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Sport 4: Autumn 1990

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They begin by skirting the falling debris so nonchalantly
they couldn't give a bugger. The palomino
shivers from neglect while the chestnut is sheltered by the old
man macrocarpa. The squattocrats' children in their brick prisons
never see the light of day. Etc. This is pleasure.
God invested His Son in you. She likens the second-growth to scar
tissue & laughs. She can hear herself repeating
herself. She can spot trouble coming a mile away.

Lagoon full of kaimoana. Udder full of milk.
Dairy full of spare bread. No spotlighting
Brand-new landscapes, tacky with memory
Highways choked with the presumed dead
Eyes on the white line, pedal to the metal, hoarfrost
on the tarseal. Lurk before you leap. She listens
to the blue road drumming in her bloodstream.
A glossy orange pictograph alerts her to a slip.

*

He takes in the gaunt orientalism of the winter orchard
& is almost undeceived. Frostily
the leafless apple solicits him with its apple-green fruit
but he has seen all this before, in a poem, he knows he is simply
hungry, he looks away. Then when the little
chocolate donkey foal swells up in his mind's eye
it undoes everything. At first he's merely worried that his heart
might break. But it's already too late for that. He's history.

page 5

Cotton seeds stream past, picking out the airwaves
in white fluff, windsocks fill up with wind.
With this kind of signpost he is comfortable enough.
The gales have bent the tree-trunks into isobars.
But more & more the countryside dissolves in fog,
the same old local colour he could find them
anywhere: here, a child flagging down the schoolbus;
here, the cocky with the beautiful eye dogs.