Salt Air

Spring  - land left us as dust

sea spared us, waves like fruit, pips

of silver fish, sharp edged mussels,

spiny urchins. We suck at the leather of long

beads. I am thick incoherence

tongue tasting, tongue tied, I - thin as the lip

of an eroded cliff, licking for salt in the air

greedy, chapped-pale-slight, slow but

hot after the stillness of hibernation

woken by the surprise of a long breath

in the thickened smoke, how wide-long

is this white world?

O, occluded holes, filled with the bones

of us. Thaw and flowers of milk

quietly moving like old fingers

we are knapped from flint, those

slices thin as an adze edge. Why, you asked

do we fight so hard for this? A bleak

day of flood and mud, another of tender

green. Oysters, oysters, silk of high tide.

Enemy wrapped in honey coloured furs

 How the grim cold settles in you

in the same way milk sap numbs the tongue,

it’s neither here and never there.

If I were a fish there would be none of that.

Words steep as glaciers or clear poison,

old meat, a horn through the muscle, perhaps

putrid – kill me or let me live cleanly,

I want none of your complications.

A skin wraps it up so nicely,

prettily, see the hand closed,

but open to gifts. Possibly I am tied to you

forever. Where can I go to escape?

Into a crevasse, a smoky cone, like

mole on cheek.  I am the last

call before disaster. Furred skin of a golden

dog, wild wheat, the voices of an oracle

two feet above our heads.

Belinda Diepenheim was born in Te Whanganui a Tara near Taputeranga Island. She has published in a variety of New Zealand and international magazines and ezines. Belinda published Waybread & Flax with Steele and Roberts in 2015.