Chris Parsons is a New Zealander who taught English as a second language
in Japanese Colleges and Universities for six years. He now works and lives
in Christchurch. His poems have appeared in Auckland Poetry, Black Mail
Press, Jaam, the Otago Daily Times, Snorkel, and Southern Ocean Review.
Avionix
Near the water
is where we
say goodbyes
this beach's
curving
taxonomy
charts soft
vernaculars
of passed lives
a Korora
(blue penguin - Eudyptula minor)
left alone
withered vulnerable
sandy dry like
grandmother
a storm petral
(Oceanites maorianus)
healthy looking even now
my father's honed
face headed steady
into yet another wind
two tiny Kuaka
(bar-tailed godwit - Limosa lapponica)
our twins
lost journeying
across inner and
outer continents
ebony-eyed shag
(Phalacrocorax varius)
its pupil's reflecting
turning tidal light
hurrying me
into a last
dive through
darker waters
of reflection
as gulls
chant
gone gone gone
Leaving Mercury
I
I'm hankering for a cold zone,
where I can kick back
on something solid. 'Cause out here
the lead's running hot and I'm uneasy
about the sun, a huge blowtorch of a
world balanced on the
horizon, about to roll
over the edge any minute.
I want a change
Of atmosphere,
to get high on moonshine
and lay down on an air bed.
II
The clustered beans are floating again
My stubble scratches
the flameproof, airproof suit.
There's no water for laving off
accumulating micro-climates.
My only fellow voyagers,
nano-companions
respirating in silence.
An astronaut knows what sailors
knew, that all travel is
squalor, and that life begins again - arriving
back to tiny universes of the familiar.
