haibun

A Play for Keeps

CAST:
BA & OT

OT: Were we here yesterday?
BA: [Pressing finger to forehead.] It seems so.
OT: Be is the beginning of seems.
BA: So it seems. [Pause.] But how is that so?
OT: In the beginning?
BA: The heavens and the earth.
OT: God is being; the other splits at the seams.
BA: I remember.
OT: [Excited] As if this is yesterday!
BA: Have you said your yes today?
OT: [Mournfully] Noterday.
BA: You seem always negative.
OT: Even when I am being positive?
BA: What is being?
OT: Here? Now?
BA: Yes.
OT: Being created the heavens and the earth.
BA: None of this is real then.
OT: Or now.
BA: Not since yesterday.
OT: So nothing exists?
BA: Only in seeming so.
OT: Created ex nihilo?
BA: It is only you or I who say so.
OT: What of the others?
BA: Just ourselves.
OT: And our non-self in common.
BA: I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
OT: More or less this I suppose.
[They sit down and look up at the absence of day.]

out of the
indistinguishable
our shadows

A Play on Words

CAST:
BA & OT

OT: I don't think I'm here.
BA: [After reflection.] Nor I. [Pause.] Ot!
OT: Yes.
BA: The moment has forgotten us.
OT: There’re no more moments.
BA: We’ve lost the moment.
OT: When?
BA: It was right here yesterday.
OT: [Elegiac] Ah yesterday!
BA: One of us could write something.
OT: Make it present.
BA: Always in the present.
OT: Like now and then?
BA: The moment before we lost it.
OT: Yes! Like a haiku.
BA: Haiku and similes don't mix.
OT: No metaphors.
BA: We learn from the pine.
OT: Hear its isness.
BA: The lily in itself.
OT: Out of the water?
BA: Out of itself.
OT: The moment when we lost it.
BA: When it forgot us.
OT: Lost in the sound of water.
BA: Everything changes.
OT: Images.
BA: Words for images.
OT: Tried and trivialised to death.
[Pause.]

hidden depths secreted from the pores

About 30 years ago I had a significant dream of a cemetery through which I wandered with an amazing sense of peace and well-being. The sense of space and life lived deeply has remained with me although the only visual remnant from the dream is a memory of the entrance. I took this dream to be a presentiment of where I would one day be buried, although I did not know if the place actually existed.

About 8 years ago I moved to Upper Hutt from the coast. One day, as I drove into the forest ranges bounding this upper valley, I was startled to recognise the cemetery entrance of my dream.

Yesterday, All Souls Day, I entered this cemetery for the first time to keep vigil for an hour or so with all the bodies, which once breathed, occupied space, and moved among us, and now, motionless, fill a more localised earth-space.

All Souls Day—
silence lingers long after
the loss of words

At seven, as the firstborn child of a physically and socially isolated post-war family in rural New Zealand, I cradled nightly the overarching vastness of the stars to bed with me; a stone I clung to through the infinity of space and time that stretched between wakefulness and sleep.

Filled with the universe, I would await sleep by trying to image the silence of total absence before the universe gained an existing presence. Nothing - no space, no time, no light, the total absence of everything - strained to take conceptual form within my childhood brain. Absence of light was easy but then I battered my mind against an easily imaged darkness but without form. Was it cubic, conical or spherical? Space requires boundaries. Can nothing be contained? But to be contained within one of these necessitated form and surely the void has no form and thus cannot change.

For hours I would lie in no-sleep trying to come to terms with an infinite sphere with no centre and no circumference until my being slipped into that place which was no-place.

Many years later I would read Jorge Luis Borges' essay "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" in which the author explored the possibility "that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors." Giordano Bruno, for instance, would come to state exultantly in 1584 "We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere". Borges then suggested that Pascal would darken this image with the words "Nature is a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

Stephen Hawking later misrepresented that Pope John Paul II had said to him “It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.”

Valuing the omnipotent reach of physics and mathematics, Hawking and associates have continued to explore the applicability of quantum theory to the instant before time and space came into being at the big bang. (I continue to struggle with the idea that the beginning can have a "before".) They came up with a model of the big bang according to the theory of general relativity that was developed to take into account quantum effects which they called the No Boundary Proposal.

The words the Pope actually addressed to Hawking were "Any scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as the hypothesis of a primitive atom from which derived the whole of the physical universe, leaves open the problem concerning the universe’s beginning. Science cannot of itself solve this question: there is needed that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics and which is called metaphysics; there is needed above all the knowledge that comes from God’s revelation."

with one last breath
nothing slips out of
the universe

In a fit of Bashō, I am moved to wax lyrical and philosophical on our lives in which each day is a journey and the journey itself home. Being so moved, my heart lead me from cemetery to cemetery within sight of Mt Taranaki to find the final resting places of my many Polish ancestors and the the sound of my origins.

journey's end
epitaphs teem with my blood
in fertile decay

Back in my 24th year, I purchased a small rural holding on the southern slopes of Mt Taranaki near Fantham's Peak. A long abandoned cottage was sited on the land amid regenerating native rain forest. With my earth-mother partner and our wild-child autistic daughter, I found time to clear some areas of the land to grow vegetables and flowers, make the cottage habitable again, set up a water-driven ram pump to bring water up the gully from a cold mountain stream to the house, and supply the house with electric power.

in the wild
less pioneering
day by day

Forty-five years later I returned to the life-teeming hills formed by Taranaki's last eruptions to revisit the old homestead and find those of my ancestors further around the mountain. One family settled near Midhirst and the other near Inglewood.

In a desire to practice their religion, maintain their cultural identity, and to escape the German juggernaut of the 1870s, the families became assisted immigrants from Poland to New Zealand. From New Plymouth port they were transported by ballast train to the areas in which they were to settle. The roads towards the mountain were little more than bush tracks and progress was made by climbing over old logs, supplejack vines and lawyer bushes on the way. The farms were in standing rain forest save for clearings where the homesteads were to be built. These first houses were originally built out of ponga trees.

Great great grandfather Johann grew fruit trees and kept a few bees. He lived to see his children married and was known as Lul to his grandchildren who remembered him as a deeply religious man, reciting his rosary outside while attending to his trees. His wife lived for 96 years.

tangata whenua . . .
we recite the mysteries
bead by bead

The swell of her belly that has been progressively pushing us apart for the last 36 weeks approaches its fullest ripeness.

"Feel baby move," she asks with the easy lilt that marks this time of our intimacy.

"It is still," I whisper.

In the delivery theatre an obstetrician tells us that baby has died and must be delivered now before its body decays much more in utero.

We greet our child, resembling a blanched tomato, robed in his white gown.

first blessing —
the sign of the cross
tears his skin

When Yosa Buson painted the "butterfly sleeping on the temple bell" haiku, he implicitly alludes to the Heike Monogatari tale of the demise of the Taira clan who, under Kiyomori's leadership, took a butterfly for their crest. In one visually appealing image the poet brings together a clear allusion to Chuang Tzu's dream that he was a butterfly and also to the Heike Monogatari's opening gong - "The sound of the bell of Gion Shōja echoes the impermanence of all things. The hue of the flowers of the teak tree declares that they who flourish must be brought low. Yea, the proud ones are but for a moment, like an evening dream in springtime. The mighty are destroyed at the last, they are but as the dust before the wind."

Some eighteen centuries earlier a pregnant virgin, overshadowed by the Tao, retraced the way that had lead the Ark of the Covenant to a house in the hill country of Judea. In response to the enthusiastic joy of her pregnant cousin's greeting, the virgin humbly proclaimed her Magnificat declaring the greatness of and her delight in God while foreseeing the reversals in store for the proud, the powerful, and the rich. Already the most sublime of all human tragedies, that would culminate in her coming child's cry of absolute despair - "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!", was seeded within her womb.

Of his 1926 sculpture, The Visitation, Jacob Epstein described the one single figure that he had completed as expressing "a humility so profound as to shame the beholder who comes to my sculpture expecting rhetoric or splendour of gesture".

Twenty-one years later Simone Weil would write in Gravity and Grace, "Humility is the refusal to exist outside God".

Reeling under the realisation that all creation "is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, but its circumference nowhere", Blaise Pascal focuses in on the imperceptibly small noting that "who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels".

with dewfall
a mite swims
the vault of heaven

New Zealanders face a 5.7% chance of developing skin cancer. Although our climate encourages outdoor activities, in summer UV intensities are high due to the overly-thinned ozone layer, clean air, and because the earth is closer to the sun.

The most dramatic ozone losses occur in Antarctica, where spring ozone columns can be less than 90 DU. This ‘ozone hole’ lies well to the south of New Zealand and does not pose a direct health risk. However, when it breaks up, filaments of ozone-poor air can sometimes pass overhead.

Elijah once needed to escape the burning sun, just as he needed to escape the burning anger of Jezebel and find shelter under a small tree. The Holy Land is a land of little shade. People there prized shade and identified it with the presence of God.

in the shade
of a peppertree
I am who I am

My spirit awakens to the flight of those I have known and loved who have taken the leap into unknowingness.

deepening night —
a fantail sings up
a pohutukawa

Boneholders, meshed within flesh. Wonderless, breath balloons squirming unheard. Worm-worded. Hegemonies of absence once upon their time. Gasping and groaning, Maui wriggles away into stillness and silence.

grave matter
in memory-made
once with words

Dearest Kitty,
An earlier diarist wrote this entry to you
"A bundle of contradictions was the end of my previous letter and is the beginning of this one. Can you please tell me exactly what a bundle of contradictions is? What does “contradiction” mean? Like so many words, it can be interpreted in two ways: a contradiction imposed from without and one imposed from within. The former means not accepting other people’s opinions, always knowing best, having the last word; in short, all those unpleasant traits for which I’m known. The latter, for which I’m not known, is my own secret."

She then ended her final diary entry with "I [...] keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if... if only there were no other people in the world."

Here we are now on Easter Saturday in quarantined lockdown (offered in sacrifice) as a final stand against the coronavirus infecting an unresisting world. Each person I hear from is a bundle of contradictions craving social interaction while practising physical distancing at one and the same instant.

a space to dwell in
the gloom of isolation
entombing silence

in the beginning it is as an old pond that looks as if there could be a before or even an after but within these words has neither although it could contain change if a frog were to jump in or out giving the water a sound it does not have of itself much like this earth we tear apart that may be 4.567 billion years old or the 6,000 years that we have been able to put our thoughts and tallies into a written form which takes these words circling back to what the word may have been

a breath of light
wind ripples
the waters

In 1882 Māori from the Whanganui River area on a trading trip asked Archbishop Redwood for a priest for their area. In 1883, Father Soulas and Suzanne Aubert left Hawke's Bay to go to Hiruharama, or Jerusalem, 60 kilometres up the Whanganui River.

In 1883, Aubert assisted Father Soulas as an interpreter and Māori cultural adviser along with two young Australian Sisters of St Joseph: Sisters Aloysious and Teresa from Whanganui. The two sisters from Whanganui were to teach in the school; their superior Mother Hyacinth arrived in Hiruharama to revive the Catholic Mission.

Aubert taught the Sisters the Māori language and customs; many children and adults came to the school.

The Sisters at Hiruharama, in addition to the usual customs of religious life, taught and nursed, farmed newly cleared bush, tended an orchard, made and marketed medicines, sold fruit to tourists and raised homeless children, as a result the community grew and thrived. Much of their income came through the sales of Aubert's medicinal formulations, including many cannabis-based medicines - Aubert is the first person known to grow cannabis in New Zealand. She was named Meri by the Maori community.

The Catholic Church has now declared her to be titled Venerable Suzanne Aubert on the path to her canonisation.

In 1969 poet James K. Baxter adopted the Māori version of his name, Hemi, and moved to Jerusalem where he set up a community based on a mixture of Franciscan and Maori spirituality. In 1969 he adopted the Māori version of his name, Hemi, and moved to Jerusalem. The community was a sanctuary for nga pohara:the poor; for nga mokai:the fatherless; nga raukore: the trees who have had their leaves and branches stripped away and who had resorted to drugs in particular to numb the sense of alienation.

I enjoyed Hemi's friendship from 1968 up until his death in October 1972, 10 months before my eldest daughter was born.

In 1981 my family and I escorted his widow and her friend, who was also my daughter's great aunt Janet Frame, to Hemi's last resting place at Hiruhirama.

There is a man.

In the very same instant, there is an ocean.

The man lives on the land of his origins.

The ocean has been existing since before the land was first drawn up from it.

The man wades within the ocean's shallows.

The ocean encircles the man with waves that have their origins at the very beginnings of changing tides.

The man and the ocean are at one within the unchanging love that moves the sun and entire rivers of stars.

forever

onshore
breeze

in an
undertow

for the time
being

of prayer

beyond
sight

Perhaps the most terrifying experience of my life came about from wanting to know what existence was like for my eldest daughter who was then aged seven. She was diagnosed as suffering from an extreme form of autism that left her almost completely in the world but not of it to the extent of being completely non-verbal - the classic changeling child of legend with a fairy-like beauty to match.

At that time she was having ever-so frequent tantrums that manifested in screaming, banging her head with her hands and against objects, arm-flapping, finger-twirling, scratching others and so on. Information on autism in New Zealand was then all but non-existent and there was absolutely no place to turn for ways to support her apart from just loving her just as she was and coping with the tantrums, meltdowns and way others judged, rebuked, shunned and ostracised her and, by extension, us.

The sense of helplessness was almost overwhelming and instead of asking the Creator, "Why?", I asked that I may experience in my own being what it was to be her and how she experienced existence that manifested in her full-body meltdowns.

My rash prayer was answered immediately. Everything that could pass through my five physical senses stampeded into me without any filter. Everything that could pass through the senses to be processed by the brain entered all at once, without distinction, without order, a complete and utter experience of chaos in sight, sound, smell, taste and touch without any filtering of intensity. It was impossible to even begin to process even the most minute fraction of what my senses were taking in to feed my brain. The sensory overload was extreme and to regain any sense of control I had to will myself to snap out of it.

Mercifully it stopped as quickly as the experience began.

Without that effort of my will I am sure that my identity would be submerged in a swirling chaos of undifferentiated sound, colour, smell, feeling and taste. I knew in the depth of my being now why my child had to withdraw into a world she could control.

I adopted all reasonable measures to limit and control the flow of sensory input to her brain. I think that I somehow decided that if her synapses could not filter neural impulses I would have to set external processes in place to apply a measure of filtering. 38 years later she is still in this world but remains not of it.

My youngest child had his 23rd birthday yesterday. He is also afflicted with neuro-atypical sensory perception but nowhere near to the degree of his older sister. In fact he is very intelligent with remarkable awareness of his neuro-atypical functioning and can communicate on a vast range of subjects that a vast number of neuro-typicals have little inkling of.

Last night we had a heart to heart conversation about what it is like to be him. When I told him about my experience many years before with his sister he said, "Yes that is it."

It is what it is.

One of the positives of living in these small, isolated, and lightly populated islands is that one has the opportunity of not only being able to become (should one so desire) a big artistic fish in a small sea, but also one comes to know many other artistic fish as friends and regular acquaintances, including many mentioned in this linked article.

In my college and university years I read everything that I could lay my hands on while also attending artist parties, poetry readings, art shows etc. etc. Perhaps I had become a regular culture vulture with literary aspirations of my own without the voice I could yet call my own in the ferment of artistic activity flourishing all around in the ass-end of the world.

By some strange twist in the fabric of the tapestry of fate, I found my voice in the ever-challenging muteness of my first born's autism-born psychic isolation and resistance to human contact.

My literary silence continued for the four decades of my life that I embraced as father and provider for a growing family sailing along the spectrum as refracted by the apparent spectre of autism and its consequences for us a family living at or beyond the fringe of normality.

No longer able to work I have ventured a little out of the silent darkness of a paleolithic cave to rediscover my voice as a small fish in a vast ocean before it falls into timeless silence.

haiku verse
my voice settles within
dreaming room

By the intermittent light of cars snaking through city street canyons, a man, in a language once his own, turns into the arms of the dark goddess, who once bore him the dawn; a lifelong grave in waiting.

'Te wahi ngaro, e Hine.' The limitless, the silent, the black night from which his eyes had habitually cowered with ashen words.

The night of stars turning according to vast and secret laws become the spirals of his dream as he sinks wordless into the dark mud of his ancestors.

He awakens slightly as a red taillight flickers by, turning his eyes inwards towards a sanctuary light or the eyes of the goddess flashing on some horizon; his eyes, which had once imaged the war chants of his ancestors notated as heads impaled on dripping stakes.

still water . . .
a black swan arches
into the depths

The debris of a consciousness once filling the dimensions of time and space wash away in his final agony just as the flesh-like image of Te-Atua-among-us was washed away when the last witnesses’ eyes were extinguished and the perfect love for Beatrice that was no more the moment Dante breathed his last.

my shadow . . .
the page I dwell on
afterwards

i experience a gradual decay through my seventh decade in an irresistible process of detachment from the world that will end when i end.

with first light i first-person myself into the I you resurrect before Thou.

O self-revelatory encounter!

wordless at first there springs an attentiveness that mines from paleolithic shadows an endless moment's willing suspension of disbelief until once more I am wordless at last.

this and this
I bless each absence
unaware

i continue to know nothing so i just writes what i writes. one word follows on from another sometimes echoing by sound or sense a word that precedes it. other times a word conjures up an image, a sound, a scent, a taste, or the feel of something once known. often words, or their relationships with each other, seem to make present something not sensed, such as absence 

third eye closed
a tuatara
passes time

Why was he looking up at the night sky?

In the frost-crisped night of central Taranaki, when light was evanescent at best, he foot-crunched through a paddock to exteriorise the dark that had been suffusing him.

What filled the night sky at that moment?

Just stars. So cold was the air that the darkness was clear and starlight was breath-held in its stillness. The Southern Cross was risen there. Night-dew christened his beard.

Was he seen?

None knew of his presence there let alone the nature or length of his existence.

What could he see?

Only a chill arc of stars, a rainbow of night, creating its own light out of nothing.

Why the tear?

Because he could see as he is seen.

Did this precipitate any change?

He was strengthened to endure all that is still to come.

Will he depict that night in words for others to see?

He will learn how to do without words.

at the end
the beginning
of the end

Clay fashioned into a semblance of a self. At first a form ready to be washed away as thinning earth colour back into the mire or to be baked into a figurative moment of permanence separated from its origins. 

Is such a making independent of will or is it the fruit of a profound silence knowing only itself?

breath-gathered
dust

warping mirror

between the shapeless 
and the shaped

an old man
no longer astonished

a yawning gulf 

that the reflection
is him

The waking hour strips the world of an irretrievable gift. A gift so deeply intimate that it is only conceivable in the stumbling beginnings of aspirated words which may remain no more than glimpsed reflections. It bears the traces of the weightlessness of shadows from the timeless instant of the bringing forth of light by word alone.

anywhen breeze
the moon swans about
its reflections

cattails  Premier Edition - January 2014
Editor's Choice - Haibun

Sometimes the most complex interactions we have with others revolve around birth and death. On the one hand, not one of us can avoid these two events, nor can they be experienced in a way that allows them to be fully shared with others. Yet, there we are in the midst of "the end", without words that matter, without explanations that truly have meaning. In the end it is the "silence" that most fully defines these moments, and completes the "sharing". This haibun brings this fact into sharp relief without a wasted syllable. Silence indeed takes a ‘form’ of it’s own, and fills the spaces in and between.

—UHTS Haibun Editor Mike Rehling, USA

In the beginning I will have been who I am – already. Seeing in being seen – hearing in being heard – touching in being touched.

In the mirror I see you seeing me. Along the canals I hear you hearkening to me. In the fog I feel myself to be your you.

Mirror on mirror reflecting each the other – I and Thou.

We are two 'I's, two 'you's, this ever-existing utter unity of us being a third. In the twinkling of an eye – our very breath.

boundless
dark

risen
sun

a breath
of wind

that which
blinds me

as if
voiced

gifts me
vision

am i here or are all my other moments of being here penetrating the present? am i processing what i am sensing or am i also in the overlaps of presents? if memory is the mother of the muses is her grandchild the alchemy of my history of nows in the crucible of the heated ecstasy of being here now?

the fire
of birdsong
in a day's embers

does the nearness of non-thinking, or that which passes for such, break through, breath by maddening breath, the fogs of perception into the tripping tongue clicks and aspirations enfolding rounded sounds of words snatched from the void of dead letters ocean-bobbing in corked bottles

all night
the namelessness
of becoming

All living things manifest their livingness by their ability to
• grow
• move
• breathe
• respond to stimuli
• eat and drink
• excrete
• reproduce

I have been present at the birth of each of my children, and also at the birth of puppies, kittens, calves, lambs, birds, insects, flies, flowers and trees. The shortest lived stage of each is the last of these abilities.

shortest night —
sounding out his name
a morepork

All dying things manifest their livingness by slowly losing their ability to
• reproduce
• excrete
• eat and drink
• respond to stimuli
• breathe
• move
• grow

I have been present at the death of each of my parents, of relatives, of friends and also at the death of dogs, cats, cows, sheep, birds, insects, flies, flowers and trees. The loss of the last six body functions more or less follow this order of withdrawal in the final hours or days.

Where in this process resides consciousness, will, imagination, love and malice and when do they leave?

longest night —
the artist paints
his white 'I AM'

Today I recall the years when, as destitute students, we occasionally gathered together from all over the inner city to share a meal. The host would fill a large pot with water, drop a large stone into it, and place it on a hot stove. Each guest would then bring their offering obtained from food cooperatives and communal gardens to add to the pot. Offerings of onions (both red and brown), carrots, celery, potatoes, leeks, pumpkin, parsnip, spinach, capsicum and so on joined seasonings and herb garnishes to gather the many into one.

When it was ready we would break bread and consume the feast.

dewfall —
the ripples en route
from a single word

It is a frosty 5.40 a.m. on Friday June 28. This pre-dawn stillness marks the beginning of Aotearoa's national holiday of Matariki.

In Maori tradition, the rising of the Matariki star cluster signals the beginning of the new year. This tradition has been embraced by all who now live in Aotearoa.

At this very hour, I have been awake since 2 a.m. meditating on the ever-present mystery of God.

life-watch
sky-sisters crest
the horizon

"Dystopia?"
"My eyes have been squinting."
"All three?"
"One after another."

gallows pole
a wind chime hangs
on each word

Without the creation of a word to name it in the late sixteenth century, did the doctrine or belief that there is no God have existence? What prompted the active rejection of God leading to the refusal to believe in that than which no greater can be conceived  let alone have the ability to even conceive of a being greater than oneself at all? Was it the hubris of an impatient heir on the brink of committing parricide?

Some three hundred years after the word was created Friedrich Nietzche proclaimed "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

A self-avowed atheist, did Nietzche mean that there was once a God who had actually died, or rather that the collective idea of one had? Following the so-named Enlightenment, the idea of a universe entirely subject to laws of physics instead of divine providence was now reality. Philosophical discourse had shown that governments did not need to be based around the idea of divine right to be legitimate, but rather formed by the rational consent of the governed — that it was possible to develop a full-scale and consistent human morality without reference to God. It seemed that the human adventure no longer needed God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the universe; philosophy and science now seemed capable of doing that for us.

Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design states "M-Theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law..... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Are we the words we make flesh from?

my shadow follows
the sun to the edge
of the earth

For the present I live within walking minutes of the river that shapes and waters this valley. Two parks run parallel to the river's course through this part of the valley. One is called Moonshine Park and the other, Poet's Park.

Birdsong in the nearby stands of dense native bush is the leftover sound of this land from psalms chanted before the advent of the human presence. My heart burns within me as I catch snatches of the silence that the floating world drowns out catchphrase by catchphrase.

panting deer . . .
a hyssop branch drips
sour wine

In 1974, my partner and I shifted from the country's largest city to buy a small rural holding on the southern slopes of Mt. Taranaki on which to raise our first-born. It was a place far away from the peopled-world she seemed to choose to shun. The land came with lush vegetation, crisp mountain air, a clear stream, and a disused cottage. The rich soil soon yielded its energy to us through our growing harvest of vegetables and herbs.

I used my developing do-it-yourself skills to provide our home with running water, light, and heating.

afternoon delight—
the love of God
is all about us

The toll of working 12 hour shift rotations daily in the train marshalling yards which were some 12 kms away, and the violent midnight destruction of our chimney by a substantial local earthquake did nothing to lessen our resolve to provide an environment that was acceptable for our child.

Our respective parents soon also moved to Taranaki to be near us. We gathered regularly with them on Sundays. My partner's aunt, who was a world famous novelist soon made the move to Taranaki as well.

Often our conversations turned to our daughter's increasingly alarming detachment from the world, her total lack of any language development, despite our literary preoccupations, while her motor skills developed early. Our heaven-gifted child skipped the crawling stage altogether and moved in a short time from walking, at 8 months of age, to running wherever and whenever she could with no sense of danger and no awareness of her dependence upon us.

mountain fog—
the apple of my eye
slips through my arms