To proceed within a trap (3)

It used to be that we would imagine our older years

in comfort, longing to be looked after again

now that seems like a medieval

miracle play, booming actors

full of proclamations, reassurances

we don’t believe will come to pass.

When I used to feel earthquakes

they were the land

grinding, creaking like a house

in the wind. We were always jumping

under doorframes, eyes round as the cat’s

on fireworks night.

Now I feel them, and I go still,

look to the ceiling for a drunken lamp,

realise although I’m back in the land of fault

lines it is always just my body,

my own pulse quaking

heart suddenly aware of its clenching

surging blood through its ribbons and meat,

self-directed

and shaking my body

like a disaster.

*

My dreams used to be wild

and played across great expanses.

Gone is Bear Mountain, the swooping

flights over desert cities

the ever expanding house

of my inner self

where new rooms would appear

unexpected as crocuses in the grass.

Now the road ahead always crumbles

under me, the path turns to cliff

the vertigo of nothing we’ve ever seen

on TV (sweet childhood companion),

I must fly through a web of wires, sparking

out of nowhere to fill the sky like contrived lightning.

There are no new secret rooms,

there is no house.

It burned up

years ago.

*

How often do we realise something is missing

only when we hear it again?

The hum of summers in our childhoods,

bees so numerous you would hesitate

to walk across a lawn

spotted with clover, laid with stings.

I heard it, that buzz, deep

in its collective, the haste of pollen.

I was standing on the ruin

of a city

five millennia old and it sounded

like summer in the 1980s.

In the scheme of ‘us’, our brief burst

of time, those epochs

lay side by side. That hum

lit up its decades of decline

its absence

from our ears.

Under the city, on a path like a paved

gorge, I walked into the silence

of a hive-shaped tomb.

The bones of its human queen

long gone, a chamber now

in which to test our own echoes.

*

When I heard the seedbank

had sprung a leak, permafrost melting,

trickling into the tunnel’s entrance

carved sloping into the bedrock

I felt doom cutting the ribbon

like a politician

leaking secrets

of the state we’re in.

Oh they say it’s fully water proof

now, designed for a ‘virtually infinite lifetime’.

We should know better

than to hope in the past, to pretend

we are ever at base level.

Everything is floating on a fictional line,

each day I swim a little further out

ride the deep lip of water

the darkening slope of the caldera

dropping away below.

*

Can we find inspiration in the solitary

evolutionary path

of Ophiojura, brittle star

180 million years a genetic loner.

The eight jaws, microscopic teeth bundled

like the needle thin hair of a cactus

in each crevice of a mouth

at the star’s centre

limbs like ropes anchoring

to their deep sea mountain.

To survive is perhaps dependant

on not wanting much

not aspiring to move beyond your natural

habitat, having an excess of teeth.

*

The day has passed again

all events flooding

from the radio broadcast

but I have remained still

on my underwater mountain,

picking at books, at small curling words.

My volcanic patience

spilling ash into the psychic brine

of my half-woken day.

Sometimes time feels fictive

though we speed into nothing, perpetually,

all is still while we hurtle.

Another decade passed in limbo,

the maze of small choices

we shuffle always onwards

through the trap.

There isn’t going to be a thread

to lead us back out

to the world we remember.

Those people we were then

are gone. Their world

by degrees hotter,

quieter

in summer.

Morgan Bach is from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her second book of poems, Middle Youth, is forthcoming with THWUP in 2023.