Hawk

The morning sky breaks with flight.
A large plane appears. Banking,
a hawk hovers over pohutukawa
and kauri, fuscous like wood
or sand at twilight. Bleak
crescent moon, hawk turns, falls.
Sparrows and fantails disperse like rain.

Later, a pair of hawks sky-dance overhead.
The sight of them so close, courting
the air, is such rare pleasure I sway.

Tension at the Airport

The world is all gates, all opportunities,
strings of tension waiting to be struck - Emerson

We sit in the Sky-deck playing Snap.
Out over huddled hills, aircraft are
specks peaking between curtains of cloud.

Connected to invisible wire, each plane
dances in the air, God’s puppetry
guiding it towards the runway.

There, heat rises off asphalt like ripples
on cobalt water or the riverstone grey
dash of wrybills startled by approaching jets.

Close to us, the departure hall is a movie-set
of fraught farewells, tears arriving
(like planes) in apparent synchronicity.

The friction the airport bears, its miracle
of cantilevered steel and glass, strains
under each goodbye, take-off and landing.

While we continue to shuffle,
gripped by what we see, how we deal
and our Snap Snap! Snap!!

Clavicle

A bone
is never just a bone.
This one is a memory,
a storyteller.

It spins its yarn,
little Rumpelstiltskin,
into scapula, humerus, radius,
ulna and metacarpus.

Its skeleton
recounts your body’s
assembly and breakage.

A stormy night;
a bed; a fall:
it’s a nursery rhyme,
it’s true.

The soft landing
that forgot to catch you;
wooden floorboards;
tears during x-ray;
fibres that knit as delicately
as granny glove-making:
these are another story.

When you’re grown,
I’ll reconstruct them
into a fable. It’ll fix
a smile to your face.

Of things unspoken:
how I slumbered
as you tumbled;
how blame calcifies;
how a mother’s guilt
is the only thing
that fails to mend –
these I’ll suffer alone.

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’s Wife

after Anne Sexton

Quaking
like rockets
about to launch,
the bed and he
are wedded;
though aching to shrill,
I must keep still.

Mustn’t let on
I feel his earth shake.
Mustn’t wonder why
he chooses another body
(his own) over mine; nor why
I allow him his fill.
I must keep still.

And so, we both worship
onanism, and are joined
by this almost-adultery.
The dark,
into which he opens up
and I shun, tests the will.
I must keep still.

But fume away
secretly, an undiscovered fire
patient for its spark,
when only silence
knows my answers or how
broken and alone I am until
I stem my need to keep still.

My Sister Writes Poetry

Only when I’m absent,
the ghosted reflection
of home movies and photograph skin
does my sister seek her muse.

Her words fill the earth,
the seasons, climates, bones
I’ve said farewell to.

And as I embrace being
an epitaph of my own country,
a strange and distant voice
at the end of our telephone line,
she grows intimate,
adjectives, nouns and verbs her new lifeblood.

And as I embrace living
my life again,
images, similes, metaphors,
landscapes darker and emptier than the moon,
free verse, rhymes, odes,
villanelles, epics and elegies
become my sister’s ongoing comfort.

And when she wants to summon my return,
she writes out the religion of our past.

And when she wishes to forget me,
she writes of the birth of her new-born.

And then, in ugly joy,
in rage and remorse and guilt,
she rips her reddened words
into a thousand tatters,
petals each that scatter the air,
their delicacy and perfume
too rare for a faraway eye such as mine.