Leigh (the poet, dad, Davis) wrote this poem for his friend Scott Perkins after Scott’s wife Louise died of secondary breast cancer on the 8th of December in 2004. ‘Requiem Masses’ is a tribute to Louise, an offering to Scott during a time of mourning, of marquisite air, a jet out.

Water and wind feature throughout Leigh’s work and here he imagines Louise being carried by these ‘requiem masses’, ‘confusing bodies’ which ‘make solicitous preparation and constantly / bear away’. His first published work Willy’s Gazette begins with ‘You blow there Willy’. Later he had stitched onto a flag ‘Where the wind blows, there is hau’. Wind is often a sign of spirit.

When he gave the poem to Scott, it was composed in landscape format, one couplet per page, the lines hugging the top left. Michele Leggott saw this as ‘leaving gulps of white space and page turns, a performance of its role of requiem text’. I think of the rhythm and pauses in Mozart’s Requiem, a slow-moving funeral procession, and sheets of music dropping to the floor one by one. 

Leigh’s requiem for Louise traces the pathway Māori spirits of the deceased travel on their way to Hawaiiki: Muriwai, Cape Rēinga | Te Rerenga Wairua (‘a country’s cape’), an ancient pōhutukawa tree whose roots provide passage to Te Pō. It is 8/12/2004, the beginning of summer, with ‘gargantuan trees that now spout red and drop their flowers’. Louise falls with them to the threshold of land/sea, life/death, and I have a picture of a red flower twirling in the air and hitting the water softly.

‘Rēinga’ and ‘rerenga’ indicate a place or time of leaping. At Cape Rēinga | Te Rerenga Wairua, a liquid seam forms where two oceans meet and disturb one another, north-bound. Another line from Nameless, published posthumously in 2013, comes to mind: ‘Open your eyes underwater, to a sky of cornflower blue’. 

betty davis