Hamish Kilgour (1957-2022)

I found out yesterday that my old friend Hamish Kilgour has died. I'd known him since the mid-1980s, when I met him in Auckland. He was a musician (The Clean, The Great Unwashed, Bailter Space, The Mad Scene, etc.), a visual artist, and a poet. He was also an amazing letter writer. We saw each other in person in various parts of the world (and kept in touch later through social media), but the first years of our friendship were conducted primarily through the post. I still have his letters. He inspired a lot of my poems when I was a young writer. I reread some of them yesterday. Here is one (actually a section from a longer poem, "Three in Christchurch, January 1987").


Room

One day when you weren't there
but all your paintings were
I sat on the paint-splattered floor
and painted my fingernails red.
At home my mother says
Open a window, the polish
stinks up the house, she cannot
breathe. But this room already
smells of paint. While my nails dried
I sat with fingers outspread
and smiled at the paintings,
they smiled back.
There was a paperback of Katherine
Mansfield stories on the floor
beside me. Later
I looked through a stack of drawings
on the floor, found a couple of my
letters there.