One Inch Bottles

corked

you palmed
into my palm

they contain
a pupae case
you plucked
from the fence

seeds we
rushed upon
trying to
best each other

purple carrot
shavings you
dried on
my heater

fragments
of antique
songs

string

Beach Comber

My Nemesis speaks
in the vernacular
from her slips

faces made of
sun ray pleats
drink the
ancient catch

and abandon
her hull to
salt rusty scabs
and perches of
weary godwits

she aches for
waterline modesty
and thin slices
of whale song
on melba toast

southerlies scour
her gentility
she curses
my pockets
filled with paua
and bleached
seal teeth

Fish Trap

She's a gleam
of sunlit
fish scales

a glance up at
radial winter
branches

his finger
slips beneath
her shirt hem

hooks her back
a small rip
a claim

red vapour
in water she
wriggles free

he lays a new trap
further upstream

baited with
erotic books
watch cogs
owl words
straw houses

she swims in

In memory of Dianne Perano who passed away August 5, 2009

Balloons for Dianne

In praise of silver skins

taut volumes of spirit
move and stay

stretched
by the vestry's breath

they hover above her
and rise

evading a float of steeples

The Accountant Cries

On his solitary walks
he feels the air in front of him
searches for her soft arm
the smell of soap and roast lamb.

Her hands folded in her lap
even when she watched
the 6 o'clock news her hands
were stored competency
reserved for mysterious tasks.

At school he'd imagine her hands
(he loved the fine wrinkles
in the pads of her index finger)
he'd imagine them at school
as he learned to rule
exercise books in neat columns.

Pushing his tie more firmly
against the knot of his throat
he flicks imaginary lint from
the knee of his immaculately
crossed trouser leg and

He feels the air in front of him
the long breath of years
too frightened to leave his body.

Appeared in The Press June, 2009:

Not Tonight

I’m a water bird trapped in the bellows
of a piano accordion.

In my walnut brain
a migraine of box headed musicians thumps.

Love song, thud song, an incessant canto of
dribbling basketballs.

It’s a peaceful lie
that God can distribute love on my behalf,

wrap it in a clean tea towel, crush it with
a rolling pin,

then scatter crumbs
in a trail that doesn’t lead to me.

Appeared in The Press, July 2009:

Fern and the Sandman

I hung the words inches from her face
in a painted dirigible filled with

go back to sleep little girl
and blew it into her half closed eyes

we won't run away

just down caves
swimming with seal pups
into the convolutions of a shell

a chirruping kiss
uncurls her