Title: Sport 43: 2015

Editor: Fergus Barrowman

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2015, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 43: 2015

Brent Kininmont

Brent Kininmont

Giant Gulps

In earlier times, all islands wandered about and had no foundations.

—quoted in ‘A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities’

How diminished
the old gods appear.

But for the crowns
their figures now

submerged, not
utterly forgotten.

Some, naturally,
still steam. This ferry

steers clear of them
and that drowning

sensation in our beds
whenever they

come up for air.
It’s an uncommonly

clear head we crave—
one now at ease in

the underworld. Once
flush with laurel

page 187

and myrtle, a crown smoothed
by eons of brooding.

Wrinkled only by that
Bronze Age road

still meandering
above the harbour.

Isthmus

Two thousand years to cut through this mound
in the way. But a 30-minute cruise
beneath the sheer rock walls depends upon
a booking. Poor planning stopped progress on
the canal before. Nero, to the relief
of 6,000 extras, pulled the plug months
into the first excavation. Any
entrails would have shown the huge drain on
the state would not end in his lifetime.
That a living god would never stand in
one sea, like Jose and I, and look down
the blue telescope of the canal at
another. Then drift along a warm gravel
road, collapsing the four miles by foot.