Quarantine Island, Dunedin

(for Helen and Marc)

Love is and is not the point.
With this high wind filling your sails,
world turns strange and yet the same.

Your craft must be delicate, also tough.
You head for open, unplumbed seas.
Love is and is not the point.

These charts you’ve packed are full of blanks,
bluffs and sounds you must rename.
World turns strange and yet the same.

Tempests, typhoons, the taniwha stowed away
in the hold: all can be weathered.
Love is and is not the point.

There will be days of sudden calm,
nights when stars burn into your head.
World turns strange and yet the same.

The unknown calls. The day is yours.
Hope and trust will take you far.
Love is and is not the point.
World turns strange and yet the same.

At the Getty

(For Brian)

In the half-dark of the Getty,
I peer through glass at Books of Hours,
those late medieval bestsellers.

Calendars, annunciations,
saints and sinners, devotional
aids, dim indecipherable texts.

St Ursula is quite charming
in grisaille, flecked with gold. Saint Luke,
a serious beard, writes, fathoms deep;

there’s an ox in the corridor.
And this is the naughty boys’ room.
A pair of foppish youths ride a goat,

fingering its horns. David, harp
put aside, hand on bare chest, says
how sorry he is not only for

bonking Bathsheba but, even worse,
for sending Uriah to the Front.
Two shapely bare bottoms frame his remorse.

Then, in a corner, a stained glass
crucifixion, South Netherlands,
1490s. There’s a double

skull beneath the cross. Mary stands
to the left, folded in, mouth turned
down. Behind her, a lemon-white sky,

bushy trees, a turreted town.
But it’s the figure on the right
who stops me dead. The slightly curled

brown hair, hollow look, mouth agape
could – this sounds mad, I know – be you.
Not the you I so fondly recall

in some bar off the Piazza
Navona, wryly reflecting
on lost boys, and love gone wrong again,

but the you I glimpsed one Christmas
Eve in St Paul’s-within-the walls,
swinging the censor, eyes wide shut.