Al and his girlfriend Nikky come back to Mum's house to visit with me and to see this place they haven't seen. They're sort of teenage tourists in a span of life. Poppa is dying his luminous death in Mum and Jim's bed. Al and Nikky stack up horizontally in the bed beside him, their heads forming a short column of two, like they are conjoined at the neck. Their watching him quietly is a kind of service to my family and it becomes the quality of the night. At the same time I know they are going to keep the luminosity. I am working in the kitchen but on my behalf Mum then watches Al to help him sleep well until morning. This is the reciprocation of love.  

the library books are somewhere even if you don't remember whether the ring was left on the side table or the wallet that they came over your front lawn in uniform to tell you about this is the height of the uniform coming over the front lawn over the tiny wall we are here to tell you about what has been found a bus goes round whether you have the money it is just down the road where he comes to the door and it's dark stacks of newspapers stacks of bottles you'll have to not mind see I'm blind and the milk the wallet months later the wallet many months later the library card that never got cancelled  his face turning in such a way that you don't see his eyes so it's still in circulation that anyone would move that way down a hall that they have always known the wallet on the bare table the cards still in circulation and he turns at the very moment you hold out your hand

this could be something you refuse as a matter of principle. repetitions which leave you knowing the words. leaves on sun. falling over repeatedly out towards them. he is in the corner against the glass shelf covering his face. we walk in circles through his howling. this is a zebra. this is a giraffe. against the world which makes noises that are suitable for their names. you refuse that for it is too sweet. and when you are more tired you crawl. and when you are more tired you will sit. the ball falls away little atom come to fetch. here skirting on a very fine rim. they are dressed in dark grey and their brooms help to steady them. 

it falls over the edge and we go to chase it falls over the edge we go to chase I have paste for that kind of rift I have six friends who would like to host the water falling over the edge in their garden that is a trampoline quivering out. it is a beginning each one wants the ball but after his molars are pushing up through we find another child hands us the ball and it is a lamp leading to another lamp back and forth all the way to the edges of the garden where the soreness tips over and falls away. she will ask you what it is the the four of them in motion. she will ask you if is your hair so long you can't afford scissors. the water in their faces falling away with the ball you throw in each  direction not yet catch. sore in a little circle around a credit card account. I will find a way to chase it. giving me a tiny edge fine hairs on the fine edge of his mother comes only for a day. she comes only for a day. we'll touch it. to their warm garden made of green water with its flowers and take that swelling there. let's go and take some words with us. he has learned to clap. see the water shakes over the edge. 

sunlight reflecting back off the green glass through the gum leaves moving like an element

   One day when I was nine or ten I went for a walk with my granddad on Patea Beach, and as we came around the head he saw a huge piece of cliff fall away from the cliff to stand, upright, beside it. I didn't see it but didn't doubt him; he was pale, shaken-- I had no reference point-- and there was the broken cliff.
   This morning I missed my bus and walked alone for the first time in ages, enjoying April wind on my eyes which I strained last night reading comments in the dark as my son went off to sleep. Someone explained there that we do not know our great great grandparents, nor our great great grandchildren. So there's no real reason, she said, to care what will happen in a hundred years' time. But you can look if you want to: it's your foot there on the pivot point, your limbs lost in molten air. 

dreamed last night that I was somewhere - some kind of bland resort-chalet type place, not at a beach - with school friends, but fundamentally alone. my mother called to tell me that she had decided to kill herself. what? but she wasn't asking for help, she'd already decided, and she'd just called with a certain kind of hardness, almost spite, to let me know - as in 'I thought you'd want to know'. I started to argue, shout, plead, cry - 'if you die I will never, ever be okay again' - and I'm thinking of T as I say this, that he will not be okay either. I cry and scream and protest for a long time, and then she laughs, and hangs up.