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.