Poetry of the Ports

TRANSPORT

SEA AIR

Flights Arrivals

Jet Star
Pacific Blue

Ships in Port Today

Cerveza II
Enchanter
Endurance
Oracle
Reel Passion
San Nicholas
Tanea
Tawera
Te Ariki Nui

Scared / Sacred

Temple of Athena /Gun Emplacement, August 2009, JB

"A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking

Temples or gun emplacements? Awaiting the enemy or framing the view? The decades between intention and appreciation melt away the menace, and instead there's scenery by stealth. Late afternoon light on a late winter's day brings a metamorphosis. The nervous cliffs at the harbour edge become places of grace, they become Vincent Scully's - his earth, his temples, his gods. An antipodean Aegean Sea, Poseidon, Apollo, Athena in attendance.

Temple of Poseidon / Coastal Monitoring Facility, August 2009

Freefall...

Filmed for the live performance by XELA at Monkeytown, Brooklyn, NY by Matthew Murphy.

[Best viewed Full Screen, and sound on Max...] [Plus a glass of something very darkly red ...]

Dream / Land

Flying / Dreaming, August 2009 JB

For us the land is matrix and destroyer,

Resentful, darkly known

By sunset omens, low words heard in branches;

Or where the red deer lift their innocent heads

Snuffing the wind for danger,

And from our footfall's menace bound in terror.

Flying / Dreaming 2, August 2009, JB

(Dreaming of James K Baxter's words, his 'Matukituki Valley ...' (1949))

Spectral City

Early morning, another city. Traces of humanity drift across anonymous facades. A blind down, a window open.

No-one on the streets. Just the aura of the haunted. Smears of ectoplasm. The scraping of poltergeists.

And a pair of shoes.

"Ghosts crawl over this landscape like termites on a rock."

Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife, 2008

On Memory

Dunedin North, May 2009, JB

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Roy Batty in Bladerunner (1982) [ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer]


The fragmentary and partial. The small elements of memory that make up a life. The shoebox of letters placed in the recycling bin - a line drawn in the sand. One day soon to return re-formed, reincarnated, as an egg carton. The photographs on the lost camera card, fading in the mind's eye, vaporising. The unrecorded impressions. The flooding of the mind, the eyes, when the wintersweet flowers. The optimism of a freesia. Soon springing into summer, a winter's worth of reverie to be catalogued, from the fug of hibernation into lucidity ...

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end ... one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)

For when you look back on the whole past course of immeasurable time and think how manifold are the shapes which the motions of matter take, you may easily believe that these very same seeds of which we now are formed have often before been placed in the same order in which they now are; and yet we cannot recover this in memory: a break in our exis­tence has been interposed, and all the motions have wandered to and fro far astray from the sensations they produced.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (50 BC)