Poem 22

Imagining all times, religions and mythologies happening at once, every place with its story and its cycles, spirit fused to the world, overlaying the physical like a transparency … 

… there’s a great sense of movement in this poem – flying, leaping, whirling, racing …

… Taras Bulba horsemen I got from a Tony Curtis film, the Hatu Patu stone is still by the highway in Atiamuri (recently attacked, police are looking for an angry woman with claws, if you see her you’re advised not to approach) … 

… the engine dying under me at the scariest point on the map is true – the Mamakus a primal and unnerving range of hills and basalt tors outside Rotorua … Ted Bullmore was the art teacher at my school, a great artist and an early death …

The Spirit World

Carp are flying in the japanese wind
deserts bloom before camera crews
every ten years 
                  every sticky skull
in the festival of death will be eaten
and the mould broken full of pennies for children

sleek buddhas dance
the steppes are full of Taras Bulba horsemen
leaping chasms old spirits of locus and genus
returning
using paper fish and flags for guidance
I build stones over the bent head of this place
a creek under pines
put a wheel in the water to whirl out prayer

wolves retake the winters of England
racing to the outlands of London
and the cumbersome talons of our own ancient eagle
cross the sun again
in broad daylight on the Atiamuri highway
the bird-woman gouges a stone
Hatu Patu laughing within

I have felt the engine die under me
midnight in the Mamakus
the land of outcrops
ravines choked with witches
the volcanic country where Ted Bullmore painted death
to know what he was dealing with

I look out the window
Miramar humps and splashes like a whale
like an elevator the airport judders down the earthquake levels
into the old old sea