An essay from my other collection Lost & Found about finding your way back to the Dreaming Road, remembering that Enough is not always able to take the place of Everything. Followed by a fresh poem.
Leaving You Behind
How will I tell you now when I have changed?
You no longer see the reflection of your eye in my eye
You no longer see
I see the arc of the seabirds over the wind
The soft apricot of dawn over tide
You ceased to see some time ago
It has taken me much longer to pause
my looking for you, my looking to be seen
You might see the wind has pushed and pulled me about
The tide rushed at my feet
The oyster catcher had stern words with me
I am a little more unkempt, dressed by sky
Freckles from childhood called back by sun’s kiss
I have been changed by the course of the wind,
my body shifting, dunes buffeted by the onshore wind
Some parts of me fall, others grow fuller
I am softening now, that leather of breastplate
no longer braced for your storm.
How will I tell you, the mere degrees I have turned
towards the sun yet found
my steel-caged heart melting
The bar across my harbour
falling back into deep waters
The salt; crisp on the curve of fresh skin
preserving me, an imprint of how I was
While my warm, softer flesh falls into new shapes.
I lost a shadow in the last days of summer,
Moved your mountain a full inch westward on the map
I made myself more daylight in the East;
reclaiming hours in a forest that counts
a decade as a single day
I moved that mountain and gave your shadow up
to silence the shag’s appetite
Making unapologetic, warm space for my heart
How will I tell you - the landscape bears your shape
but my own will overtake it
shadow will no longer fall on me in damp winter
or the long stretch of summer burn me
the shorebirds remain to sing their songs and
dawn chatter for me
You now ageless and I ageing on,
how will I tell you how I am growing old
I tell the oystercatcher, he squawks again
he and I of the same age
Perhaps the black billed gull will bear it,
Carrying word into the horizon
while I am ankle deep in tuatua beds
Or dug into the hillside for the passing shower
In the steps between the chapters of my life
Harvest, gather, shelter, thaw —
I moved that mountain of undone things
I have kept the still waters running
in the deep spring of this river —
calm above, swift beneath.
From that dark crevice now —
a clear run out to the inlet
Salty spray flying while I bait the hook
I have learned how to cast into the harbour.
I would tell you that and other things too
Later I will find the language
An offering that echoes what it is
In the river that runs to harbour
Where I am born of the land and the lakes
You left no mark on the land but me to remain in it
How will I tell you that - I am what you made me
But I have become more than the sum of parts
The birds know and the moon sees it,
Rising and returning on me with regularity.
I swim in the dark water now
But mostly I wanted to tell you
I am finishing what was left undone
Collected the shells from the shore
Pulled seaweed from the tide
I finished planting the garden and
cleaning up the little messes that you left behind.
Spoken: The Road To Everything