What bears the light of
gathering,
an earth-yellow desire or ability
to go on.
The wax
emerges from the bee
in scales clear as ice,
swept
& sweeping in
its slow glut
of pollen glow.
It is warm.
There is heat
in the thinnest wings,
in the single egg, words
for what silences us,
the living, encasing
& encased by
the dead. Plasma,
golden
when unbound
from blood.
*
Short proboscises
reach the depths
of tiny mānuka blossoms.1
What reaches us,
what do we cause
to survive.
Small holes (in the silence (of soil)),
where black bees
burrow like rain,2
where trees soften
into shapeless shreds,3
where their knots
have fallen out like teeth.4
A loop gently adorns a hole
as though a wrist,
perhaps framing where
a dead branch
was engulfed
by the expanding
tissue of the wood;
perhaps mouthing
a missing piece, cut out
so a thing might pass through.
Ring & air,
nucleus & jelly wall;
the two share a centre,
unhollow one another.
As if to remind,
this is not the void
but a harmless pebble of it,
carried
to know it.
With paper,
two children and I
recreate the eyes of owls.
I instruct them to place a black circle
within the yellow one:
with this black circle, I explain clumsily,
the bird will see in the dark, and
I cannot remedy their puzzlement.
*
settling in
living in
living5
The notion of home and of settling in was fraught for Perec, a child of Polish immigrants whose Jewish family name (the Hebrew Peretz) was buried within a French-assimilated one.
Living in the war meant burying a box of jewellery and pearls in someone’s garden, excavating it after years, entrusting it to someone else for safe passage across land and water.
Living in the war meant losing his mother to Auschwitz and his father to shrapnel.
Living after the war meant running away from his adoptive uncle and aunt’s home, meant being sent to boarding school.
Living meant a day job in the archive of a neurophysiology research centre for nearly twenty years, cataloguing maps for thousands of webs of nerves. How I imagine those tangles of dendrites creeping out like tentacles from within their dossiers.
Living meant adopting a pet phrase, life goes on.
To live meant to write, to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive, to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.6
*
To live/to live in/to settle in: water
settling by defying
containment,7
leaving
an empty pool
& entering
unseen spaces. Water
still trickling into
mineral-rich cracks
deep in the earth, water
below Ōtepoti
where a silvered mollusc
once lived,
a salt marsh flooded daily
by the tide.8 Water
suspending blood cells,
speaking in a glint
of tongue or tears. Water
meeting the thick black sap
of decomposed organisms
to make a thin film
of iridescence.9 Water
leaking
from pores,
sought out and sucked up
by lasioglossum,
the ngaro huruhuru
so drawn to sweat.
*
And is it still a body of water,
if it is so dispersed? Is this
the truer body? Am I
at my most existent
in the traces I leave?
Single strands of hair,
long enough to measure months
of living, of going on.
A world exists
at each end.
–
Written in bed, Waiheke, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2023