $15 price on the inner cover, the hallmark of a second-hand bookstore purchase. I left for the UK the same year I borrowed A Network. I was still captivated by the collection from afar. Eventually I asked my dad to find me a copy, which he did, and packed it into his luggage when he visited the following year. This is the book:

                remember that book,
                the one you smuggled
                in your suitcase,
                as if you were smuggling
                a packet of
                illicit drugs?

Poetry is for the train. Perhaps I am too literal here, but I carried A Network with me, Edinburgh to London, travelling to and fro. I always read poetry on the train. New Lynn to Newmarket, The Strand to Wellington. I have always thought of this experience as private, quiet, reclusive, a way to sit within the passing of time and manage the onslaught of strange company. But I think now about the sight of another reader on the train: a radiance and a sense of connection. Our fellow passengers have a destination in mind, but we readers are open to unknown destinations, and we speed towards them, alive and radiant.

This is why we read.

makyla curtis