steady
day i
i am trying to imagine a body of water from the confines of our green space.
my neighbour reads an excessive number of library books on hydrotherapy,
and i become accustomed to skimming these surreptitiously before returning
them for her. there is a composure to the watery diagrams that i pore over,
searching for instructions beyond mere bodily mechanics, some sort of cure
for aloneness in one’s body. we must stay safe at home, i repeat, but it means
very little to you beyond a sibilant silkiness on your tongue. and sometimes,
although you don’t know it yet, harm can come from within too. these days,
our neighbour calls out to us from her bedroom window each morning
when we are once again wandering undirected in the early flinching bush
and your face breaks, like a wave at its apex, about to crash. to distract,
we lean in to green. you choose the seaweed stick of chalk, and we draw
pulsing trees together. later, finding a grove of wild ginger, you insist
it’s a treasure, protecting this weed with its pervasive rhizomatous roots,
shielding it with your splayed hands and then draping it over your shoulder
along with your foraged Hormosira banksii, claimed at mid-tide on our last
evening swim. everything equal in your mind, you stroke the leaves
and shrivelled olive beads sleepily, lulled by a saturated silence from
the deserted road above; watching you, i think of habits and how they form,
and hope we keep some or all of these we are forming. my pelagic fish,
the silt in your river of isolation came when you realised the sea was lost
to you, and you struggled to use those branching chains of water-filled veins
to withstand the ebbing tide
day ii
morning light hits shivering rimu fingers in a way i didn’t notice before,
like it’s plunging, trying to pick something up that’s lost at the bottom
of a council leisure centre pool; abandoned goggles, cap, stick, stone.
i want to find that thing we’ve forgotten, or maybe all the owners
of these churning lost things that help us stay buoyant or otherwise.
my maternal grandfather was a daily wild swimmer and treated it with
a reverence bordering on panic. it’s the alteration of body temperature
that releases, relieves. it made him feel sound of mind, but maybe not safe
of body, given the lacey shape of the fractured greywacke rocks he dove from
at the inlet they called home. i can visualise a breathlessness, and then
a bruised flying. and I wonder, is that how he felt? did the propulsion
into water, coupled with that numbing, knotty coldness, shake him wildly loose?
like him, you exercise an immersive love that demands return to one salty,
thrown-about body, tangling us up in green scribbles, circles and untraceable
starfish scratches. how deep you want to measure, to fill up every space
between us, the air we share. at breakfast, while slicing apple suns,
we discuss the air quality index and the Clean Air Act and what this means
for cities and transport and adverse health effects. afterwards, floating in
the bathwater on your back, eyes closed to me, i watch the soft depression
of your chest cavity and talk to you about the humming bee breath,
closing one ear to all surrounding sound
day iii
we bend and collect fallen kauri and tanekaha leaves to dry downstairs
for making into sheets of paper, and i feel like calming, wake-like
into the warmness of the leaf litter underneath peeled-bare branches,
sighing into all the worries of the basalt, granite and rock crust
that should be frustrated with us for failing to care. we do not
have kauri rot, and our ritual to ensure this has something of prayer to it.
understanding, you chastise any who visit, pointing to which boots
are allowed to be worn on your indecipherable map filled with rising
lines, eddies, swells. you are rooted deep to your watery west coast clay.
today, we read of the cormorants that have returned to Venice,
as the seaweed-thick fragile lagoon ecosystem is visible again, shorn
of tourism and motor transport disturbance. and while you flick through
photographs, I worry that we will forget too soon. you replay the narrative
again and again, hopping and spinning about and hot-headedly insisting
on mimicry. my body still baffles me after birth; refusing, uncooperative,
not at all one with my clamorous mind, it carries me along through
this time of confinement but feels weightless in a frightening way,
as though i am an alluvial river, and not at all certain how to halt
the erosion of these shores
day iv
stories are one thing we agree upon, resting flock-like on steaming
beds of compost mulch, chopping up rotting weeds and long, prickling
stalks from harvested Jerusalem artichokes. we argue over a pair
of turquoise-handled scissors like siblings until i take your
little finger and link it through mine, pleading silence while i weave
another marshy history. the blue hue of the ocean is largely constructed
from chlorophyll and disintegrating organic bodies, and this seems
to be the only likely truth i can hear. there are more snarled news reports
that i mute furtively, my fingers washing away a wider belly of current,
holding it back for just a little longer. i am selfish in this skimming
of possible narratives, but i want you to be a water-skating insect,
legs as flotation devices, ridged with grooves marked on tiny hairs
that trap air. please slide across this surface without pause; you will learn
to scull or drift through swampy nodes and puckers soon enough.
for now, all you have is the woven ribs of trees, and the light running deep,
keeping us very nearly afloat. sometimes, if i rise early and walk into
the aqueous-lit yawn of bush before you wake, i can hear our neighbour
singing, just ever so faintly
Elizabeth Welsh is a poet, papermaker and academic editor. She is the author of Over There a Mountain, published by Mākaro Press in 2018. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She lives in Titirangi with her husband and daughter.
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