Dear Virgo
I love her for her astrological turn of mind
her determination to live in a deterministic world
where there is a providence in the fall of a sparrow
or in a starling scrabbling in the chimney flue
her versatility lets her live in the reality-based community
to love in the greenhouse among peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes
to breakfast each morning on bottled sunshine and white tea
despite sparrows, starlings, sudden hailstorms and those lighting strikes
which shouldn’t be so sudden given her ephemeris and the weather report,
doubting the wind of chance, the chance of wind, but holding it to her heart,
holding me there as well, with her certainty we were meant to be
Medea in the greenhouse
They hide beneath the leaves they immediately begin to shred.
They devour the flesh between the veins, gr0w fat and green.
Insidious lacemakers tatting with their teeth,
they arch, crawl , burrow before they mine the tomatoes.
They dig pocks and craters, they shit specks of evidence.
Believers in invisibility they cling to ridiculous denial.
She hates them preferring her love apples,
but because he admires them for their writhing audacity
she allows him a kiss for every one he kills.
Not swimming naked in the moonlight
We never swam naked together: not in the amniotic water of a river, nor in the salty warmth of a shallow bay.
It wasn’t our thing really, although the idea did appeal from time to time – until the reality of wetness and crowds collided.
You would have floated on your back, arms splayed, eyes closed, the small pink islands of your breasts breasting the surface. I would have struck out
powerfully towards you doing that Australian crawl I never mastered. You would have waited in the water with sweetness in your fingers.
the sweetness of the honey light of the moon with the shining circle itself floating high above us in a star filled sky…
We never did. Beauty lives in distance and the mind. Reality is closer to home. Honey is sticky. Nights are cold, and stars signal frost. We don’t swim.
The gap between people and sheep
We are walking uphill on a narrow, metalled road.
The road is fenced on one side and on the other, a line of pines.
A mob of sheep is in the paddock. Alert to us, each stops and stares,
stares relentlessly, pose frozen. They do not trust us, and seek
to justify that distrust, and they are quite correct to do so.
They know we are descended from giants, that beneath our clothing,
eagles’ wings are concealed, that we could take flight, soar over
the fence and seize their little ones with the talons concealed beneath our socks.
We stop as well, and stare as well. It is an impasse. We do not intend
to harm you, we implore. No wings, no talons, and our ancestors were
small and mild-mannered. Honest. The sheep, unmoving, do not believe us.
And again, they are right to do so as we shrug, unfold our wings and rise
high, high, above them, to soar into the open sky.
James Norcliffe— “I have published eleven collections most recently Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (Victoria University Press, 2016). Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and last year’s Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press). In 2022 I was awarded the NZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Early next year, Otago University Press will bring out my Selected Poems: A Day Like No Other.