Public Transport

Monday 3 March 2024

Lift off

At last we are seated on the Number 30,
Me, my bag, him, sports bag and school bag. 
The bus  is shuddering, creeping, leaping, stopping. 
We are late. Cricket practice. Rush hour. Rain. 

He switches his phone to a  YouTube live feed.
Steam shrouds the base of - a missile? A rocket?
“Where? What?” I ask, over the top of his damp sports bag.
“On top of the Space X Falcon 9 rocket -there-
Is  the Dragon Endeavour docking module. There.”
“Don t talk to me like that.”
“It’s the astros going to the ISS.”

As a live feed it beats the bus experience,
Except the rocket too is stationary, 
“Just waiting for “Go for Launch,”  he says.
We have reached the lights now. Green. We aren’t moving. 
I am tempted to yell  to the driver,”Go for launch!” 

The only thing that is moving is the rain, downwards. 
The rocket, we hope, will go upwards. 
“One of the astronauts  is a woman.” He’s hoping to impress me.
“Thank goodness it isn’t a poor dog,” I mumble. 

We change buses at Newmarket, to the 64. 
 The rain turns the road into a black lake. 
The bus jerks forward. People sway like  a kelp forest. 
I grab the bags. He holds onto his phone. 
The bus shakes, roars, creeps, stutters, then stops behind a Mini.

“Dragon is on Countdown,” says the phone.  “Go for launch.”
I’m hooked. I’m watching.
“Look! Flames are licking the rocket;s bottom.”
“Quiet, Grandma.”
10,9,8,7 -  
“I can’t believe we are watching Cape Canaveral 
From the  commuter bus, grinding along Broadway!”
“Grandma! Shh!”

3,2,1 -
Jerk! We  bang heads as the bus belches forward. 
“You o.k?”
“Yep.” That’s 1.7 million pounds of thrust , Grandma.”
“Aye. Imagine that.”
There are the crew, wearing smooth suits and helmets,
Sitting, crammed together.
“A bit like us lot in here,” I say, 

It’s gone. It’s just a burning skirt of light in the blackness.  
We watch the stages  separate as we cough and gasp up Khyber Pass..
4,000 miles per hour, 6,000, eight thousand. 
The rain runs diagonal on our window.

Bodies tense as the bus sways round the roundabout,
Slingshots up Boston Road and left into Mt Eden Road,
But our eyes and minds are  with Dragon,  going at 14,000 miles an hour. 

“Dragon is inserted into orbit,” says the phone. 
“Press the button,” I yell. 
We  drag the bags down the aisle. 
Swipe. Swipe, with our cards.  “Thank you, driver.”

We cross Mt Eden Road while the  Space X team on Earth standing, cheering.
We nearly get run over by a RangeRover. 
The astronauts are so grateful. 
They formally thank Space X staff.

We hunch in a bus shelter as the four crew 
Let the stuffed toy dog float around the module 
To show us  they are in micro gravity.
“It’s playtime at kindy,” I say. 
I shouldn’t have said that. 

There’s a pool of water in the dip on top of the school bag. 
“ Put the phone away now.”
“In 26 hours they will be at ISS.”
“So tomorrow, after school,  we could watch the docking, eh?”
“Nah. I’ve got cricket.”

We trudge home. Puddles swollen into ponds.
“What d’you reckon they’ll do now?”
“They’ll look out the window at the view.”

We are silent.Then he says: 
“The ISS orbits at 17,000 miles per hour.”
“Hurry up then. I’ve got to get the dinner on.
And you must put out the recycling.”

*

Arriving on an Island

Then – an island was a prize, rewarding those who risked 
The crashing waves, the reef, the rocks and rips.
Islands were once come-hither dangers
Rearing high out of blue ocean. Beckoning.
An island was a prize, rewarding those who risked 
The crashing waves, the reef, the rocks and rips.
The lost sailor looked up to them in wonder.

Gasping in green water, he jerked his hips, 
Caught a wave’s lift, tumbled in foam. 
Then he was floating, transformed, 
Languorous, in a mirror lagoon.

He waded ashore, startling fish and crabs.
He wobbled on sloping sand, under stretching palms. 
He turned, squinted into the setting sun and saw 
Pieces of smashed wood, drifting, blown.

He was here, and had to stay awhile.
He turned inland to walk into the unknown.
*
Now – we look down on islands from stiff planes
Laden with soft toy turtles, snorkels, reef shoes. 
We arrive at night and could be anywhere.

But after we leave the airport’s concrete and lights,
We look up to unexplored islands, stars so bright, 
The same ones that pulled the first canoes 
And guided the boatloads that followed.

The frangipani air is soft as talcum.
We hear a guitar and the music washes away
All thoughts of where we came from
Or when that was, if it ever was.
*

Newmarket Broadway Summer 1

The sheets hang rigid side by side.
Parked cars sleep behind windscreen sunshades.
I wade to the bus stop as though through high tide .

My broad brimmed sun hat cuts out the flat blue sky.
My 3 year old sandal straps curl, tired. 
They need a paddle next week at Muriwai.

As we  climb aboard I notice leaf-thin jandals. 
He’s had those a few years too, I smile.
HowI love us bus users’ sticky tangle. 

Alighting on Broadway. I make for the bank.
A red and yellow  tunic’ed  guard
Tells me to remove my sun hat.
I hang my head and flattened hair.

Outside again, punched by the glare,
I walk to the library where someone sleeps 
in the sun draped across my favourite chair. 

A red Mustang with a black soft top
Rests under a jacaranda tree in the Domain.
All around and on the car, mauve  blossoms drop. 

Look up! Two balloons caught in the tree? No.
Two plump, pin-headed bosomy pigeons, 
asleep, satiated on chips.

Coolness caresses my armpits now.
The breeze decides me to walk home,
Looking forward to the sheets smelling of sunshine
All night long, and the windows open.

The cup bearer

Did they tear flesh from their prey with those?
I was moved to pity by the T Rex’s diminished arms,
Too tiny for the left hand’s talon to ever clasp the right.

Then the crowd dispersed, quickly.
I turned and there, a tableau: a man,
Down on one knee, back straight, arms outstretched.
A proposal, perhaps?

His hands formed a bowl shape.
White fluid dripped over the index fingers,
And thicker gunge drooled
from between his middle and ring fingers.

He wore a plain band of gold.
In front of the man a rigid boy, head down,
Eyes like concrete plugs about to fall
Into the brimming bowl.

The cupbearer and his young lord?
No. Just a father, with his child who was vomiting –
Probably from too much excitement –
In the museum in the school holidays.

*

The Perfect House Guest

In my multi-purpose, mismatched muddle

of a room she claimed the one upholstered chair,

Anchored her bag beside it – there –

Then she sighed, smiled, and said my name.

While we yarned, out of her bag she conjured her world –

Pattern, needles, glasses, book, phone, medicines.

As a hem floats wide when a woman spins.

All took shape around her.

Everything in the room began to orbit her,

Transformed, a galaxy of effortless order,

Her concentration and contentment at its core.

As a migrant bird, feeling the centre’s pull,

Might weave a temporary home, in my room

The chosen chair became a nest, a loom,

A bright bricolage of woven wool.

Boats and migrating birds respond to a scheduled fair wind.

Later, her bag repacked, shipshape, preened,

She sighed, smiled, repeated my name, leaned,

And left me bereft, the room falling discrete again.

Waste Space – Point Nemo

We used to look up to them but
No one can see them now,
Those man-made marvellous migrants
Who have seen the  shine of the heavens
And now are surplus to requirements.

There is a place where these wonders go to die
2,700 ks from lived-on land.
They are not old or lost,
Just discarded,
Of no use.

Crafted so rarely, so carefully,
Steel, titanium, ceramic, 
Then controlled, purposeful, 
And now,  after falling for 4 ks
Through the ocean, seeking the centre,

Finally spacing themselves randomly 
Where it is silent  stark,  always dark,
over 1,000 ks of seabed,
Separate, alone, and dead.

Above them just the Pacific,
no visible islands, no shipping, no humans, 
The unused ocean , no features,
Few creatures, but containing occasional flotsam

And 26 micro particles of plastic per square metre.

Divination 2

“I come here, O haruspex, to know

What you can foretell from the entrails

 Of my sacrificed white lamb

Which  now steams on your stone.

I know the future is fixed and fated.

I know I am doomed to cross 

Time’s hall from past to future.

I know your power is prediction 

While mine is merely planning.

It is the not knowing that halts me.

What auspicious omens can you see

As you bend and tend?”

“I see at  a marble bench a future haruspex.

In her nail-less blue handsI see 

A drowned brown fledgeling 

of our huge-winged white bellied seabirds,

In whose entrails are preposterously 

shiny net, beads, tiny cups, cubes, 

lurid red, orange, blue, purple, pink colours.

I cannot interpret this sign. 

But certainly it is a sacrifice,

A gift to mollify the gods.

“Now I see  another haruspex, bending, tending,

knife clenched in smooth green hand,

Another  marble bench

On which slithers and quivers 

The monstrous entrails of a whale. 

The knife slashes.

A gelid pile of objects  

indescribable, undigested, inedible,

And all the unachievable colours;

The red, orange, blue, purple, pink colours.”

“O , haruspex! What future is that?

How can I plan my life?

And that of my child?”

Tides

With scooped-out sand, shells, and spread-eagled hands
Toddlers try to divert the incoming tide
From their castles and moats and their plastic boats.
They shriek and clap as the steep walls slide.

Old people slowly plod the windy strand.
Just the everlasting to contend with now,
Just the sea, rock, cliff and sloping sand.
They hunch and bend, a deferential bow.

Grey spume and guilt accompany their walk.
They know the kids’ castles will all fall down-
Just the sea, rock, cliff and sloping sand –
Unless they can make them understand.

Divination 1

A brown drowned albatross on screen,
Its stomach cut open by a blue-gloved haruspex.
Inside hard, bright, inedible things
Foretell the future.

The couple turn off the news, their guts churning.
Later they attend the ballet, as planned.
Tonight the prima ballerina, all in white,
Is a dying swan.

Waving arms above her head
The dancer stretches, feet together en point,
Then slowly raises one leg.

The woman sees such perfect balance.
She sighs, leans forward, and longs.

The swan flutters, and wobbles.
Her pirouettes pulse slower. Her end is near.
Jerkily she twirls. The woman grabs the man’s hand.

He sits back, legs spread,, eyes on the swan.
He sees a bent screwdriver
Trying to bore to the guts of the world
To find out what’s going wrong.

Wolf at the Door

We like to tell stories in that corner of the dining room
Where balls and marbles always end up.
The house listens and remembers, except when the story
Is the Three Little Pigs.
Then, the sash windows tremble.
And boulder foundations tell us
They were never piled, in 1884, to withstand the shudder
Of double decker busses rumbling by.

But we don’t want a brick house,
Insulated, and all the windows closed.
We love the gaps between the floor boards, the stuttering pipes,
The crying windows in the icy dawn.
With our pit-sawn weather boards around us
We will keep the wolf away, at least for another day.