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The Sands of Wairarapa Beach



Prologue



The man of old sands

performs his manipulations

before the mirror;

turns his glass.



He notes again his aspects wear

to lesser features,

grain by grain,

as his life each day

expires, yet rages

to be not constrained

by the turning of one burning grain,

but to span the wink eternal

of light to dark, universal

and back



and back again.



One glass empties;

one glass fills.



“Ah,

but let me begin…”



Act 1



Gaffed and netted

aloof, astute

on these parenthetic, wind struck days,

he remembers, still, how was the air:

flaked like shingled slate

sun struck and shriven;

his watching borne upon an azure sky

brushed like a young girl’s hair,

only blisteringly

blistered white



and behind came

the rain,

blind and dry

in its unravelling,

as he

strove to gather

thoughts

like pools

trapped against the tide

of stillness.



He remembers the maritime,

with mute photographs and fractional

images of

strand etched bottles

and other

subtly wayward farings;



but mostly now only counting loss,

the empty spaces that prevail,

his arms akimbo as if vaguely

chasing away

the formlessness of these fears,

these vestiges,

these alter days.





Act 2



His eyes linger

upon an aching shore,

restless to be

where fleshless, the winds sweep fierce

across the sand grained wastes

of

the sea and sky abutted,

to peel back the clinging, fluted green

of living,

to there reveal

the images real,

and the great distance come resolved

of

the blue on blue

and the blue on blue.



But mired in the cruel,

the flightlessness of morning,

how the smarting tongue uncurls

from the promises that night has wrenched

from shaking, sweating palms;



as unbidden, immortality

proffers, soft,

not light, not joy;

breathes not the breath of a visionary

horizon,

but the clinging of

a deep, blind sea;



and ever edging



to the borderline

he waits,

and wears



infinitely small

and

infinitely

thin





one more transparent grain tumbling

backwards into

the air.





Apparitions.

Whisperings through the glass.



Echoes.



The swalelands.





Act 3



The man of old sands

turns his glass.

Cleft and hollow, the slow devouring.



He looks to his hands,

shaken as if something other

stirs inside;

he dreams to be free

of these prognostications,

these leaches;

he dreams only to walk the sky’s beaches.



The man of old sands opens his palms;

nothing stains, nothings marks;

all

emptiness fills,

to overflowing.



Soon

only the salty spaces

within the sands

will remember the hungers devoured,

the tides withdrawn



and the waves that washed

like a young girl’s sighs.





The matted twisted nets

knock against the boards;

he knows not how to answer.



The rime of ages settles thick,

both cocooning and dehydrating;

his fingers reach towards the glass….





One

glass fills;

one glass

expires.

One

glass fills;

one glass



expires.







An Epilogue



Here now,

is all such longing stilled;



here, a faceless moon,



a starless wind sung night;





and smeared in the corner of the mirror’s eye,

just the aspect of a smile…









"Ah!



This, then, is all it ever was,



and it is …”





done.