Poems by John Adams

Fishing, off Kawau

            turns and spits: which part of no don’t you understand?

N O is two islands, lumps of difference in a flat film
like skin near some place I’m taken to
fish, one of them, I’m not sure which, a sanctuary,
landing not permitted. Someone must have landed
once, there was a jetty. Whenever low tide curls
back, jagged rotting piles raise a silent jeer
as you float by. One snot-green molar sports
a gulping shag; wet globlets flick; its neck
snakes. There must be fish
here somewhere

The nearer part of N O is poorly charted,
presence of rocks noted but locations
uncertain. Not to mention
the rip.

The middle of a poem is as likely a place to find fish as anywhere else in my experience. Down here they dream past in schooling streams, eager for any morsel I care to place before them. Yes, these are my fish; they will know me well; dappled silver to scale; mouthing uncanny words ending shortly in O as I jerk awake.

Now my slender thread
    drips
        down
            through the disappearance,
                baited
                  with little hope

Did you hear the snicker/ of that piwakawaka?/
In which fold/ is the artist squeezed?

This is a lonely realm, a scary place for non-Maori
poets who’ve not wed with the land or made cousins
of forests or fucked up a kinship
with the rivers. We, too, fear there may be taniwha
at every bend of these shaky isles; it feels a long way from
safety — we so small; the landscapes so
expensive, big with uncanny sky and the squawk of some
terrified bastard out of sight, straining for a foothold. 

 At Adam’s anxious entree, same same: same stuttering litany
of names, the tic of homage to geology,
geography, flora and fantail, faint trace of our thin poetic
pencil running ahead of the eraser, touching the ground for
autistic affirmation, shitting adjectives like sheep
backing from a noun’s bark: on any approach, bound to be uphill.

“The snicker of the piwakawaka” was first published in Brief #42 (2011).