Leaving Luang Prabang: A Tale of Two Travellers

Abstract

The poem called ‘Leaving Luang Prabang’ comes into being as the poet and his companion prepare to read and speak at the funeral of an old comrade who was an integral member of Red Mole in its early years. Peter Fantl is one of the chance-met group of New Zealanders in the opium den behind the Shell service station in Luang Prabang, another traveller on the river. The poet composes an elegy from current scripts with long histories that will do the stretch: two pages (polar night and adept’s paradise) for concentrating thought; two more (folded together print outwards) to name the place on the river where the journey starts and to intimate the course of the unknowable beyond. In the event, it was Sally who came to Auckland for Peter Fantl’s wake at Alleluya Café on K Road where she delivered a eulogy and the poem written to make visible not one, not two, but a convocation of travellers: They walk down the moonlit road / to the river. / They smoke cigarettes then someone says, Go! / White Angel / White Flower / Go! / Holy / Holy . . .