Category: 2013

spring   tin can chatter small thrusts of song   swing me up   on the collarbone of morning sun pours up nests dream   of spitting   startled chicks homeward and the upside down cerulean   dish of sky   is a cool-eyed mother holding watching      …

Forecast   A gale drags across the rooftops, peeling shingle, breaking tree limbs, as if the ether is taking back all it has previously given.   You had been told that this weather was coming, had been given many clues: His brow: the dark clouds at the furthest edge of…

1 | 2 | 3   The Storm   We left camp at Reefton – to the Waitahu – the single fishable river, still three days after the rain of logs and boulders had wiped out the railway bridge at Larry’s – and run the Coast to mud.   No fish in that…

1 | 2 | 3   Obi-Wan Kenobi goes to the Porirua Aquatic Centre   Not so far, far away – to be here and once again mortal, after Palpatine and Vader – all those years as just a ghost in The Force.   Old have you become in your grey togs, across…

1 | 2 | 3   The end of May   I can see the moon outside this office window –   it’s not even 4 o’clock but it’s big in the sky   half-waxed or waned chasing the sun’s narrow   slide across the wintering horizon.   There are so many…

1 | 2 | 3   Brooklyn Breech For A.D. O’Brien   I. Silent surgeon you who, cool as an eel, sleeps wrapped from crown to heel in your inverted patchwork.   Your mother, my friend, keens to you: To everything – turn, turn, turn. Beyond her thudding heart you hear the vacuum…

1 | 2 | 3   Nothing breaks   like a heart. The piano chants Bach from deep down in its crimson chest – carved like a trellis of arteries – Ave Maria, full of grace.   Ashes for coffee, the girl says, ‘No that café is not this one, that High…

1 | 2 | 3   she hoped that Jack would come up the stairs and hold her   she had heard him moving, swift on his stick and then he wobbled loosely into the room, the floor still churning, a livid sea.   poor old house clattering again – and the bricks…

It’s Rosemary Anderson!   Rosemary Anderson is a mouthful. She chases away the son of Andreas; a pigeon in the park.   ‘Rosemary Anderson!!!!!’ (Fire on the school bus?) She glides through the window courting dark.   Where does she swim to? Rosemary Anderson clings to cliffs, crusted with quartz,…

1 | 2 | 3   I ngā wā o mua . . .   there was a woman who lived in a house with a garden just before the crossing to my school. There were ornamental shutters on her windows.  The stems of her flowers danced on stilts with petals layered over…