Star: I saw you
In the cool dark of kind December
I hid tears in night’s gift and lived again

You would remember me
Hallowed in Northcote by the Georgian hymn
In the two-dollar store’s neon aisles

***

You—are the rush of thunder and the tempest
And your morning fog wakes the borrowed day with dew
You are the cèilidh of our city’s broken rain

You are the glitter around Tara’s harbour
Eyes soft in the sea-swell, refusing to die
—Sono un uomo, so they might take me for a buoy

You are the light on the ridgeline, the call between father and son
He sits in the foyer and I can hear him speaking
—Non mollare, hai degli amici

You are the fall of water to fern and the hand that holds me
Pulling me down from the hill to Kelburn ground
They are all around me: I love and find life in their bright and past-looking eyes

On the phone my mother says
Think of all the stone in the soil where you live
Isn’t it—scoria?
Go for a walk and look at the walls outside houses
Made from rocks dug out of the ground in people’s back yards
All that volcanic rock—from Mount Eden, as it was before

On the phone my father says
When I was your age, in Australia
For months I felt immobile
Like I was dragging myself around
Though I always went to work

(In Farmers Blue Monday drove him mad on a boombox
And people returned hifi sets after weekends, claiming faults)

That immobility is dangerous, my father says
Too long without movement and it gets very tough
You need motion

In the early years my father took me to Mount Eden
Watched me careen on the flying fox
Months after I moved to Grange Road, he asked
Do you remember?

I hadn’t, the fox not visible on my bus route
Now my neighbourhood mountain and the one in memory fused
In tectonic violence
Past rushing into present

***

In memory my grandmother, the stone woman, lies in bed
My grandfather, plutonic, hides the truth of his wife

On the phone my father says
I’m grateful I’ve never been as bad as her
Never faced destruction in the way she did

I want to go to Iceland, he says
It’s volcanic there
And cold
And listening to Icelandic feels like listening to my past
I can hear those Scandinavian roots
The Northern England of my parents’ families
Was settled by the Danes

When you are deep in it, he says
You cannot see above the barrier
And when you are out
You don’t understand why you couldn’t see

I imagine a wall of stone
And I am in the pit like Joseph
The man in the Catholic picture books
In my grandmother’s back room (gone now)

***

In the shadow of Maungawhau I bless my metamorphic body
Slowing and hardening and loosening and moving quickly
In and out, every week, like breathing

The present point in a lineage of stone
Of mental difficulty, peppering the timelines like ash

What the phone calls really told me was
Bless the porosity of your body
Nothing short of a miracle, really
That a stone can live a rewarding life

In my thirties, or maybe forties, my father says
I had a realisation about the meaning of it all
I know it’s hard, he tells me
But you’ll see

something sulphurous is dripping down
the inside of my torso
the inside of a cave
the damp of my body

in a hotel once—
the girl pressed into me
ground herself down to nothing
until she was as thin as pencil shavings
and bright as a knife

and the hair she had then is the hair I have now

my envious and Saturnal instinct
means I eat everyone up

as the grey came to brood in a soggy sky, Charon mated with Karen—
the Epsom houses have been hollowed out

in the remnant of pith there lies a spider’s egg of wealth—
white sneakers, light fixtures, pressurised air

and seeing castles in the ozone, a throbbing palimpsest

Google Search: synaesthesia memory depersonalisation
                         mood swings changes in light, weather

no one can give me a fucking answer

and the cloud, it’s trickling into my skin, it’s melting me
into the footpath with the sweat I carry

you’re incredible, you know

still pounding the pavement, even with all that in your head

Google Search: is it normal to feel like

            to feel

                        like

the mind-vomit

what did you tell her? that it feels like living in a horror film

yeah, you’re fucking amazing

;

chattering ghost faces run the gamut
see the small world
rotting leaf is beautiful—drip drip
straw grasses, feeding warrums near the plastic flakes
tinctures: concrete sizzle, line vertical, bird-tail-flick, happy house-dirt
door open merging boundary;
wishes laughing in the humid air

;

the tips of the lemon leaves are winking with water
I’m catching the sunset on the swing of my hand

there is no substitute for the growth of a year
the hard-edged confidence that hands me an afternoon
with new and good people

and returning home to the cat
bathed in some combination of
viridescence and old furniture
and hope in the yellow

            “Carol looked at her. ‘How do you become a poet?’
            ‘By feeling things – too much, I suppose,’ Therese answered conscientiously.”
            The Price of Salt, 1952, Patricia Highsmith

            i.          Bliss

I spilled water on the carpet when I knelt to feed the houseplants
Like you broke the milk jug
Ambivalence touched me lightly
I waxed translucent

I read in my old cahier the violent words of fantasy
I felt my knuckles drag
Soft fevers tore my skin
I ate fitfully and late

Music rang and crooned
The curve of my throat was vulnerable
Restless in the stair bend
I fell heavy with yearning

            ii.         The Mirror

You
I found you
I saw you in the Palermo
You stole glances but were afraid

And being you, I saw myself
In some unfamiliar frame
You were too much of a boy

            ***

Let me count the ways
That I am you
I read Joyce’s Portrait too

I too bought material things for love
And saw figures in clouds
And whole worlds in Sandringham houses that each seemed like their own country

I saw you and within you I saw myself too
And within that silhouette another self and on and on
Until I numbered in the thousands and millions

            iii.        Anger

Like you I could not escape capriciousness
Like Auckland weather

On Oxton Road I watched a curl of leaves rush across the street, unwinding
Those blissful feelings closely held were now dispersed and lost

I felt the blow she dealt you
The shame of living vicariously

I looked for you in a palindrome of movement
Here and there and there and here again

But you were gone and there was only jealousy
A disgust at never knowing true and beautiful affairs

And the sky turned to slate
And the wind blew as if to say

You will never settle
You will for ever shift and change

I stared at the 1917 in stone on a Dominion Road building
            which was there before you or I were born

And selfishly believed that the world held its breath for me
            and that was why the streets were empty

I ran to find you and put you behind me

            iv.        On to Perigee

In the end I came to your conclusion
There will be a gradual return, the journey slow where it had been so quick before
I’ll walk towards the natural and right ending of things

It is an omnipresent ending
I’ll make your choice repeatedly
On shuttering grey days and when the light is lemon-toned

None of the first ecstasy now
But still the wingbeats of the pulse of love—
Like you, I choose to continue