MY MOTHER’S COUNTRY

1/

There is no water here, only schist and quartzite;

the gleaming quartz gravel pulverised for gold.

The only gold now is gorse on the ranges, 

the flat topped and rolling ranges, and basins

the alluvial basins long dry, nothing to drink 

of the cold streams that powered wheel and sluice, 

think silence and solitude broken by a rabbit

sudden as a rifle crack amongst the rocks 

in a sere and sun-trampled land, not even

an acrid sip from a natural basin in the rock,

stillness interrupted by empty thunder,

impotent, somewhere off in the ranges.

Grass has a cleaner death than ours, a sudden

russet overtaking of the chlorophyll, acceptance

and no pain, a dry and fragile skeleton behind:

live, and die, and live, and die, and live again.

Behold the meteorite, all overgrown with lichens,

half buried, the contours softened by erosion

for thus does earth make of her own

part of the sky fallen in a forgotten shower.

Orchards I will not inherit crumble to dust

against an abrupt hill, and below the ranges 

lies the town where my mother was born,

like Lyonesse beneath a lake, damn flooded.

Drowned Old Cromwell.

                                             There is the water

but here is the land

my dead  lie buried in

five generations

full six feet under.

No water

No spring bubbles from the rock

Not even the sound of water

just the cicadas in the parched grass

shrilly reminding

the universe of their existence,

lichens, skinks, cockchafer beetles

and wild thyme

shanti shanti shanti                   

shanty town.

2/

Rusting cages like gibbets are strung over

the Clutha; these are pragmatic

metaphors for vanitas.

From Cluaidh, the Gaelic name for the Clyde.

The river’s borrowed goddess is Clota,

the divine washerwoman,

worshiped by the Welsh-speaking Damnonii,

scrubbing clean the past in the eddy Mata-au,

a roaring taniwha.

Molyneux is as forgotten as the Moa of the upper headland.

High above the sparkling ochre stone of the gully

the hawks hover. In the glaucous water

mini Charybdis and Maelstrom,

for this is mythic country, and Scylla may any minute

erupt from the ore-bearing rocks, nosing for a victim.

Turning over in the riverbed

(the water of history rushing

over the rocks of time) a dissolving bone,

a lost nugget of gold, a story.

Stark rockfaces seamed with milky quartzite

hunting off like arteries to the motherlode.

The water is tugged and ripped continuously

from the bolt by the white thunder

of rapids no Huck Finn would dare attempt

and the river’s drumming weirs, whorls and hesitations.

3/

Even in drought, this a maternal country, these

these calcified vertebrae of the landscape, ramparts

of civilisations that never were, dissolving

like slow aspirin over centuries into the trickles

and springs babbling oracular through fissures 

beneath, gnawn out hollow cloisters where the first tribes,

returned from trading, traced inscape constellations:

terror eagles that could carry off an infant, moa

with periscopic necks, taniwha the river guardians

(and wonder if they worked in monkish silence

or gossiped and told stories, tagging like teens),

touched up by a flying Indo-Dutchman or broken up

for crude mortar and fertiliser for sheep pasture

and even fed to chickens to improve their eggshells.

Think of Oamaru, as if a fleet of quinqueremes

fetched up in Waitaki mouth with a lost Roman legion

and they had their own Renaissance without waiting.

Think of all those neoclassical basilicas Frank Petre

knocked up around the South Island; all limestone,

lunar and luminous, our ersatz Carrara and Parian.

Malignant quarries, descending terraces like Dante’s

Hell, eat into the green breasts of hills like cancer,

chisel, sledgehammer and crowbar, in frenetic violence. 

The thyme and tussock scented air has a churchlike

cadence, labyrinthine gennel and ravine,

karst, underworld castle, grotto and womb-cave,

ampitheatrical doline, fluted karren, an abstract

sculpture park, an alien world from 1960s Star Trek

populated by the occasional fleece-bound hermit ram.

There on the hill like the Rook from Titan’s chess set,

the squat wizard’s tower of an old lime kiln, mellow

and round; that’s where they immolated the lumps

of congealed millennia of foraminifera skeletons

haunted by trillions of very tiny ghosts whispering.

Beyond the crumbling portal it’s dim and cool

like being submerged in well water, but dry

and the slightest sound roars around its hollow, blackened

brick rudely glyphed by bored teenagers from nearby 

farms, satisfying the unconscious craving for the aedicule.

Outside the breasted curve of the landscape watches

this recent interloper warily, though recognising

the reassemblage of its own atoms, and the water

twists through it like dark veins in a wrist, chuckling,

giggling and babbling irresponsibly in the darkness.