PASSIONVINE HOPPERS
Weeping softly,
like someone new again from sleep
like a pāua shell-half
I glitter, I have colour –
turn me this way, turn me that –
hold me to the light, see that I am bright
but I will not know the rest of me again.
I rock on my rounded edge in the warm sun
of some little boy’s bedroom.
I rest on his shelf and when the tide goes out
from just over the train tracks beyond his window
it takes the land and the creatures with it.
I am not a shell, or even half of one –
instead I am a person
with a pillow, on which gather tiny moths
barely the size of your pinky nail.
I coax them onto the pads of my fingers, lift them to the window
but they do not seem to want to go.
BARNYARD
Skinny but not, like a prize-fighter, you
are very dangerous (I think)
or maybe not at all –
like a building that is on fire…
and in Venice.
Real good and real bad and
ridiculous, like me, a cyclops
glaring out at the beach
from behind his Wayfarers.
We walk down the street, in our matching shirts
we look like old-timey companions
and I want you to know
so many things:
I am not beautiful, but I could be…
I see a bad painting of the harbour, don’t eat for days.
I want you to know about my nights –
how they are full
of that warm silence
belonging to large animals only
with their planet-eyes, that bulge
out from either side of their cheese-block heads.
I want you to know about the black cat
courting cars right under my window –
how it looks like you –
and I want you to know
I really could have taken you, into the mountains.
But mostly I just want you to know
that I could not have found you
if you were, as you wish to be,
a creature without sound.
Charles Ross grew up next to a tidal estuary in Waitati, just on the north side of Otepoti Dunedin, and is now living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington as a first year student at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.