Natural Causes

How many times a swan dies. How many final

songs it can sing. A ballet, an aria, a storybook

with gold on the edge of its pages and a new death

each time. Each death preened by the hand

of its own fat sadness. Swans, sing for us –

and the swans only glare and wild their wings

along the walking-speed water and dredge

another snail from the riverweed roots. The swans

think we are singing to them, and our song is a long dying

all the chatty minutes of our life.

                                                               Once, on a river,

I was struck through with such straightforward happiness

I didn’t worry about anything, not crabs migrating

over superhighways or the walruses that fall from iceless

cliffs, all in documentaries so beautiful

it’s as though the camera is en pointe, the camera

wears the longest white lace gloves you’ve ever seen.

Swans, where is the bend in you,

and is it the same as the bend in the river, do you flow

at walking pace into your shapes and out again

in a long ribbon of music when you die? The camera dives

soft over huddled bodies, hunting the curve for the pirouette,

hunting the S for the gilt-edged page.

Clubs Day at Duvauchelle Primary

 Long slice from throat to crotch to slit the skin:

grip it thumb to knuckle of first finger, peel hard

and cut again to show the cramped chest cavity stoved in

where a stationwagon hit, the heart clotted

where it burst. Ruth slips a pearl-gloved finger underneath

the diaphragm and shows us how it moves. The possum

is quite dry as it defrosts. I smooth my hands over the sheaf

of newspaper for mopping-up: it’s warm. Next the abdomen,

a suitcase packed with organs. Ruth cuts the stomach

and inverts it like a heavy rubber glove. A globe of frozen

half-digested grass is handed round. When her back

is turned, Tim grabs the liver and presses it to Rosie’s neck.

She hits him. The liver’s thrown from hand to hand,

returned when Ruth begins to look. I focus

on the guts – the scalpel handle like a wand

that lifts a slender loop into the air, and higher again,

then lands it like an empty speech balloon

on newspaper that’s now begun to damp and smell

of possum juice. It’s a summer afternoon,

air outside the windows full of pollen, the model club

crouched over tables in the yard, the origami club

crease-mouthed with concentration in the other room.

Zoe Higgins lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, where she writes poems and exists as a benign cryptid.