from The Elements

II

Already ahead of ourselves. Knowing what to do.
Look to the distant wave, crunching over reefs
far below in a bay that is open to the ocean.
The foulest of weather sweeps in off the sea;
leaves bow to the rain, branches bend,
bark peeled from tree trunks flaps in gusts.
Knowing what to do (however improbably),
we are always already ahead of ourselves, already involved.
Before there were footprints, storm, the sea.
Look out to that broken water, look into the gale.
Pay attention to rainy flux in its perpetuity.
Build yourself a house. Walls work for a while.

IV

To talk about the town is to talk time itself.
Already ahead of things, knowing exactly what to do,
they established a smelter and container port,
these after the whaling industry had dried up,
after earlier ways had been pushed into the margins
and the forest cut down for pasture.
For all time now, the port resists the waves;
for all shallow time, although that will pass,
the action of wave on breakwater, wind on steel,
destined to prevail in the natural course.
One day too the smelter, a trapped river
crying out across the sandflats, will fall silent.

VIII

Hard to say what will happen to Waituna.
Hard to know the fate of the old trees
in Omaui Reserve, what that forest will be
after the elements have rubbed out our age.
Hard to assess the fate of a water drop
suspended on a tip of flowering flax.
Hard to predict what will happen with the gorse,
whether mānuka mothered by its thorns will thrive
or whether the gorse will choke Waituna.
Hard to say how the town will evolve,
what will replace the decrepit buildings
that in their day were renowned establishments.

XV

A friend involved with the company that built it
picked Flat Hill, which might be a fairly non-descript area
though clearly it was someone else’s land
before the wind farm, before the grand conversion
of contours into platforms on which to seat the towers,
another example of the elements corralled
into servicing the ambitions of the newcomers.
By which I mean the ambit of our species,
the crackle of a moka pot on the small hob here
being likely the wind’s work, a fact of coffee brewing
on the back of the storm breaking over the hill,
the blades of the turbines stirring the dark.

XXVII

The water is not the colour you supposed it to be.
Tea-black clear, the gravel at the bottom
shining like teeth through the penumbra,
water where the eels are, raupō and wire-rush,
water bubbled by expiring peat, swamp tears,
it is not what you and I, trading thirdhand knowledge
about the qualities of the wetland, could know from a distance.
Paddle in a puddle, wetland getting in the shoe,
cold, wind-cold, water-cold, getting between the toes.
Get into that, perfectly still under mānuka
the frigid lagoon, a present haven for the ducks.
Take note of the solace she gifts her visitors.

Richard Reeve

Richard Reeve is the author of seven collections of poetry by various presses. He lives in Warrington, to the north of Dunedin. The Elements was written after a time spent in Bluff in 2023 at the kind invitation of Marcus Lush and Vanessa Underwood. It will be published by Maungatua Press at some stage.