warm my hands, scratch at my shadow leaning against a dry

crumpled stone. I'm

squatting,
staring at a sun spiked by the summits of Maungapohatu. In the bushes

birds sit, mesmerised by these flames.

Yesterday
you said you'd come back. You walked across the baked earth,

said you would be back – turned in the afternoon glare and

said it
and I believed it. In me you've become a

flicker of a thousand images, an ultramarine mirage

forming and reforming,
untouchable in spite of myself. In me I've this shape of a white-

painted figure coming in from the horizon of a desert. I'm

not alone. There's
another figure sticklike and identical and another and

another. It's not you who moves in single file, painted white and naked.

Not you. Not you. These men
hide nothing but their faces – eyes hooded and deep set –

I sense I know them, sense the liquefying fulfilment of their intrusion. They

warm their hands
by the fire too – one chants softly to himself – one prays to his stones,

another sings under his breath, while another

performs the miracle
of them being here with me. This is the living site of the future, this

cold before the sun clamps onto a lifting cloud – these hands

spread before the
desert fire of my making, this feeding of new shadows, my

overwhelming focus on the deaths of moths dashing into the flames,

my thoughts of you
still vivid but changing to a traveller gone off to a distant land. You said you'd

come back but I don't believe it'll happen any more. One day these men will

disappear too.