Rob Dyer

The Atlantic gale that now abrades the Côte Sauvage
stirs the savage skin as it has done since men dared raise
these broken menhirs to the god that pounds the broken cliffs
with wind and wave and the loud cry of the gulls.
...

The First Duino Elegy of Rilke
Rewritten for Roxana Dyer
...

To Canberra

On the prismed green of your grey hills,
where once when I was young only the kangaroo
...

Reply to C.K. Stead, Letter to R.R. Dyer

How can we desert the day
who storm through the mists of morning?
...

In dangerous silence
to the memory of
Rex Fairburn
without whom something quite different
...

I never was on Crete
they say.

Yet
...

Oruawharo Bay glistens silver in the nor-west gale,
the tourists shelter in the lea of Sugarloaf,
the stranded shags in the pohutukawa;
only the gannet in dangerous silence fishes the stormwind.
...

One day, coming down quite early in the morning to the Bay,
following the sheep track through the toetoe,
above the pied shags resting in the pohutukawa,
out to the deep cave, where the dead souls leap
...

Once in our clematis days your hooflets trampled tamariki-a-Tane:
rimu, totara, miro, ti, kahikatea, nikau,
startling the tui from the kowhai, the ruru in the kauri.
Then the settler's wife, lingering in the tin privy after tea,
...

After Sappho

Along the branches where the apples swell
a shuddering river of cold murmurs,
...

After Ronsard

When you are old beside the quiet evening fire,
knitting and winding beneath the cold electric light,
...

After Spenser

I wrote your name upon Guerela Beach,
furtively on the lip of the last wave,
...

From Sydney

All along Manly Beach simulacra of swimsuits,
lithe limbs polished to an antique bronze beneath the parasols,
...

All the birds of evening have taken sudden wing -
out, out, away, over the Crosley right-field fence -
midst the cheering benches he slugs the bases home.
...

We have all at least once, somewhere else,
died: bloodless, uncertain, wanderers,
awaiting the judgment of motives -
no, not of deeds - they were judged, also elsewhere -
...

Who visits the old tin boatshed, now that the fish are gone?
the runway broken, in the storm of '69, they say,
the pulley rusted, one boat done for, the other -
I boot it, feels sound enough, just needs paint and use.
...

To Wittgenstein, Oxford,1957

Words stir and patterns coil at your hard saying;
thought, piercing the shapeless clay of memory's dug sites,
...

Oh smile not at me like an angel,
raise not your arms to gather in my lips,
say we lost each other while there was still time.
It is not true that on the judgment day
...

Our eyes meet, for one brief infinity
we gaze into the deep brown entrance
of our souls,
and are amazed.
...

Gazing at the tall-necked heron sweeping the bay,
the steep, torn bay at Pataua, where all my hearts reside,
I see adventurers set out beyond my narrow land
to worlds I cannot dream of and deeds the papers splash,
...