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.
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