What haunts the space, one poem to another ...
Whose is the journey that spans these three dots?
You could not know then how it was
that modulations in her voice
carried you from long summer evenings
by the harbour, the sandy bush track,
to an imagined past
nor how the scent of gumtrees and low-tide weed
gave way to the invoked tang of pine --
a northern forest sweeping down to the sea.
In her voice is the keening of older tongues:
make-beliefs, half-truths, ghostings of words
that would take you a lifetime to translate,
Corrie: a circular hollow surrounded by hills.
(To mean, also, a cauldron.)
You listened, waiting, while she stirred and stirred
-- story-woman, sibyl, confidant, mother.
And after her telling? Always the dotted pause.