in venice

in venice

in venice
i saw venetian blinds
in a morning café
window slatted with
the blue sky and
churning canal
scenery of pleasure
boat, old gondola
and it clicked
i’d come home
to roost in
the land of
those blinds
i’d peered through
in childhood years
amazed at the

sheer

sheer
noon, 2 december 2013
maungarei (mt. wellington), auckland: looking across the tamaki estuary towards bucklands beach & musick point

The estuary where the boat was unmoored to wander… a Weathercat postprandial snap

from the top
of that sheer
and green folded
volcanic cone
the estuary on
the out-tide was
watercolour run
dry on paper
the peninsula
where all i had
was once enough
to burn in
november
bonfires
year upon
year
looked an
hour glass
pinched between
the thumb and
broad forefinger
of sea

Copyright © 2013 Peter Le Baige. All Rights Reserved

The music accompanying the reading is from the opening larghetto movement of Trio for Flute, Bassoon, and Piano, A. 507. by Gaetano Donizetti , & interpreted here by Francesco Bossone (Bassoon), Carlo Tamponi (Flute) & 
Stefano Micheletti (Piano) in a 2012 recording.

wanted

wanted
june 2013

i had wanted to
write the poems
that the teacher,
the lecturer, the
speaker years
after my time
my full-stop put,
would say of
how the language
was like a treasury
of sounds and images
emptied across the
wind those hearing
it already ascended
the steps of its
soft rhyme gone
though the doors of
its palace into the
gardens of fish
on trees,