*
To live through the poem, be on the other side of it. Coming back
from Invercargill, turning east from Mataura to Clinton, the sky 

flood-dark to the north, drove into a first sheet of rain, stopped
at Clinton for a pie as the rain rang down on the asphalt; went on 

to Balclutha and the rampant Clutha, tree-tangled, brown,
its effluent-gilded floodwaters underneath the bridge 

purging to the coast; to Milton, where by State Highway 1
pukeko on berms scratched for worms teased out by the rain, 

behind them, a dirty inland sea slurping at the roadside;
to Henley, brown; across the Taieri, enormous, brown, 

plastic silage bales bobbing about like ice cubes in soup;
Allanton, Mornington, Warrington; the end of the poem 

still far off, though I believed it imminent on my arrival,
readying myself, stepped from the wheel into the rain. 

 

 

*
Later, on the road south again to Gore, everywhere evidence
of the flood, by Milburn pukeko kneading sodden pasture 

as if to draw the land's milk, at Clinton disarticulated fences
draped over the paddocks. Past dramas reassemble, 

resolve, amplify in the journeys of our conversation,
the inevitable client meeting, and then home to Dunedin, 

we talk cows and lawyers as Murihiku recedes line by line
under the old BMW, idling at roadworks while animals 

amble along in lines beside the road, their thick breasts
slapping them onward to the milking sheds. The poem 

is now another voice of the land, gutteral, unforgiving,
suing the pasture in the aftermath of the giant rain, 

tight-lipped as ever about any motive or predilection,
mess-driven, acquisitive, convoying the blatant mud. 

 

 

*
Flower of rain, rainbow, rain-soaked grass. Vivid green,
cloud sombre as glacial till, and corridors of sunlight 

travelling the remoter farmland. Not difficult to see,
even accounting for the clearance implicit in this landscape, 

the disclosure we call beauty uncovering over Southland,
hedges articulating a light that is the colour of being. 

Discussion among the fence wires. Pukeko to pukeko,
the fix is neither straightforward nor sophisticated, 

we agree, apprehending the scale of transformation,
rolling paddocks cultured by gelignite and the plough, 

the quotidian productive eradications. No going back;
no regeneration of the earlier cover to anticipate; 

for our time the insistences of the species will prevail,
here is the equation for subsistence, look no further. 

 

 

*
The Waipahi is in flood again. Pomahaka, the poet's awa,
has burst its banks. At Washpool, you might find a problem; 

don't count on the Clydevale crossing. See how waves,
breaking over fences, rework the path of Kaihiku Stream, 

bear the blended land with them, how we too, carried along,
part of that commotion and execution, are items in the epic 

comedy of the water, characters heading east to Mata-au,
the momentous Clutha, to meet our fate at the river's edge. 

Cross the bridge, creep over the surge to a new consideration.
The weight of incidence, incorrigible reinvention, obliging 

travellers to their private conclusions. Witness small towns,
dressed in a habit of the water, winking at the highway; 

observe their impossible suspicion, the aery arbitration.
Acknowledge rain pressing its point. Beware the equities. 

 

 

*
Past Phosphate Road, alive to the music of the flood,
at the wheel I incant the raw occasion of the poem, 

its wordless metre the shudder of windscreen wipers,
water scattered by tyres along the seam of highway 

travelling drowned farmland, its tropes the contours
lapped by an inland sea, Waihola flooded by the Taieri. 

Above Berwick, weather stoops to touch exotic forest.
Where Maungatua might be, low cloud hides the ridgeline, 

details of the composition submerged in its wrinkles;
I anticipate the terminology of the reckoning, rain 

wearing down the articles of schist that stud its spurs,
compounding or restructuring, managing the detritus, 

I read in pluvial influences extinctions, pollinations,
the grammar of culmination circulating in a puddle. 

 

 

*
At her funeral, the deceased is a celebrity. Rain falling,
the threshing of claws through the grass, a procession. 

The setting is famous to itself. The old lady dead, echo
of a congregation's gathering past, vignette of the four brothers, 

ancestors allied in some way to the local life now gone,
and beyond them, resident, eternal, proximate affairs, 

the nattering of rocks, grass, drops identifying on a shrub,
invited in by the eulogies, companions in the delivery 

of her expired body to the clay. Revelation of the rain,
consonance of its details, arrives and departs. What 

to say, having regard to the irreparable finality, solemnities
mumbled to document the legerdemain of creation. 

Rain and the poem of the family, important, ordinary,
whatever may be made of the old fact. Pukeko knows. 

 

 

*
Obsolescent crossroads. The grass chest-high in a ditch
where the gathering, insubstantial, begets footprints 

on a leaf, palps testing the way forward, encroachments
on the frontier of nothing, the little ones tapping forth 

to greet the rudimentary silence with their presence.
A narrative, water reads and rereads. Cannot figure out, 

after the characters have settled, which of us did what;
whether mote or tardigrade served acknowledgment 

on the thing itself; what was meant by a paroxysm
reporting through the canopy of the lichen community. 

Who may say where significance lies? In the vacuole,
at intersections of mineral and moisture, or scored 

into the dermis of a flower's cochlea. Also in words.
And in the spaces between words. The bustling void. 

 

 

*
A visit to your frail house. Then apart, following weather
north to its Waihola digs, rain like a boozer entrenched 

in the lowlands before Maungatua. I consider your advice,
hover between being and being, the poem correcting itself 

in squalls of creation, as though a moment might echo
in preemption the pelting of words, glimmer of recognition 

through the grey, something we labour to get back to,
the syntax at its root, prefigured in a vanishing scene. 

I simply do not know where to go. Ever looking back,
strain forward, a knowing verb. For you, the way is ethical, 

political, resigned, cavities everywhere having opened
in the cultivated surfaces that clothe the soaked earth. 

I am inclined to agree. And remain subordinate no less
to the highway, its self-important lines, insisting north. 

 

 

*
Reaching for writing, I inhabit the sound of the rain,
which is the space of thought, ever almost language 

yet defying articulation, something we cannot quite say,
enclave of rain, unattainable though encapsulated 

in the universe of my apprehension, hear the shush
of the storm against tin, make light of the grating metal, 

am an obsession of rain, not moved further on a thing
until the pour eases, no longer thinking I continue. 

Step by step, gathering momentum towards a finale,
the poem feeling its way forth in the matters of expression, 

I navigate the undergrowth of words, investigating
roots, stems, vital particulars, inferences or avenues 

to the settled saying, the shape of what will become
rain's legacy, the sound of words falling from the sky. 

 

 

*
One more attempt, calling together the difficult elements
into a fabric of weather, at this moment at the task anew 

the words of the rain, weaving the wet, so many strands
to account for, each drop an episode of water, forgotten 

the drought that once seemed an uncrossable expanse,
the water is a bridge out of the anxiety of imperfection. 

Where is the pukeko? You know where. Inveterate beak,
incomprehensible to others the runes it scrapes, clacks 

against the bitumen, testing this unyielding frontier,
wild, cryptic joy in the act of creation, in self-correction 

inching on as the scale of the ambition becomes clear.
Pukeko at the verge researching the ambit of operations 

knows her field, the fact of high water under the willows,
annihilation to come, delivery on the ransacking tide. 

 

 

*
Everything again upended, the poem looks back at itself,
relives the road and its places, the hearth of the rain, 

the land once more ancient under overwhelming water,
a time before, after humans, when the pukeko shall rule, 

original under the low cloud, herding through swampland
her perpetual chicks, and otherwise, their enduring death,

all this consummate on the raised edge of its metaphors,
the poem recollects itself, first in that old place reborn. 

Things having happened, watersheds, trivial coincidences,
an unforeseen extrapolation of the other. The words, 

the shape of the utterance, transformed by the weight
of evolving circumstance, insurrections of the ancillary, 

by Clinton, Milton, Henley, settle like debris on the page.
Sentences accumulate, accidents of intention in the fog.