E hoa,
I’m so glad we met each other on an uku mission
That haereka to Karitāne, to collect earth and stories
The great scoop
Fingers troughing in the rough and pebbled cliffside
Sweeping maukoroa and throwing its dust into the Huriawa currents
Whenua burns under the watch of Kahukura, refracting magenta in the sun
Ignited towards crystal greengrey
Have I told you e hoa, about the trapdoor spiders I see at night?
They’re in the banks, or at least their tunnels are. Perfect circles excised out of moss-cloaked clay, visible only when you kneel down. I love crouching to trapdoor height. Eyes and body in humble hui with mud contour. Knees and palms damp – leaf litter smooches.
Pūkāwerewere are our first weavers. Here in the banks, they are master excavators.
Eight-legged earth shifters, they know cavities and they know how to make passage.
Trapdoor spiders aren’t famous for their dispersal. Most spiderlings settle into new homes within a metre of their mother’s burrow.
Males might travel a bit further
–soft abdomens made vulnerable in open air–
in the great reproductive rush to find a mate
Instead they’ll travel two, maybe three metres into the bush. Bold explorers. I imagine the dotted maps they touch into the soils as they walk. Many multiplications of eight over and over, over the most intimate earthly takiwā.
I stare at the gaps between skeleton leaves and try to discover a spider’s footprint by torch light. How many generations of trapdoors have shaped the ground here? It’s impossible to decipher in a single night, but with each return to the clay banks I feel closer to the idea.
There is a mātauraka here–the path making
the excavating
the limbs
An infinite koiri of touch receptors!
The vessel pours itself
Spouts forth a slurry
Which pools into etched earth, and the whenua is coiled: cursive love letters and declarations
Mauka singing their tipuna’s names into veins of pigment
Kōkōwai awa, all braided and all slipping ka mua ka muri, one uri to the next
Time is musical here
One thousand friends and all their hands, resting and nesting
They high-five through Te Kore
Digits locking into a recursive mesh
Latticed chainlinkers, clinking mouths pulled into shrouds
And at those shrouded doorways ( those waharoa ) the barbed patience of parasitic wasps
The water evaporates out of the soil, the pūkāwerewere have to work harder to break ground. The wasps go hungry.
I remember our trip to Huriawa and the scorched maukoroa. I still have a jar of crumbs from the outermost layer. It took so long to reach the soft clay that day, and I worried about the climate.
Months later the rains are endless. New gravel runs rife down the gutters and banks.
Thick iron rust and cyanobacteria oxidations speak green into the air.
The trapdoors flood. I wonder about spider evacuations, who will host the wasps? Do they feel lonely, waiting at the tunnelled entrances?
Can they see their reflections in the water?
In the torrents
Basalt shards cut the ripples and scratch mangōpare into my feet
When I stand, my toes sink into mud
The dirt settles like cement
I stomp stronger and stronger
Rūaumoko under the lichen
The calls of pōhatu ring and hush
Fast-twitch fibres in a pinch pot
Dishes spilling over with fluid ash
In another world I drink it deep into my sinuses
and feel myself as ipu
Weighty with the earth that bore me