They wrap mountains round my eyes,
they say ‘look’ and it’s all what they say
where the colour, that’s another word is
deepest blue, and that’s the colour of
the wind, blowing this way, warm and dry
coming from the mountains, visibly.

I have eyes in the back of my neck
too, the sun is mumbling the day’s news
over my head. In so many words.
My morning bath was warm, out of a tap.
This garden is just one year younger
than I, ‘girdled round’ five years ago

with six-foot galvanised iron on
rimu posts, the sawn timber elsewhere
supports the Number 8 fencing wire
with one barbed strand, a little rusted.
The new vicarage is a ‘bungalow’,
the veranda faces north by west,

casements are fashionable magic
again, since the double-hung sash went
out, opening on the forms of pain, of
mumbled words, mountainously pronounced.
Too small to see over, I can thread
my line of vision through a nail-hole

in the iron. I give it a tug.
The mountains have shifted at their moorings,
shudder and heave clear. The biggest wind’s
in that quarter, it loosens the snows,
the Green Road is under water, old
Mr and Mrs Troon in a boat

are ‘taken out’ repeated in a dream
of the Troons, the Troons! What have I done?
What are the Troons doing ‘taken out’
in a boat in the dark up Green Road,
old and ugly and wet? The wind was
never so dry and warm or the smell

of sheep so sour or the dust so thick
in the macrocarpas. The mountains
are the colour of wind, the highway
north is a pillar of dust by day
half-blinding riders and dogs, westward
the river still rises. My mother

bathes my eyes with boracic, she ties
up torn dianthus, delphinium, phlox
wasted on the alluvium the storm-
waters have been scraping seaward since
the sun mumbled the first implanted
word. My mother grows it all from seed.

A small charge for admission. Believers only.
Who present their tickets where a five-
barred farm gate gapes on its chain

and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock.
Out of afternoon pearl-dipped light the
dung-green biplane descended

and will return later, and later, late as
already it is. We are all born
of cloud again, in a caul

of linen lashed to the air-frame of the age,
smelling of the scorched raw castor oil
nine whirling cylinders pelt

up-country-smelling senses with, narcotic
joyrides, these helmeted barnstomers
heavier scented than hay,

harnesses, horsepiss, fleeces, phosphates and milk
under the fingernails. I’m pulling at
my father’s hand Would the little

boy for selling the tickets? One helmet smiles
bending over yes, please let me,
my father hesitates, I

pull and I don’t let go. Neither does the soul
of the world, whatever that is, lose
hold of the load, the bare blue

mountains and things hauled into the time of day
up that steep sky deepening from sea -
level all the way west again,

this paddock, the weight of everything, these people
waiting to be saved, without whom there’s
no show, stay in place for ever.

A hand under each arm I’m held, I’m lifted
up and over and into an open
cockpit Contact! Gnome-LeRh

The moon rolls over the roof and falls behind
my house, and the moon does neither of these things,
I am talking about myself.

It’s not possible to get off to sleep or
the subject or the planet, nor to think thoughts.
Better barefoot it out the front

door and lean from the porch across the privets
and the palms into the washed-out creation,
a dark place with two particular

bright clouds dusted (query) by the moon, one’s mine
the other’s an adversary, which may depend
on the wind, or something.

A long moment stretches, the next one is not
on time. Not unaccountably the chill of
the planking underfoot rises

in the throat, for its part the night sky empties
the whole of its contents down. Turn on a bare
heel, close the door behind

on the author, cringing demiurge, who picks up
his litter and his tools and paces me back
to bed, stealthily in step.