Both Sides of the Moon Read Free

mistake again). It is wasted ejaculation, of water hurtled to a sightless sky, a man’s excited ejaculation has more meaning. I wonder if it hasn’t done something to me before my time. I fear that all my turgid, seething thoughts are wasted to the ether where thoughts go, while words would at least leave a little trace behind. I keep meaning to get a diary.
    The early hours are ours, before the hours rented out to the tourists. Foreign takers of sight in our land. As our Waiwera World War II men were takers of sight — and life — in other lands.
    They come here to exclaim, to take incessant photographs of thermal sights but always with themselves in it, as if nothing is separable from an individual’s intrusion into what he experiences. This place, the villagers’ place, half my place, has no meaning but its physical manifestations, since the insight they gain into village Maori life is but surface. There is nothing to tell the tourists about behind the steam curtains and vapour veils. It is private and anyway jealously guarded. Besides, a communal people have fewer secrets; probably why my mother moved away from them. To practise her not- as-secret -as-she-thinks life away from prying eyes.

    I have strained eyes at the jagged pencil-line of tree-covered hill, trying to catch the erupting water cutting the hill breasts in two. I have come an hour before dawn and stared till my eyes water to pick out the faintest sign of charged eruption breaking the black, becoming the cleavage between those hilly breasts. I have ached my eyes to catch the evidence of blocked-out section of stars; turned myself into a rigid statue of stare to catch a missing sliver of star-sprinkled sky so to claim back lost sight of a geyser blooming. I don’t know why, unless to capture the elusive. To confirm, or answer, a question.
    Geyser roar and choked stranglings (He’s coming! The man is coming!) from ground fissures, of heated pressure squeezing through cracks, and tourists make much the same fuss of an exit from a ground eye-hole as a man in private makes of sperm exit from his cock-hole. They gasp. So did he. Oh, this is some place to find meanings and metaphors, parallels and paradoxes. The more when you have to relate. And a mind that tends that way.
    Mud-laden thermal breath struggles and fights up through thick, bubbling fluid clay and sits, suspended for a last held moment, a bubble, a bubblegum blow, a set of swollen cheeks and pursed lips, a statement about to be made to the upper-world as it pops into the infinity of sky, slish, slish. All over the grey fluid surfaces it does this. (All over the town, we her children had to find out, she and men were doing that, slishing in the groaning dark.)
    It is angry struggle here: roars, hisses, squeaks, screams, moans and gargles. See the metaphor, grab a comparison, of rock and water and a molten inner core far below the cause of it, it could be society, it could human life. Hear the same seething surface echo with actual song, and laughter, and tales being told, and lovings being made, and funerals carried out. Hear the villagers in their own eruptive outbursts of being what we all are. So, of lovings all over again. (And questions never answered.)
    It used to be the duty of the first arrival at the changing shed to light the single kerosine lamp. But Uncle Henry persuaded the town council to run an electric cable along the river bank and up to the shed.
    The better to choose from a row of five small warm water vessels, each large enough to take seven, eight, ten at a happy squeeze,sited here on this blessed, free-heated soil, and a ceiling of stars when they are not over with cloud. Slide into warmth fed from a large pool down concrete channels, dark feeding shadows arrow-straight along the ground and, when first light comes, like mercury flowing, thick and graceful and silvery. And then the sun moves to higher angle and it is like rivulets of gold running into your submerged lap. This