I’m walking above myself in the blue light
indecently blue above the bay with its walk-on-water skin
here is the Kilmog slumping seaward
and the men in their high-vis vests
pouring tar and metal on gaping wounds
the last repair broke free; the highway
doesn’t want to lie still, none of us
want to be where we are
exactly but somewhere else
the track a tree’s ascent, kaikawaka! hold on
to the growing power, sun igniting little shouts
against my eyeballs
and clouds come from Australia
hunkering over the Tasman with their strange accent
I’m high as a wing tip
where the ache meets the bliss
summit rocks exploding with lichen and moss –
little soft fellas suckered to a groove
bloom and bloom – the track isn’t content
with an end, flax rattling their sabres, tussocks
drying their hair in the stiff south-easterly;
the track wants to go on
forever because it comes to nothing
but the blue light. I’m going out, out
out into the blue light, walking above myself.
What if God slowed down after making the grass and the
stars and the whales and let things settle for a bit so the day
could practise leaving into the arms of the night and the
tides tinker their rhythms and the stars
find their most dramatic positions.
Or maybe if he’d made man and said, ‘You learn how to
live with yourself and do housework and then I might think
about woman.’
Or instead he’d made woman not out of a rib, which was
really such a last resort, but rising out of the firmament one
woman followed by more women and they took journeys
and learnt how to build boats and bridges which surely they
would have done without men around pushing and shoving
and constantly giving orders.
I just think it was a bit fast – six days to make all of it. How
could the relationship between things be seen, be felt?
And as if God’s rush were in us too we go about remodelling
faster and faster with our burning and breaking and the earth
reels with our speed and it looks and feels like a disaster.
Our smallest bird, a visionary speck
in the cool, calm, cathedral-quiet of the beech forest;
the milk-moss, fern-fanned floor
where I lie down and wait
hearing a million tiny rhizoid voices, the high-up canopy
consorting with the sun, light
falling through a found gap
makes music with the moist green, gem
to gem. Above my eye comes titipounamu
on the trunk that hasn’t opened yet – once more
she scales the rough-ridged bark
tap-tap, wing flick, tap-tap-tap she looks up
to see what’s happened in the last three seconds
then back to the tree: bow, swivel, tap-tap-tap
as if she will find the key one day – open
and open – all of the secrets of the beech forest
bursting free.
Courier of bloom powder
the river meadow agog with flower head;
low-lying daisy wakes with the sun and turns
till dark hushes each petal and all the hubbub dies down.
Even sandfly, vampire of the light, gives up
his head-butting crawl across glass while moth
is up all hours with her deliveries.
River bucks and veers
taking the boulders at a glance
– I am a child of the river
small in my parts and barely audible
yet I too may grow into a bed of gallons
under the sway of sky
overnight, the rain like breath
filling my body till I roar
and you can say
you knew me
when I was only a trickle.
Tucked into snow tussock’s span
shy gentian – one life holding another –
did butterfly consent
to draw her wings closed? come October
mountain daisy
rose like an earth-sun, orchid
peeked from its cover
the bracts and the berries and the leaves
wetlands’ quiet webbing
the watery sails of spider-work
banqueting bees without a flower
did midge and fly consent
to the clot and clog of the flow?
Ahuriri-Hakataramea-Waitaki-Tekapo
the river soul slips from the fish
perishing, the land soul
slips – a plenitude
narrowed and yoked
the weave unpicked
and the stitch – nothing
but the great loneliness
of grass.
Your friends progress
writing their stories. Sunlight peers
through motes of chalk.
This is your timeless time. The alphabet
lives on the blackboard’s top line
– each letter has a big brother
or a big sister.
Miss Breen can see
there’s some far place in you.
Fantail stutters from the window tree.
You stand beside the island of her desk.
Your friends are busy; even the tadpoles
are working themselves
out and into frogs.
You can’t tell what you see
– the words are shapes
and the schoolroom’s paused.
Bright crayonned houses
pinned to the wall; the piano waiting
to be woken with a touch.
All of the doors that will open.
crossing the page – you tilt
your voice in reply; through your held-back days
you are her echo.
The smell of Miss Breen. The story
is everything.
A whereabouts that grew
out of two miles and a nor’west wind
that fortune made mattered
less in my doing days
managed like a high-wire walker
being in two places
at one time earthed and above
here and away how the soul
works against gravity yet
tied to the body a string of code
‘Nothing but pinex board and timber,’
my brother says
‘the whole place could have gone up
at the drop of a hat.’
A worn hollow my favourite seat
the backdoor step her work shuffle
in the kitchen behind blade on the board
clattering across carrots like heels on pavement
the line to the house
as I go out (my homework done)
a song line spirit line the little air bubble
balanced between my eyebrows
as I press down on the barbwire top-rung of the fence
and jump
into the next province the line
that would come as I go an invisible road
into the next country into the next world
it would hold.
As if the night had lost its way
and the sun might never set
the crop kicks up its heels and it feels like forever
and forever and the combine harvester
sounds out on the townland edge – stalks
scooped up in the threshing, grain
shaking down a chute – and a dust cloud
rolls in the wake and the gulls agitate
and the small birds follow in the flung seed-spree.
We’re cutting through the paddocks for home
as the wind grows, it grows
like an animal, our voices drown in the roar.
Clods fly up from their bed, the little kids
are scared, we try to keep our heads
above the air, a sheep lorry goes past on a lean
then my dad swoops in from nowhere
pulling me out of the wind, ‘thank God’ he says.
The wind keeps coming for more, the shed roof
sails over the lawn, everywhere is drag and claw,
it feels like the house might surrender.
The transistor voice is our centre, the ferry
is the size of a field. ‘These night prayers,’
mum says, ‘are given up for the rescue.’
But isn’t God steering the storm?
A horn blows, a judder, behind the window
where I lie, the waves breaking into my dreams. The sea
will never be the same.
The afternoon released last class freed
from the sentence of a sentence to dawdle out
along a shingle verge the heady scent
of gum trees in the gully changing pace
as magpies swoop down from their watchtower
to outrun time and enter space
– the unsupervised, unscripted primer –
dry grasses a dust-caked hum
the riddle of the creek-bed dragonflies and reeds
a wilding apple sharp upon my tongue.
Before home and the night descending
to rhyme my way across a wheat field floating
on the plains’ big sky inland gulls like envoys
their telegraphic cries that said not far to go …
not far to go became a day a moment
in a single hour words woke upon the page
sense with sense converged shapes
became a sound I made to suffer
the illumination gain set on the scales
with loss the world forever after in translation.
I take my bearings from the stream below
tree or not tree
I bow above the waterflow
terracotta, ochre, subtle rose
my bark enacts the light
in this country of so many greens
the record of myself I wear
– a ragged bride, her train in tatters –
I make my fluid stride, letting go
and partly shredded
I look like a historical document
unresolved, I grow.
Bring-a-plate occasions, flagon beer,
rites of passage: final year
school concert, a twenty-first, the wedding dance
– moths scaling up the entrance glass
bar heaters coughing into life
the get-up and the let-down
awkward in suits, immaculate hair-dos
the gravel spit of car park where the lights left off
a stage for fist fights – men
with a skinful, gone berserk; and the dangerous
liaisons in the car-room, backseat bedsits
those simple-complex nights – the hall
lit up like a liner
in a sea of paddocks; the country dark
turning stars into an anthem
warbling and symphonic.
she could break from her ease and drop into a dive
every small whim of the wind
she adjusts to
riffling feathers
rapids of air
in which she excels
was it the sky that hatched her?
finger-feathered salute
her spiralled ascent on the slope updraft of Mt Charlotte
my eye in pursuit
Kāhu, the victor,
homing the high space
she disappears through the top of the picture.
What did the wind want with the house
muttering? below on the flat
stillness or something close to a breeze;
cresting the hill my bike at an angle
or the settling-in of an hour
noised-up with the whistling eaves. Roses
hollowed their heads on the worked-up air
the backyard birch bowed
like a monk at penance, and those small hopeful trees
you set in a splint – strapped to a stake
as if the break had already happened.
Birds flustered to wrong flying
guttered down the chimney into the firebox
– one saved, one too late to free:
ghastly, unintended
what was the wind asking us –
our share, under the same roof, the us of us
unspeaking speech?
Days when it gave us a breather, days
when the hills were at their best and an old calm
wandered down the hallway; we could leave
the doors open and not miss each other.
That day I came round
to pick up last things
– books that had merged
with yours on the shelves
and the small wooden horse
with a broken leg and broken hoof,
you asked
did it mean something to me?
for a moment we poised in the question’s sway
till our eyes gave way
and finding your kit, the glue and small instruments,
you sat at the kitchen table
with that open concentration
that could keep you on a hillside
sketching for hours.
I’d picked him up from a pavement stash
outside a junk shop on a London street
– chipped and weathered, a gallant prance
travelling in time
as I watched you make the repair
with fix and adjust
and what more
could be found in a moment’s exchange:
the small wooden horse
back on his feet – we too
had changed.
loses laughter, dilutes the larger part
of joy and play
and bends the truth of wonder
yet never hesitates, at 3am,
to detail and exact
the hardest time, the roughest weather
our worst fight ever, the jolts
of fear.
Though I can’t see beyond the entrance
there’s a honeycomb of housing below
past crab burrow to ghost shrimp and worm
sparking in the wet
catacombs of vitality, so busy down there,
small mouths on which this world leans.
What the body might feel
before thought: to inhabit skin
as a girl can, without meaning to.
Provisional, perishing, not solid ground
crossing the saltwort meadow
fossicking the ragged seam:
cast and carapace, small bird bones
a floating harvest of eelgrass –
weed pasted in like a poultice.
I’ve walked the salt marsh in sunlight
come back in the depths of night
to listen to geese at their pillow talk
the moon holding on to what it can’t have
brings the sea to my ear; a boundary found
then lost again – on this waterlogged map
my whereabouts is ‘almost’ or ‘maybe’.
She flew in through an open door
– what can I hear from her?
corralled inside the corridor
where nothing works as once it did
the shrinking space, the disbelief
where each week I take
again the thinking cure
‘think not these thoughts’
when asked
to chart my progress
I hover on the brink
of 1–10 and think and think
how the sky became a lid
walls she has no map for;
the window replies with tree
and cloud, she flutters up against
the hope, the doubt.
Feather unto skin, creature
to creature, a message being sent:
how a search begins
– this rapid, rapid beating.
I sit down under the dawn redwood tree and cry
and cry. After a time I think, ‘OK, that’s enough tears’
but there are always more, a tear-rain
falling, raining – I am turning
into the country of Ireland.
I look at the dawn redwood tree
Maia says it is a living fossil.
Maia is away. She is on Stewart Island looking for kiwi.
She has lent me the old school-house library
inside the library there is a table, a chair, a bed
an armchair and a wood-burning stove.
On the floor there is a bag of books
– I am pretending to be a writer. I lie on the floor
pretending to be a writer. I sit at the table
this is more difficult
the door is open. The outside is nearby.
The birds come and go.
I wonder if a bird ever wakes up in the morning
sick with the business of singing.
Do the birds cry? I have never seen them cry.
Maybe they do it when I’m not looking.
Maia returns every two weeks or so.
As soon as I see her I start to cry. I have forgotten
how to be around human beings.
My words have turned into water
could this miracle continue
and the water turn into wine and the wine
turn back into words….
When I am not planting a tear-garden
under the dawn redwood tree
or pretending to be a writer,
I am mowing the grass.
Maia has lots of grass.
‘Maia,’ I say, ‘you have too much grass.’
‘I know,’ she says, ‘but now I’ve got it under control
I want to keep it that way.’
The garden is not under control
but the mowed grass
makes it seem like it could be soon.
I start with the top patch of grass
which is a long way away from the library.
I drag the mower behind me
through the small gate
up the narrow tree-lined track.
The mower and I
grapple with each other among the tree roots
up, up to the kidney-shaped bit of grass
at the top. I pull on the cord of the mower.
It always takes more than one pull
then there is that satisfying pull
followed by a big noise
though sometimes I resent the mower.
‘It’s OK for you,’ I say, ‘being a machine,
all I have to do is pull on your cord
and eventually you break into life.
You want to try being a human being.’
I have to stop talking to the mower.
Sometimes everything happens at once:
mowing, crying, pretending to be a writer
and I push the mower
into the rough scrubby bit
and choke it to death.
Maybe this is why the birds don’t seem to cry
– flying with tears in their eyes would not be safe.
I mow for an hour or so. I don’t really know
how long I mow for.
The hours have gone from the day; there are no more hours
there is only the light and the dark.
it is like the sun going down
when I walk through the tall iron gates
atmosphere folds
to a moss and lichen era; headstones
holding onto their names, softly
avalanching –
is it that gravity is more intense here?
in the old cemetery I could not skip or dance
if I tried; each step goes
life-death, life-death
trees and birds
become rafts in the swirling tides
and the feeling, as in a church or a temple,
that something is being asked of me
I do not know
what is being asked of me –
I find myself listening intently
memory thins to a sound
beyond the human ear
leaving behind
the old cemetery, the permanent residents
the beauty, the apprehension.
It was the year between before and after,
God slept in the roots of the plane trees,
the horizon was talked of
but I couldn’t find it.
My country was going away.
There were the last of the waves –
my mother’s hand, my father’s hand
where all the events were recorded
like music wrought in the wind.
It was the year of myself walking into myself
and walking back out again.
A chestnut shone, an autumn leaf
and how their deaths returned me
bent to a grave as if looking into a mirror.
The long straight roads
crossing the plains, fences
staking the distance, a distance
that has never been straight –
the way back or the way to
– horizons open and close, open and close,
the wipers swing snow drift from the screen.
Softening lines, freighting the windbreak trees;
a musky earth-scent not yet risen –
the wide openness I drive out into
the where to live, how to live.
To reach the small town
while the light lasts
before the freeze
sets black ice on the road
or a stag, driven down
from its high place
by hunger, looms
in the headlight and I’m
too late
freedom for safety
as the dark
marries into the land
nothing to withstand it
– the going, the gone.
Two shaggy old macrocarpas
break into morning song, the birds
having sheltered the night freeze
one body to another in a hug of green;
come spring, they will claim their territories
but we’re not there yet.
The big red mail truck out on its rounds
travelling miles between houses
and as if harsh weather worked like a burnish
the sky freshly minted, the pitched roofs glitter
facets of snow with the spark of opal.
It’s this southern light that knows me
I can’t hide in the gaze of it
though I’m claimed by the distance
– leaving home long enough to be a stranger
sets a yearning in motion
never think of home
imagine
a morning like this between seasons
exposed as the ridge line in the west
and across that span to meet halfway
the roost trees breasting with call,
call and response – hurry
with a kind of happiness, a coming
round, a coming to.
We carried the day through the door
the harbour had earned its keep
light laid its hands on each contour
the shed held abreast with the shore
spreading the waves in pleats
we carried the day through the door
tide played a rift to the floor
retreat and return, it was speaking
as light laid its hands on each contour
the reds and the greens and the blues in rapport
lines apart and meeting
we carried the day through the door
time was like something we wore
shedding, left a wide scope in its wake
the day with its openings, the door,
light laying hands on each contour.
The boy bottled up inside him
wrote Irish for the short days of his schooling
his sister called him ‘the scholar’,
the rest of his life
was a great unlearning.
Great Grandmother raised him.
Heather and stone, a struggling field
headland like an arm in the sea
– a brooding ground
that tied his tongue.
As if there were a mile to each word
my mother said, ‘He still had a long way to go
when he arrived here’
how far his distance was
I could only imagine, until
I went back the way he came.
Sometimes he couldn’t find a word
to save himself and screwed up
his fists between his knees
as if his arms held on to a signal.
When he raised the spirit to his lips
and the music stirred
he would enter a private mist
removing his glasses, grinding
his eyes with his fist.
Dear Donegal, how you lived in my head –
fairy places, leprechaun interventions, the mystical
sad eyes of a donkey; curse of the English
and Kitty, great grandmother
calling from nowhere to nowhere.
Her portrait wore me out:
noble peasant, spiritual vessel
one among the apes. Or what
Yeats, Kavanagh or Synge made of her
what I had in my head
straying into her field, cattle treading puddles
to a mud pool. The dirt floor. The cottage ruins
all over Donegal women clattering their needles
click-clicking like instruments
their bodies swayed to the beat
knitting for pin money, after a day’s toil,
an early version of nightshift, as cleaners
crossing pre-dawn streets to executive suites. Invisible.
She lived on in the clachan
between the asylum and the parish chapel, between
the workhouse and the grave
tales, half-truths, rumours and prayer
I foraged, home-coming among the ruins
– bog cotton, asphodel and ling, the view
sweeping out to the Atlantic. A line of descent.
Words plucked and plaited into lines
for a loved one to unravel, dear hand
receive what’s given, mirroring
as true as can be done, by composition
words made fit for travel.
A thousand laughs, a thousand tears, have fed
the living kitchen table – a pitted, polished
sounding board for ‘was’ and ‘is’
and ‘what’s to come’ – the speaker
in more minds than one.
With all the tenses aired, the spirit
of the letter waving at the door,
your task done – in this communal barter
hand to hand, hand to mouth –
a score of hens’ eggs in your basket.