The elements of one

In all the world, under the rain, through drafty passes and over ice floes once a
sea I have only one body to travel in and only one language. Wanting to see in the
mirror that I had the traveller's nous I looked for trails under my eyes, beaches
on my lips. I searched in my bones for artefacts, proof of my journey and that I
existed in more than just the mirror. It is true I was lost on the frozen wave of
a mountain, turning black, disintegrating. Had it not been the wind or gravity
that made me leave, nothing would. I was alone, existing in a lake of ice, tapping
at the world to see which of us was real.

Four corners

1.
I decided San Francisco,
the air was magnetic,
the homeless were magnetic too
stuck at length to the ground.
And the cable car was magnetic
sliding over those hills.
At home we would have thrown them off
our backs saying 'get away with ya, ya mug',
'do your own dirty work'.

2.
Ah the Samoans are joking again
because don't you know
life is actually funny.
But they're not the only ones,
I just noticed, to pull the sun
out of a hat with hands soft as butter.

3.
Berlin, berlin, berlin.
I'm cycling to you
through my wine.

4.
We are back on the atoll.
Crew-cut trees wait for the sea
to remove them from their concentration.

Cardiac simplicity

I was happy my father did not dig for a living. In one summer on one day when I sat on
his knee, (though it could have been you or no-one at all), he sliced up the orb of a
swede and we ate it on a white chair over the concrete.

It's a long way from that year, I was even wearing a dress, unheard of for little Marysia
who fought with sticks for rifles and beat, beat, beat the long grass in the big field down
out of her way. Around and around I paced through the days, addressing trees,

questioning plums - 'Why are you a plum and I am not one?'
I'd ask it in English, somehow in Polish and sometimes in Maori when I was alone.
In the complicated language of plants there was no answer for me.

The rough Slavic hands of my father were, I suppose, like so many others,
but only his considered my mouth worth a donation, and this, for a catholic, shouldn't
be much. The child of a catholic I was, and just a child anyway, probably 4.

For my father first it was the war and then me. I am not still small and on his knee
though if I were we would need nothing as he would explain how to cut from a swede
the size of a heart, the weight of a heart; 'one for you and one for me.'

Leo

Discovered through new and newer telescopes,
a passion, a success, a nebula of messages,
but instead you look there,
over the waves, for a boat with a sail and a chicory mast,
the last place you thought you were.

Stars form and under the slip of your eye a gathering takes place.
Out beyond your fingertips you reach for the rest of you,
part there, part here.

On a night sea cliff the moon runs away from your child heart,
inside you a small shadow circles around,
compressed by unreachable lights
and that which should never tame itself to be approached.

'Lóg az es_ lába'

The rain's feet are hanging down

The high seat of wind sits another you in other places,
the detached crumble of grey thoughts and thimbles full of rain
approach from upstream. There is strange weather you imagine,
a needle sewing up the sky too late, a giant ladder wavering on its ankle stumps
and stories about the people who lay flat under the soaking current
as the rain sat over the perpetually turning ball beneath its feet.
That was you, wet hair, rippled dress, dreaming of life above.

The trace

Lost in broken rain
that cannot fall
in even quavers.

Lost, looking for
the water
filled with birds.

All words fail
in endless fathoms,
days drip on.

The night drags a leopard
into me who savours
in my bones the trace of you.

Herne

You say this one is not like that one
but the new machine does just as the old did,

across the same field, ashes, snow
toward the play beyond your sight,

while the resolution; she is at home
patient as you reload your steps,

a wolf for the same purpose,
there is no hunt without you.

Sorry

Sorry, I'm not butter
or guitars, a thunder of horses
opening clouds,
I'm not under this impression
but a life of impressions,
risking a colour, not another,
no crown, a little dirt in the eye
where I need you, and my voice,
that thing on the horizon.

Maria Zajkowski


Maria Zajkowski's work has appeared in literary journals in Australia, New Zealand and online, inlcuding Cordite, Heat and Landfall (NZ).

Previously published

'The elements of one' ; http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com/index3.html (NZ)
'Cardiac simplicity', Food, The Alphabet City Anthology, The MIT Press (USA)
'Leo', Elimae 2006:12, www.elimae.com (USA)


E-mail: Maria Zajkowski