1. SOUTH
OTAGO COAST
Below inch-high
Clutha
are blowholes and coves,
long shelving bays where seabirds walk.
The ocean
booms to herself
in a victory or anger
I can’t translate.
Only the
seals,
gods of these mica sands
and sea-mauled points,
observe
the cloudy heads lined up
as this wind-sculpted coast recedes south,
beyond my vision.
2. MANUHERIKIA
The wind
speaks a foreign tongue
and the century and a half
we’ve
been here
does not make it less strange
as it buffets
the tussocks
and grows brash from the snow plateaus
a horizon
away. Gold
lured the pioneers who built
St. Bathans,
Cambrians, Lauder
that do not belong to this moa-boned earth
dreaming
reverently among its eerie geography
like the landmarks of gods.
3. WHALE
COAST
Driftwood,
seawrack.
The tide lays her unreadable icons
where the beach shelves.
There are
other carvings:
bleached whale vertebrae,
a seabird’s rumpled ruin;
and among
marram dunes
yoked to this scrubby beach,
sea purples bloom.
Once a smokestack
rose up on the bay
and a whaler’s shed
where the bluff ends.
Now only
wind roars
over the seaward mountains;
seaspray mists an obscure coast.
4. MATAKAEA
... where
sealions dream. All night
a moonstruck silence,
the ocean’s
cuss like a heart.
When light blinks on
offshore
stacks define themselves.
Dawn’s grainy,
loud with
seabirds’ anger,
louder than the breakers between heads
sweeping
south to Tairoa
deaf with surf.
While in
Katiki Bay the tide inscribes
her writing on perfect sand:
crab and
cormorant scripts,
the oldest runic hand.
5. RUSH
Landfall
on a whaler’s coast.
Crossing gaunt hills, range after range.
In Maniototo
snow tussocks
and rock gullies
still clatter
with their barrows.
You can find rat pits,
manuka poles,
sluice buckets.
Even miners’ nugget boots
and wide
awake hats. In such
wilderness
the scab
weed stayed longer
than their greed.
6. OCEAN
MUSIC
From under
the gold leaf patterns of land
a slow tug crawls across the bar
to trawl
oyster beds. Not today or ever
shall the sea be the same, which bears us
to Ruapuke
and the Halfway Rocks
where swell crackles over limpets.
This is
the smelt run where reefs build,
the sealion’s lookout;
under a
cowl of mist Rakiura
sleepwalks in another age.
When lace
rain falls on the sea
we winch over our pots;
the land
has gone. Only ocean music
and a southern right whale sounding.
7. Paturoa
Bay
The sea’s
gravelly breathing is a mile out
and the exposed mussel beds are intense
green clumps, like poison.
Infinitely
slowly sandworms scribe a fine writing
the tide shall erase.
And whittle driftwood into drowned faces.
Then eyes
raise from the sand; blink.
One million years to create such
murderous vision.
As the crab
excavates itself from burial,
hoists an appalling claw,
a slurry of seawater moves in.
