the tasman drives a profound surf
lands mist and driftwood sculptures
icons in this elemental world.
Precipitous falls and the watchman daunt
like rounded boulders embedded in silt
and stands of seaswept pohutakawa.
Swell reminds volcanic times
have been here,
close to the settler's baches
and lone kauri road that
squiggles into deaf and blind bush
loses compass in wilderness.
ocean orchestrates the surf's murderous voice
recalling drownings.
If noises in the swell
are loud like insanity
the bay has other plastic rhythms;
a buoy knelling a death mass
shearwaters to perform the office hymn
last sun a bloody magnificat.
When it is too grainy
to read ritual in washed-up kelp
tides swing into the bay
making dark
and stillness
as time was, before there were gods.
Today a seahorse skeleton
yesterday a lost doll;
in winter a leopard seal
muses here.
Around the head to pararaha mouth
black sand fills your shoes;
a raw-boned gale births while I fossick
dusk amplifies the sound that
knells bass chords in the surf,
rhythms urged by the moon.
Later in blackness under zion hill
a thousand miles of sea gongs.