FOR THE BOY
What you are, Child, is the moon
A great, fat, bright thing
but a wriggling moon, a dribbling moon
a moon with butter toes and anemone lashes
a moon with custard brow
with sea glass eyes and seashell fists.
What you are, Child, is the moon
just a perfectly ordinary thing
Just a marvel at which I gaze.
QUEEN ST
SENRYU
Cold on the concrete
under Louboutin’s window
he dreams of new shoes.
AFTER THE WAR; or, THE PARK WE LOVED
There is a mosh pit of daffodils
slamming and swirling around a crusty trunk;
a peek of white tipped kinks on the horizon;
a mist the wind will not let fall;
an hour of mortality and separation
that strokes our fragile flesh;
a bomb locker, long forgotten;
and a pleasant chill at Hawthornden Reserve.
RUSSIAN CORIANDER
First published in Tales from Dominion Road
It's raining...
Let's have a threesome!
You, me and Clive Christian
in the back row of the Capitol.
Give me exactly seventeen deep breaths
against the nape of your neck
that forbidden space
seen by all who meet you
but known by me alone.
Ronnie's boy
or the girl scooping popcorn
they don't know the scratch of your stubble.
They're not held captive by the mineness
of iris and amber.
So, take your seat
away from the smudged reflection of tail-lights
away from the scent of petrichor and noodles
and allow me aspiration.
Come, Lover,
let's have a threesome.
You, me and Clive Christian
in the back row of the Capitol.
RADISHES
First published in Gramercy Review
A single diaphanous breath, entrusted to the tides,
dodges ships and sharks, pollution and phantom-like jellyfish.
Reaching land, it runs many miles through the aquifers,
beneath rocky canyons and verdant fields.
Turned to steam, it will rise up through some subway grate
to surprise you in Tucker Square, where you are contemplating radishes.
You will feel it on your cheek, a mere drop of humidity
as warm and as wet as the lips of a woman you used to know.
LEVITY
Pōhutukawa needles,
vermilion as valentines,
are less due a comparison to our love
for their amorous hue.
Rather, it is their levity.
In an instant, they abandon
their tree for unknown winds.
As light as the needles on summer's quick breath
hangs the harmony of us,
faithlessly awaiting flight.
THE EIGHTH WONDER
I have a vial of something — chalk, maybe —
bought by a gullible ancestor,
supposedly a sample from Te Otukapuarangi,
the fountain of the clouded sky.
I picture the charlatan who sold it
with a well groomed moustache
and an impressive hat.
The vial has been passed down
quietly — faithfully —
through the generations,
just like noble blood,
long ears,
and alcoholism.
I keep it with my treasures:
Nana’s teacups, a medal,
a pewter goblet,
and this hopeful, worthless dust.
MOTU
First published in Tales of the Hauraki Gulf
“You” dwells between sleep and awake;
between sound and silence.
“You” is the break and the swell;
the scream and the lullaby.
Ungraspable and ill-defined, just like me.
“We” drifted the tide of our many lives,
creating hope from hopeless histories.
Floating between hauora and hell,
“We” was the fever in which I longed to dream.
Now, my love, I’m quite the realist.
Between us are all the great and little barriers.
Between us is a never-conceived son,
and grandchildren with molten chocolate eyes,
the dozen proposals that happened,
and the anniversaries that didn’t.
Between us is beauty run rampant;
countless waltzing waves,
pōhutukawa needles, adrift on warm winds,
the wine we never drank,
the boat we never sailed,
the summer we never became.
I know now, my love, that I am Leigh
and you are Port Jackson.
We are the edges of the Gulf.
We share only tides these days,
and we’re both just fine, I guess…
Reaching toward each other
but not for each other,
always looking inward
united by what divides us.
HEART
With a felt tip pen
the barista drew
a love heart
on the plastic lid
of my soy latte.
A nice hot cuppa —
a frigid day improved.
I went the whole day
(the whole bloody day!)
unaware
of the broken heart
adorning my nose…
until I came home
where you could laugh at me.
That laugh! It warmed me
like no coffee could.
I love you.
I wish it could last —
this splendid winter.
EIGENGRAU
In evening fog, my outstretched arm marks vision’s end.
I gaze into the grey to no avail, hoping
to glimpse the intrinsic — the balustrade,
the persimmon tree, the fence post — I step slowly.
I count the stairs. Four, three, two, one.
I strain to see the magnolia’s fallen blooms,
once ballet pink, now treacherous brown and slick.
I descend with care, unsighted and uneasy.
Eigengrau, everywhere. I fumble with reality.
Balustrade, fruit tree, fence post, perilous petals.
I have no faith in possibility just now.
In this obscurity, I do not reach for your hand.
BREAK
Day cannot gently separate — it must break.
Each morning, darkness is torn
by a blaze of blush and gold
and a rush of birdsong.
Nature has a bent for the dramatic.
We, too, make much of separations.
Even as we unite, we come apart,
Russian-dolling each other,
trying to find something unasundered.
LICHEN, ACTUALLY
I almost lose myself
musing about the moss on the magnolia tree.
“It’s actually lichen,” you’d say.
You never liked too much alliteration.
I muse, then, about the lichen;
how it holds — sorry, clings — how green,
how seemingly soft — sorry — how it clusters
around old bough and opening bud.
It looks inelegant, but kind of swell
like I always felt in your presence.
A bee bumbles by with a dignified, interested air
but doesn’t pause to pollinate.
“Actually,” you’d say, “you’ll find that it’s beetles…”
I feel now, for you, like the bee for the bloom.
My unmade advances are not unrequited,
I’m simply invited to go by and go well.
So I do,
but I still think it looks kind of swell, actually
the moss on the magnolia tree.
THE HOUSE BESIDE TIROHIA MARAE
In the latent space before dawn
day gathers so patiently.
Colour waits
to wash the hydrangeas.
Shape waits
to trace the hedges.
Sound waits
to fill the amphitheatre of pines.
Soon, the sun will come screaming
newborn again
over the plains.
Soon, there will be the burning of toast
the pouring of coffee
and the feeding of chickens.
Soon, bees will hum in the prolific pink rose bush
that, one day, will kill my father.
Just now, though
unknowing
I sit in the dark
at my parents' country home
listening to the day accumulate.
YELLOW
Dripping like yolks from the tree
kōwhai bloom above two, once so ardent
as they hurry to separate brunches
pretending not to see the other as they pass.
It will spoil their Eggs Benedict
and plague them both for weeks
this near-miss under a cacophony of flowers
the colour of hope or cowardice.
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