Wakatipu

March in Queenstown, remember the ice we climbed,
you seven months pregnant at Fox Glacier,
sees winter start it's pour at two thousand metres,
as autumn suns itself across the surface 
of the lake.

We'd arrived, hitching rides down the West Coast,
the winding roads seeing you sick again
and again, your hair, blond then, streaming 
from rear windows in southern winds
and sun bleached.

Where we pitched our tent under trees
by the lakeside was latent with wild grass
and hints of gold, the Rush called off years ago,
the soil offering torn shards of it's past,
forgotten now.

The morning after I filled the tent with several
stomachs full of dry Montana White
I found you gone and searched the lake shore
without success till the surface tension broke
and you rose

reeking of Wakatipu, your hair a waterfall,
rinsed of my stench and fragrant now, cold washed
clean of all my blunt betrayals, how I had
failed in the ever fathomless past and would,
you knew, again.