from Avenue
by Chris Holdaway

At the risk of reality: the plaster sky is crashing down. Roads
delirious with their own markings and the event horizon of
train tracks running out of sight splits earth with the silence of
vision. The dreams of private cathedrals arrive at crossroads
and revolving doors with the tea leaves of currency; domestic
Platonic solids of burning trees and watering plants. Distance
has become a stranger leaving the house like shedding an
exoskeleton and taking on prosthetic space itself. Pierced by
the needlework of chimneys; a papier-mâché sense of scale for
all the routes walked home alone after funerals—when there
were other options—and shops where nothing lasts more than a
few months. Denizen fatale. O nuclear option O mushrooming
city. March at waking hours for all roads are war roads.

The intention at this
point is nothing more
than a rupture and a
journey thru the spirit.

Beneath the clock hands of exiled birds; no one knows quite
how to gather the sails. Buoyed by the burning desire to treat
city limits with the clarity of water’s edge—O indolent tides of
front yards. Some say there’s a gulf in every doorway; the
wreck of every roof pitching into black sea. Behold the
shortages cantilevered out over transcendental cliffs. Every
morning drops detached dwellings like anchors measuring
longitude by the lanes holding back time; whistling the
comings and goings of islands and waitstaff which are one and
one and the same. Time to reconstruct the world by shipping
manifest. Nothing so real as light reaching across harbour
water darkly; never so alive as beneath a lit-up bridge.

Every moment a
voyage to witness
transit of fruit fly
across white tile.

—And yet dawn breaks like gulls tearing inland; the epileptic
flit of sunlight through a forest remnant in a city as a forest
remnant. Not to take the step out of the root but to retain a
sacred relationship to firewood. The sound of lost birds crosses
a swing bridge worth the tallest tower and returns as if by post
to suspended wetlands. An aerial divides the sky;—as much
another world as weathervane or winter branch. Salutes beyond
the battlements of clouds scattering blue into colonnades open
to the tyranny of noon.

You must walk in
any weather to
justify the act.

~

Chris Holdaway is a poet, publisher, and translator from Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of Gorse Poems (Titus, 2022) and HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018). He directs the award-winning publishing outfit Compound Press.

Featured image: Chris Corson-Scott, 2013.