a few poems for Kora

Your Lucky Green Cap.


Across a field of raspberry grass
your trail spins out. Stars light
tips of my hair and swirl
behind your absent face,
suspended in crystal sugar sky.

Love sits on my head, like your green cap
twisted back. My happy thoughts
in the peak, bereft of you,
your residue residing in the sparkle
on the dew, and in the echo
from this favored shell
that cloaks my memories.

How can I believe you
when you tell me you are dead?
When you are here with me, so real,
and I can touch your smile
inside the floating espers of nostalgia
that melt their slender tapers
into shallow bowls of loneliness.
A fat and sluggish waxing
of forgetful flame.

It’s not the same I know,
but the pain destroys my freedom
and confines me here. Across this field
a warm wind blows and teases through
my quiet wounds, blood still fresh.
The bitter howl of empty air
passes through bones you left;
this cap, a ball, a thumbprint
on your bedroom wall.
I can’t believe you’d leave me here,
alone after all.










Loose Mooring


Tears slip beneath my skin.
My sorrows sail there
in little boats.

The doctor says when the leukemia’s
white fingers reach far enough
into my mother's brain
she will go unconscious
and

when I think of it
all my little boats go into a frenzy,
run pennants up and sail in circles.

The woman with two-colour eyes
and the dark northern woman
will join hands with me.

We will cast spells,
weave baskets to carry shells,
with my mother's music carved in their grooves.

We'll sing the ocean and shore
where she can run barefoot
and send our messages to her in bottles,
float all of our sorrowful little ships to her.







Pines Beach Domain
March 2004


Pines needle the sky
along the edge of the domain.
I sit on a bench
in squinting sunlight and think,
if you were here
we’d giggle about Zac last night,
telling me girls at school
nicknamed him ‘teddy bear.’

I’d show you the poem I wrote
and you’d make me feel
like Maya Angelou.
We’d talk about story ideas
and you’d pretend to frost your words
with lilac tints, all the while
the flame tips of your phoenix feathers
reaching up so bright
they’d make the sun seem to dim.

But a cool draft shimmies the dunes
as though someone left the door open
and the seat beside me is gray with ash,
gritty on my fingers where I sit
trying to create feathers.
I should have gone with you.








Terminal



I’m watching you go,
feeling you fade.

Clutching tight
with both fists,

still you slip
through my fingers
like afternoon sunlight.








Dark Flowering


death is a dark rose
that blooms only once
the petals fall forever








The Breakfast Shift


Elton is playing Your Song –
piano tinkles of glass threads
adrift on the breeze.

A woman in front of me
gives Eftpos instructions to her Mum.
I keep my eyes down so she can’t see
the saltwater sparkle in them,

a wave that suddenly threatens
to wash small villages of freckles
from my cheeks.

They watch my fingers forget themselves,
stumble over everyday tasks,
as small-town New Zealand rolls past
to purchase toast and orange juice.

I weave my way between tables
once weighed with plenty,
now laid to waste, and remember
last night’s dream –

a ghostly mother playing
my son’s toy keyboard,
a song she used to play with him.
The sounds are sharp, like glass threads
snapped in the breeze.