Plea Before Storm
Like the sky-high seagulls
tossed from those thundering black
boulders of the clouds, you are
girl, setting off back home,
looking for the things you’ve lost--
a mislaid purse and raincoat,
wondering where you put them last;
and nearly ready now to climb
the cliffpath, trying to recall
the home you left for this,
what way you came.
The macrocarpa blackness
quickens; pine-belts black on the hills.
Storm is coming in that crazed
rustle of leaves, the frenzied
laughter of the seagulls skidding
spread-eagled on the light. Like ice
setting, the light sets hard.
It is coming fast. Lightning
and thunder quicken. No pause.
I’m sorry, forgot what I said.
Come back inside.
A White Gentian
Remember Ruapehu,
that mountain, six months ago?
You sat in an alpine hut
sketching scoria, red
rusted outcrops in the snow.
I climbed some southern peak
and made up the sort of song
men climbing mountains sing:
how, no longer your lover,
I knew it was over.
I thought I’d try out my song
when I returned that evening
as though there were nothing wrong.
Instead I brought a flower down
smelling of the mountain.
The Gulls
At night the gulls fly back to
rock ledges.
A volcanic
island, I remember. Grey
sea, the grey sky quickening to
blackness. And the gulls, black-backed
but white, white underwing, they
return in legions to rock
ledges of the night. And this
place, too, I know. A bunk-like
ledge where I crouch on black
stones with a woman, and kiss
her till she quickens. The link
with her, black to black.
While high
overhead, we watch white legions
of gulls circling . . . until giddy,
we spin into sleep.
And I
find next morning, pecked remains
of some woman beside me.
A summer Poem
We would never build our huts
in macrocarpa trees:
the brooding darkness, wetness,
in darker greenness was
where wetas and those birds
that peck your eyes out lived.
Sun and the smell of the gum,
we built instead of the pines,
hoisting with ropes limb to limb
planks from the timber yard;
and the other day we would use
the ropes as swings . . . .
A friend once swung to a roar
some forty feet up--
the highest of the summer--
the rope tied to nothing more
than a peg of a limb.
The whole next week he was King.
Like the sky-high seagulls
tossed from those thundering black
boulders of the clouds, you are
girl, setting off back home,
looking for the things you’ve lost--
a mislaid purse and raincoat,
wondering where you put them last;
and nearly ready now to climb
the cliffpath, trying to recall
the home you left for this,
what way you came.
The macrocarpa blackness
quickens; pine-belts black on the hills.
Storm is coming in that crazed
rustle of leaves, the frenzied
laughter of the seagulls skidding
spread-eagled on the light. Like ice
setting, the light sets hard.
It is coming fast. Lightning
and thunder quicken. No pause.
I’m sorry, forgot what I said.
Come back inside.
A White Gentian
Remember Ruapehu,
that mountain, six months ago?
You sat in an alpine hut
sketching scoria, red
rusted outcrops in the snow.
I climbed some southern peak
and made up the sort of song
men climbing mountains sing:
how, no longer your lover,
I knew it was over.
I thought I’d try out my song
when I returned that evening
as though there were nothing wrong.
Instead I brought a flower down
smelling of the mountain.
The Gulls
At night the gulls fly back to
rock ledges.
A volcanic
island, I remember. Grey
sea, the grey sky quickening to
blackness. And the gulls, black-backed
but white, white underwing, they
return in legions to rock
ledges of the night. And this
place, too, I know. A bunk-like
ledge where I crouch on black
stones with a woman, and kiss
her till she quickens. The link
with her, black to black.
While high
overhead, we watch white legions
of gulls circling . . . until giddy,
we spin into sleep.
And I
find next morning, pecked remains
of some woman beside me.
A summer Poem
We would never build our huts
in macrocarpa trees:
the brooding darkness, wetness,
in darker greenness was
where wetas and those birds
that peck your eyes out lived.
Sun and the smell of the gum,
we built instead of the pines,
hoisting with ropes limb to limb
planks from the timber yard;
and the other day we would use
the ropes as swings . . . .
A friend once swung to a roar
some forty feet up--
the highest of the summer--
the rope tied to nothing more
than a peg of a limb.
The whole next week he was King.