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Press » David Howard » Shebang » The perpetual bird | ||||||||||||||
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The perpetual bird1The wind, wily as Te Kooti, at the window tumbling into your pupils: flesh gulls homespun over poplars they are a mockery of. From a lost novel by Robin Hyde prepared for some unknown celebration you sleep on the leather sofa you descend a guttering fire in the library ‘Daddy, don’t you see the devil or the answer of someone sleeping a stirring that is international in a flawed bowl the ghost of Henry James might notice— measured by the wingspan of the dove (O for the
wings…) feathers tracing a circle in the stone ocean the echo of Rua Kenana: 2 Ko te kiri kahurangi hoki i wera i te ahi! You look at the sun on the trees, suddenly you: the dew stone which is, I guess, language. If I put my hand in yours – but why our bed was covered with the sky’s debris: our heads could never rest on. Whispering, God no! If we hesitated it was only to go like relicts on a drizzling Sunday the turning for. The prevailing wind was the closest the scent of our bodies, traced those crow’s-feet our poppy eyeballs. God knows on the flagstones and once again we enter near the mirror which tells us nothing 3Once again the sky comes to knocker on our door. Draw I will answer with a half-smile, remembering presaging our boy, who will point answer a different door after my knock before me into the dark say, still tasting your pillow talk. respond, offering your body as the sky offers 4When the rain overwhelms when the star below closes its arms like the wings of McCahon’s angel Rusted barbs are more dangerous than bright ones. wants the signature of a child’s thigh, 5Say the water’s clear, your bare feet you are stranded on an unmapped island for my sail on this iridescent horizon like a dictionary definition of ‘desire’. drop of your stockings onto the nondescript through epithets, then expletives as we made I don’t want to know, I want to know 6E pari, e te tai! Kei roto toku aroha Tonight no keel will find expatriate status: they cannot make up off into the darkness laughing to whatever’s beyond the black rock. black, too; they assume Your voice mimics the sound of a cloud only there is no spinnaker, there is it will keep you warm, it will keep you down. Then you can set sail 7This sea wind carries the anxious carrying a candle that could gutter Mid 1996, Customs Street West, Auckland. 1. ‘Straight towards me flies a bird….’ 2. ‘Oh the precious skin was burnt by fire! 6. ‘Tide, flow on! The love within me
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