Rotorua

In honor of our impending trip back to New Zealand tomorrow!, I wanted to post my Rotorua poem from last year's trip. I orginally envisioned writing a series of New Zealand poems--one for each day--and I still may do just that.

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The smell of sulfur lingers in my shirts,
wrapping these cotton threads in an
otherworldly musk that can't be machine washed,
that has to be worn
and eroded molecule by molecule

until the scent itself is just a memory of it,
fragmented and partial,
lumped in with other thin stretches of lake highway
and stream shrouded mudpits,
mobbed bus depots and
creek waterfalls like fire flowing on the outskirts of town,

and the bedsheets and white walls on Hinemoa Street
are infused with the same smell in the air
that swirls unseen over us and into our
lungs like bellows at the fire,
pumping and prevailing
some minute portion of that acrid substance
to mix through my swirling blood,

and then I am it and it me, a more
complete and more ruined creature:
part mineral, part man.