Sport 34: Winter 2006
Regionalism: three poems
Regionalism: three poems
Silver gelatin print, Russell, Bay of Islands
Given, as taken, from a westward leaning wharf—
trailings of rust buckets and evening ferries. Later,
a sheet of photographic paper adrift in the windowless room.
There is only one fish in the sea. Many times over.
Reading Italian poetry at Waihi Beach
for Vincent Moleta
A chestnut or cricket ball
it bounces
along the edge
of the known world—
the well-tempered avocado
the well-trained satellite—
hovers in the mind
before re-entry, then lands
on the orchard road
amidst a flock of well-heeled quail
for whom waits
the patient motorist.
Martinborough, 31 December 1999
As soon as the new century has tidied up
after the old
this distant
departing music
will finally be gone
then we will amble far
from the lopsided horizon
our half-asleep bodies.
Then the rain that
need not bother us
need not
no longer. And the dogs that dig
their trenches
in the rose-garden of 1917
and the war dead
need never
have dug nor died—
the century best understood
as a sunlit chessboard
from which the last remaining pieces
have fled
our bodies far from us
and the grass beneath us
further still.