A New Word

I have a new presence inside me.
You. It is a pale still day.

The tuis are really here,
I have seen them, three of them.

Thrush, tui—which is the most mellifluous?
A word I learned from Phyllis Webb.

'Drunken and amatory, illogical, stoned, mellifluous
journey of the ten lines.' If I could sing

like you, like her, tui, like spring water and
far off a rock falling.

– 42 –

Sunset

Sunsets are for poets and there's not a thing
I can do with this one.

Gulls are careering out of the picture.
A man is thrashing upstream as if he'd kill

for its source. Wind chills my back
as I stand by the estuary which flares

like a glacier on fast forward towards the ocean.
No evening star. No moon.

Strands of gold thrown out
in the silver stream like trash

– 43 –

Floating

The lake is never like glass. It has a soft
top that will always let you in.

It will hold your confident body in its satin hammock.
O let your body be

in ancestral hands. Forget their treachery.
It takes so little—just a flutter

of your arms and legs to lie in splendour

being purely who you are already
preventing death in a state of grace

water      fire      earth       air
a state of grace preventing death