Title: Makara

Author: Joan Fleming

In: Sport 36: Winter 2008

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2008

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 36: Winter 2008

Makara

Makara

That night, she tried to fit the whole of him
into the space of her and it hurt but in that good way
like when the stars in the back of your eyes explode
and you can finally see a path to the moon
and the moon is saying oh oh oh stroking the tide in.
They drove his van into the dark with the bed
in the back and five curtains with a pattern of flowers
so small at first they seemed like polka dots, or sometimes
not there at all. He kept stones everywhere
and she talked about the boulders she had seen
with hollows that would fit a human body
and he said yes yes yes and she picked one up
and so smooth she thought he must have loved them,
and also driftwood on the dashboard and strange
wheaty parachute tufts that could slow
a free-falling finger, maybe a whole hand.
Over the dark hills new to her and white angry signs
along the way, she didn't know about the wind farm
but he would always point to these things,
like later, in a friend's hallway he pointed to a map of Belize
and said you know? and she felt small
and said no no no. And they kept on the dark roads,
roads that later she could bike the whole way up
after saying for years she'd never bike in this town,
he was always the one disappearing down the path
of their house in his bright yellow cycling jacket,
he was always asking her to name the precise colour
of that exact patch of sky, getting out three pages
of computer paper to make a border and she would say
nothing is independent but would name it peach-grey
page 173 anyway. When they came to the beach they drove right
onto the sand and she leaned up against the van feeling
everything was possible and she was thin and her smile
was a whole sky and he grabbed her and pulled her into his beard
and said I think I'm falling in love with you but then later
he never said I'm falling in love with you.
That's the thing about possibility. Anyway,
they chased each other across the dark beach
like children and hardly slept in the tin van home
under his clever netting with its small light and
its insect repellent and its holes. In the daylight
they were parked ten metres from someone's front porch
where a man was having his morning coffee, they hadn't seen
the distance in the dark but he said he didn't care
he would make love to her with all the windows open
and the sun on his back, but of course he didn't, and
they dressed each other, boiled their own thick morning cup
on the camp stove and talked about going to the Orongorongos,
and what it might be like, and what it might be like to stay.