Poem 62

Good visuals … I’m trying to catch the look and feel of the New Zealand I either know or imagine …
Alicia with her big car was inspired by a photographer who took my picture for The Listener …

( … foetal spine hanging like a glow worm from the stone world – look at the globe and you’ll see it … )

Desert Road Song

This is salamander country the cold lizard
that speaks out of the fire
                              a few knobbly mountains
    with frozen fingertips falling away into melt
and green
           a foetal spine hanging like a glow worm
from the stone world
                        Alicia has an American car
so big it seems to jam in the throat of the islands
she drives recklessly not caring whether
she's in the front seat or the back swallowed
in upholstery she blasts across the plateau
then has to come back again because those mountains
    were gone so damn fast (Waiouru sounds just like
Tucson to her)
                 the bush presses close to the roadside
shooting out ferns like coiled tongues
seed knocked early from the grass by cars'
constant percussions
                         in the afternoon
     blue light falls on the hills
the road is warm and alive
a line of friction transfixing the country
hawk pulling up from it
       as if it were a new wound