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Never the bark and abalone mask cracked by storms of a mastering god, never the gods’ favored glamour, never the pelagic messenger bearing orchards in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom or valor or cunning, much less hunger demanding vigilance, industry, invention, or the instinct to claim some small rise above the plain and from there to assert the song of another day ending; lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked in the clamorous public of the flock so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals, faces shining with oils of their many miles, where it hops and scratches below the baggage carousel and lights too high, too bright for any real illumination, looking more like a fumbled punch line than a stowaway whose revelation recalls how lightly we once traveled.

A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of   the storm’s worse attempt at language — thunder’s umbrage. A tree is torn apart, blown upward through a bedroom window. A boy winnows through the pile of shards for the sharpest parts from the blown-apart glass. He has a bag that holds found edges jagged as a stag’s horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand into to make blood web across his ache-less skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a scream it cannot make. He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body configured without pain. When his skin’s pouting welts don’t rake a whimper from his mouth, he runs outside, arms up for the storm, aluminum baseball bat held out to the sky until lightning with an electric tongue makes his viscera luminescent; the boy’s first word for pain is the light’s new word for home.

For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs— bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle, bodies growing disease like mushroom coral. It is tiresome, tiresome, describing fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs into some slow, future forest. My beloved, he tires of me, and he should— my complaints the same, his recourse the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes over the living freeze of heart after heart, and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did not make itself, the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone to wail across the plains or beg the bare city. I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans, the figs that outlived summer or the tedious mineral angles and their suction of light. Have you died? Then speak. You must see the living are too small as they are, lonesome for more and in varieties of pain only you can bring into right view.

“A equals X,” says Mister One. “A equals B,” says Mister Two. “A equals nothing under the sun But A,” says Mister Three. A few Applaud; some wipe their eyes; Some linger in the shade to see One and Two in neat disguise Decapitating Mister Three. “This age is not entirely bad.” It’s bad enough, God knows, but you Should know Elizabethans had Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too. The past goes down and disappears, The present stumbles home to bed, The future stretches out in years That no one knows, and you’ll be dead.

Who is speaking? Our correspondent on the hill above the river, making pictures for exhibition in other places. Each stroke of his pen ricochets across the valley. He sees what he wants to see. He does not hear what he cannot see. A smoking ruin behind him. Another 
waiting just around the bend.airy particulates A path leads from the pa to a ford of the river hard by, which was that traversed by the raiders on their return. Nothing was heard but the occasional yell until about 8 pm, when we could again distinctly hear the yells repeated, and then all was again quiet, save the sentinels’ “All’s well.” was, it seems, waha, mouth The stream at this spot is about 90 yards wide, and its depth is about 3 feet. Then a shout of “stand to your arms,” which was followed by a heavy volley from the rebels, who set up a most unearthly yell. wavering, with two hearts The south bank is flat and low, and on that side there is a good deal of marsh. They were full of determination, and at times came within speaking distance, inviting our men to come on, who replied by recommending them to stand out. led the women in resisting the survey The north bank is high and steep, and its precipitous sides are clothed with karaka and fern trees, whose luxuriant foliage, thickly matted with the vine, and parasite plants which grow there in abundance, forms a sort of vegetable wall. Several old women were vociferous in encouraging the enemy. to get shellfish from the reef The landscape is extremely pretty. They were blowing their horns and shouting for a long time, and in the morning it was found that the sap rollers had disappeared, and also a quantity of gabions. this white flag is not an emblem of peace The camp shows above the windings of the river, which pursues its tortuous course over a shingly bed, and is lost to view in the distance. All the peach trees, karaka trees, where the picnic parties used to go, have been cut down. a comet, west northwest, portending The sun shining on the white tops of the tents renders their outline particularly distinct. Every time a shell is thrown they set up a general howl of defiance, followed by such challenges as “Come on, Pakeha!” “Come on, 
soldier — come on!” left on the ground for the pigs and sea gulls (karoro) In the distance the sea presents an unvaried, unbroken line, and the snowy peak of the mountain to the left adds considerably to the scene. During the night they contented themselves by wasting on us all the bad epithets and evil wishes their language is capable of. “a mate noa,” till death The road down to the ford on the north bank is very steep, insomuch that it is a necessary precaution to dismount and lead a horse. They have several blowing horns, by means of which they mimic our bugle sounds. These horns are heard both day and night, and it is probable that they have certain established calls, which they all understand and adopt on particular occasions. wrote his name on a tub The raiders, however, managed to get their bullock drays up to the top, but it is presumed they were empty, and that their contents must have been brought up by hand. On Monday night the guard in No. 8 Redoubt were entertained until about 2 o’clock by Hapurona, who was urging his people most vehemently to attack them, and said they were very weak in it. He said the Governor had done him all sorts of injury, and that he would scatter our bones over the Waitara. a blue shirt braided with scarlet The ground about the pa is tolerably clear, and it is in part intersected by fences. Several of the men in the redoubt knew his voice and what he said quite well. being covered with myriads of empty cartridge cases A solitary canoe was found half full of water near the ford. During the night voices heard on our right, that of a woman being most conspicuous. She was endeavoring to incite the people to some desperate action by relating the deeds of her forebears. being pouri (grieved) How do they sound, drifting back to him there on the side of the road down by the river or along the beach? A group of riders coming the other way, a group the artist did not catch in his notebook and they were gone before he thought to turn around and look after their retreating voices. Top hat and sidesaddle. Onaero, Urenui, Wai-iti, Pukearuhe.

for Robert Payne Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned By a young wind from a cloud in Asia moving Like a most recognizable most silvery woman; Tall Alexander to the island came. The small breeze blew behind his turning head. He walked the foam of ripples into this scene. The trunk of the speaking tree looks like a tree-trunk Until you look again.     Then people and animals Are ripening on the branches;     the broad leaves Are leaves;     pale horses, sharp fine foxes Blossom;     the red rabbit falls Ready and running.     The trunk coils, turns, Snakes, fishes.     Now the ripe people fall and run, Three of them in their shore-dance, flames that stand Where reeds are creatures and the foam is flame. Stiff Alexander stands.     He cannot turn. But he is free to turn : this is the speaking tree, It calls your name.     It tells us what we mean.

There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.

I So this is where the children come to die, hidden on the hospital’s highest floor. They wear their bandages like uniforms and pull their iv rigs along the hall with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale, they lie in bright pajamas on their beds, watching another world on a screen. The mothers spend their nights inside the ward, sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds, too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip beside their children, as if they might mesh those small bruised bodies back into their flesh. Instinctively they feel that love so strong protects a child. Each morning proves them wrong. No one chooses to be here. We play the parts that we are given—horrible as they are. We try to play them well, whatever that means. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. The doctors come and go like oracles, their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique. There is a word that no one ever speaks. II

Water-flesh gleamed like mica: orange fins, red flankspots, a char shy as ginseng, found only in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear of faraway creeks no map could name. My cousin showed me those hidden places. I loved how we found them, the way we followed no trail, just stream-sound tangled in rhododendron, to where slow water opened a hole to slip a line in, and lift as from a well bright shadows of another world, held in my hand, their color already starting to fade.

In the coolness here I care Not for the down-pressed noises overhead, I hear in my pearly bone the wear Of marble under the rain; nothing is truly dead, There is only the wearing away, The changing of means. Nor eyes I have To tell how in the summer the mourning dove Rocks on the hemlock’s arm, nor ears to rend The sad regretful mind With the call of the horned lark. I lie so still that the earth around me Shakes with the weight of day; I do not mind if the vase Holds decomposed cut flowers, or if they send One of their kind to tidy up. Such play I have no memories of, Nor of the fire-bush flowers, or the bark Of the rough pine where the crows With their great haw and flap Circle in kinned excitement when a wind blows. I am kin with none of these, Nor even wed to the yellowing silk that splits; My sensitive bones, which dreaded, As all the living do, the dead, Wait for some unappointed pattern. The wits Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead I do not heed the first rain out of winter, Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made; And alone shine in a phosphorous glow, So, in this little plot where I am laid.