Rocks, Te Namu Pa, Taranaki

I have seen the tribe upstanding
as waves of a sea and I have seen them

collapse, from the inside
like tents, their poles removed, or as trees

flattened on a hillside. Because there were
people here once, not just stones

long conversations wading the river, then lingering
as the light that lingers on its bed

of evening boulders, isolated clouds
nestled around the mountain

and tomorrow's rain as it falls,
as it is supposed to fall.

 

 

Untitled

Water, you are unwell
a stone falls through
your battered embrace

like the heaviest
weather or a comet plummeting
through space. If you had

daughters they would be
a line of markers
in the harbour

of your body, not at all far
from the entrance, signalling
the channel out.

 

Beausoleil

The beginning of summer was the end
of summer; spring became

autumn. A lizard running down a stone wall
ran back up. This year became that

year. Peak season became the shoulder
on the beach towel

and the blue of the beach towel that both measured
and defined summer

had wrapped itself around a colder
body. Summer at the beginning

of the pier became summer at the end
of the pier. And the vocabulary

of summer, with its lifeguards and loquats, had been
translated into a far off language—

one we could no longer speak, but would sit
listening to, as we sit listening

to the last waves of the season. And the dolphins that
we never saw. Ah, we can see them now.

 

 

European

A rectangle floats down
a river on which the riverboats are
triangles, except

as they pass beneath us: then
they are kites trailing their
fine, knotted lines.

Home is something we circle
but not as you would a cloud
or as a cloud would

you, rather as racehorses
crashing around a
Sienese town square

which is, as aerial photographs
confirm, in fact the shape
of a seashell. Most times a square

is only someone's inaccurate
memory of a rectangle;
a hexagon is a country

in which we live—although this
doesn't allow for the edges
as they soften

and harden and on which
rectangles of rain and sun
go to work

each day. We sit
on the circumference
of many circles or parts

thereof: these bays
and inlets where
far beyond

the frenzied particles and
particulars
that outlying island

is a perfect square and
one perfect day
we will go there.

Copyright © Gregory O'Brien, 2004.