The Taste of Spring

From up here,
on my hill,
I see the white caps
of the harbour
stumbling in the morning light.
Their impetuous play
carries new anticipation.
They too fall upon the shore
in love.
In the vigorous wind
that bowls through the suburbs,
precariously tilted
over Wellington,
I witness the
gleeful annihilation of
clothes lines,
and the scent of the
wild spring
buffets my heart.

My Lady the Moon

She has everything now,
up there.
And when she turns to me,
as if to say
there is no one else you could love,
her regard bores through
these hands I raise
to show I am nothing
but a receptacle of her night.
She has confiscated all of these,
my affairs,
my days used up with love.
Afflicted by a burning chest of solitude,
in the month of her fiercest song,
I sit atop the highest hill,
far above a town full of
sleeping dogs,
of waiting bells,
drunk and full of ache
with a wind-devoured bone,
I try to patch things up
with my lady the moon.

In the girl was a violence

In the girl was a violence,
a century of hungers
that she often lulled to sleep.
Then, one by one,
from her open chest,
came red balloons,
fears I burst with
the sharp edge of my
love.
She entrusted these things to me,
for a purpose I
would never discover.
In the soul of the woman,
the child’s despair was
never outgrown.
With her,
I would always be child too,
I would know the
indescribable lightness,
diving head first
from the flaming rocks
into an unrelenting
life.

Sun Shower

Caught in a sun shower,
the girl in my garden
flings five crusts of bread
in wide arcs,
bird gifts,
turns heel,
runs back inside.
Birds and girls,
saturated, singing,
leaping in my garden
like wings of rain.