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. 

the tar-pit wasn't of much interest to me. the falling, of course, was real.
mother's milk wasn't of much interest to me. the seething kid was real.
the herd wasn't of much interest to me. the enclosures, of course, were real.
the haunt of jackals. the thirsty ground. the churning cream. the bottle of tears.
his age wasn't of much interest to me. his transparency was real.

I begin at night. I paint my skin and the hairs of my body and of my head. Now the sun is rising and bright hairs fall, flakes of skin fall all around me as a glittering dome. Now I have their eyes they come in and they are an audience. The sun is rising. It is midday and the head throbs. So they are pressing on the fence. They are spilling into an air zone. Now I name the secretions of my rivals. This one bleeds. This one's nose dribbles as he cries. They will be devoured. The sun is rising. Flakes of skin fall from the rising body. The clamour is an open breath and it casts a shadow. The body shines. 

as a kid I could imagine the end of the world as watching stars go out. not trying to decide what to serve for the first birthday party while watching fictional radiation sickness on tv while clicking away from the map of the oozing red globe on the herald front page. what have I learned? that ending is a fantasy but irrevocable loss is real. that I can write about it think about it feel sick and then forget. 

my mum gave us this picture book by a swedish behavioural scientist which is supposed to put the baby to sleep, and I gave it back. the rabbit is drawn in coloured pencil and he looks unwell, like someone who's been smoking a dozen cones a day since 2004 but hasn't slept since deciding to quit on tuesday after breaking a rib coughing. the book warns you off reading the book to someone who's driving, then the rabbit's mum takes him on a long journey to see uncle yawn. well, I'm sorry about uncles, but in the sense of general regret, not personal responsibility. my memory of being hypnotised in 1988 by bert potter the communist free-love therapist who turned out to be a paedophile is surprisingly clear. there were a hundred people in the room and nothing happened except sun coming in through the trees and the big bay windows onto the cushions and the groups of quiet cuddled up people, and bert talking slowly about a beach and the water line and a stone and a box. I feed my son to sleep, and sometimes when he doesn't sleep we just go out into the back yard and talk to cockatoos or look for the moon. I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not but it works okay. 

why, when I catch the bus, do I share it with old women and not with old men? are the old men still asleep or are they already at the shops? did they walk? did they drive? one of my grandfathers would only walk into town, walk from balmoral to the city and back again in three hours. when he died of a heart attack fishing on the rocks, the doctor refused to go down to the beach, and the men who found him had to carry him up to the road. once I dreamed I carried him on my back through a desert. because he was dead he could no longer walk. I am not sure, in a heart attack, if the heart attacks or is attacked, and if it attack-fishes or is its own end in war but still quietly with the tide, and perhaps the bus's old men are already dead. or perhaps they are driving regardless, like my other grandfather, who nearly died when, functionally blind with glaucoma, he drove into a sheep, and who nearly died when his ride-on mower rolled over on top of him at the bottom of a slope where very long grass kept on growing.