NB 9.

And The Wind

I have been here before but

The light is different.

And the wind is blowing

Making the water dirty so

I will go inland.


Reverie; bitter thoughts of some

Perceived wrongdoing

From another century.

In another country.

And I wake to dull forest


Trees with selfish winter blooms

Private flowers for self pollination.

No sun, no dapple.

Smell of wet, smell of clay.


I meet three dogs on the flats

They are wary and bark

And bark.

Until I go.

Laughing Gas. (Chasing The Aurora)

Nostalgia


Used to be an illness with medicine and stern words of warning

Then it had it's heyday, middle aged and weepy but rehabilitated

If not fashionable.

Then sadly it became outdated, yesterday's emotion.

How I ache for those days.



Sentimentality


Another mental sprain glazing the user in a vitrine of longing,

Fixing free floating feelings on obsolete objects.

Antique artefacts rubbed longingly, suspiciously.

Yesterday's fad redundant, becomes today's reliquary

Tomorrow's curio.



Twin aches, like arthritis and lumbago

The sadistic Gods of old age.

Or Hypnos and Thanatos the dark Gods of

Sleep and death, to a citizen of Troy.



Where the heroic thinkers only sentiment was

In dreaming of a future nostalgia.

Tide Fall.

The Southerly has made fresco of the sky,

Pale horizon to lapis above, in one smooth sweep.

Frigid beauty like a marble Venus.


Below, wind against tide.

Angry waves struggling out of the harbour

Like chastened sinners leaving the cold chapel.

NB 6.

Solstice.

The clustering Matariki fades, as twilight dawns,

On the beginning of the shortest day.


The night dies and a black tailed fantail dances

in the indigo, indistinct.


Warning of the end of the

relentless, gradual, loss

Of light.


We wash in the salt water of sun rise.

Cold and fiery tears to rinse our bodies

Of darkness.


A regular renaissance.

NB 9.

The Bushmans Legacy.

This neck of the woods at least sounds right

With the nectar eaters chiming up top

But between factory and suburb

With the thin ribbon of trees, meagre, on the dirty stream banks.


The virtual reality of nature managed and cribbed

Dog shit gravel and moss slick board walks

Fluorescent rat runs and graffiti sprayed trunks.

Ready to drink, drunk and chucked.


Magnificence of old kahikatea and tanekaha

Shrouded in a mist of methy ethyl

And spent diesel stink.


Reconcile to the other side of the creek

Over a sturdy council bridge to the factory side.

Caged graffiti on mildewed shade cloth trapped

Behind cyclone mesh taut between water pipe uprights

Caged units.


Under barbed wire,

Stacks of pallets

Skips full of flat brown cardboard

Polystyrene strata

Cheap cars parked by the gross.


Graffiti up high, graffiti on the cracked pavement

Graffiti neatly sanded away

Graffiti painted grey

Graffiti over and over


Much as the bushmen came and made their mark

With the axe, the crosscut and the fire.

Planks stacked and the clay turned for

Cold houses and sour wine.











 

NB 8. (For Liz)

Memory of a far place.

If I hadn't been to the other side and seen for myself

I wouldn't have understood the conflation of volcanoes where

Distance pulls to flatten and attenuate, to sphagnum green

and paints beautiful muscular form.


From this place of future memory I see 

Cumulus in perspective

above the approaches.

One vent surrounded by a crop of stone

Another turned to quarry.


It's in the flat mountains between, where

Curious disciplines collude and conspire,

A thousand years after the fact,

To speculate on long dead lovers.

NB 7.

Convention.

Breakfast.

Purity.

Transgression.

Morning tea.

Disgrace.

Renunciation.

Lunch.

Relapse.

Epiphany.

Afternoon tea.

Transformation.

Apotheosis.

Drinks.

Egg First.

Hot and tired and hungry at the lake

Drop our packs down strip off and swim in

Cool clean water.


Air dry on the grass and restore some modesty

Unpack plastic click clack

Dates and nuts an apple and a boiled egg.


Egg first, cracked on the knee

Peeled in tiny fragments but then a satisfying release

Shiny firm albumen revealed


A twist of salt in grease proof paper

White on white

First bite of salty sulphur.


Then a feast of picnic while the billy boils

Someone has cake.

We should make it home.

NB 6.

Serengeti.

Safety In The Outdoors.

You need to watch out for trouble.


The bush here is safe, in its way.

There are no snakes, hidden, or tigers,

No poison darts or Kalashnikovs.


Unlike the Serengeti where we once saw a giant eagle

Swoop on a hyrax, only to lose its grip

And drop it's prey.

Never to hit the ground as

It was seized, in the air, by the jaws of a passing hyena.

The winner on the day.


But you can get bluffed and fall,

Or get caught out by a raging creek,

Or get mistaken for a buck, or a duck,

And get shot.

Or just become lost.


If you are still with us, you

Should follow a creek or is it a ridgeline?

You should stay with the boat or the aeroplane, you should

Use your watch as a compass or

Empty your pack to use as a hat to

Blindfold you to the reality

That you are lost.



You can place a small smooth river stone in your mouth

And press it against the roof of your mouth

With your tongue

But don't swallow it.