Heraldry
 

Hand upraised beneath a cloak of mist,
the colonial goose is cooked and eaten;
triple-chinned wonders soak in thermal springs,
seals bask on Zealandia’s sundeck.

Loneliest place on loneliest planet,
where bees, quilting, sew pastures silver,
dairy queen udders burst snowy from alps,
and pine cones cast-off await collection.

Dip your toe in Marlborough wine lakes;
dodge falls of rock climbers out of mountains;
read small grain of a given piece of timber;
wad cardboard into rugby ball shapes.

Blood sport jokers jockey for lunch money;
tractor blockades smoke the Beehive out;
pre-mixed under-agers gatecrash winebars;
blat of grrrl racers burls down boulevards.

Fox Glacier launches a hot fridge brand;
fine wool clouds gather fattened lambs;
paddock barbed wire’s bent round in a crown;
urgent hayseeds gee up Race Cup steeds.

A name that ripples in red, white, blue;
a slippery pill popped from a seething scrum,
half freezer pack, half frozen shoulder;
ref’s whistle to raffle off a brassy win.

Weetbix bards at breakfast address their mums;
hip-hop stutters through blizzards of abuse;
snowboarding bohunks neck ekkies with glee;
all eyes on screens fix as if held by glue.

From Time of the Icebergs (Otago UP, October 2010)

Kate Winslet Promotes a Credit Card
 

She’s contorted over script or contract.
She mimes reading with hunched back.
She’s somewhere inside The New Yorker.
She poses beneath the legend: My life, my card.
She sucks, like a straw or claw, at her finger.
She exposes, like that of a great ape, a foot’s sole,
wrinkled as a map of the moon.
She has a big toe that seems so much older
than the rest of her, as if she has just
arisen from a bath, and that big toe
was under longest.
She has that toe as the punctum,
so that we must contemplate smoothness
wrinkled in a bath: that wrinkled, sensitive
point of balance exposed; just out of its shoe
and already cooling the blood.
In a photograph the colour of greyish tin,
she feels through the sole’s drumskin
each reverberant step of her life.
She’s architecture; she’s an archive;
she’s a firebird; she’s a poet’s metre,
putting her best foot forward.

 
From Time of the Icebergs (Otago UP, October 2010)
 
 

Dust
 

Hot breathing wind
on red dust’s imprint;
a percolator carries
the taste of charcoal;
scorching heat sings,
and walking stirs
up eddies of sweat;
clothes hang lank,
hibiscuses wither,
mangroves smell of mud;
mid-day glazes downriver.

Stains on concrete:
rust, chocolate, blood;
above trees black dots:
hundreds of fruit bats.
Melon-scented dark’s
buttery barbecue smoke;
then night lightning,
hailstones’ smack and roar.
After the downpour,
hordes of cane toads
splash along roads.

©David Eggleton