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.