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Sport 35: Winter 2007

Whitireia

page 153

Whitireia

Last winter the back door stuck fast, swollen
by southern rain that came day after day
until they could remember only rain.
He removed it from its hinges, he laid

it on the garage floor and, with a plane,
unfurled the wood. The pale curling pine was
his hieroglyphic, the marked door became
a palimpsest as did the state-built house;

they were etched with livings of a hundred
hundred people and their scripts. Out back
the cement path hoarded prints of long-dead
dogs and slowly groomed the lichen. Two blocks

further the streetlight touches on the park,
the pa forgotten under grazing stock.