At the end of the day
(for Lisa)
After attending a funeral
of one who died beloved
but too young
I have lost track of the trembling world.
The black pen lies still.
What can I say?
So I read again my favourite poet’s work
written as he was dying.
Boughs scrape my roof
stirred by a night wind.
Pictures and photos embrace me.
School art colours warm my bedroom walls
as if safeguarding me.
Our boys with time on their side.
They are taller now
swept along by lusty life.
These poems daunt me
humanity haunting each wise line
clear thoughts amid chaos
medals for valour
in the face of withering knowledge.
I glance one more time at the photos
those fresh faces
their time on this earth ahead.
Impedimenta
Opposite the horizon of the dark sea,
bending, rattling, she can’t make the gas surge,
shields a small flame, sputtering.
She might as well have landed in a squat.
Only the stove will light up, just,
not the hot water, nor the fridge,
that stove’s wan heat in constant danger.
She fumes, needing tea’s habit, a shower,
needier still for the comfort of wrongs put right.
He slumps on the sullen periphery
of this gas bottleneck, this powerlessness,
knowing they gaze in different directions,
a man with anniversaries of battles.
Outside, a sombre sky, wind skirling.
A wasps’ nest caused the mini-crisis,
abandoned in the narrow copper pipe,
a paperiness lighter than sea air,
now blown away, disappeared, like time.
He stays up late reading a novel by gaslight
about the way love fades at the edges.
She sleeps, exhausted by the heft of the day.
Poet as ageing narcissist
He watches himself in the third person
at this gathering of his blood
marking a Round Figured Birthday,
hair, beard beyond mid-life grey,
not ageing well like wine or cheese,
a mockery of pulsing yesterday
which, like other damning birthday evidence,
astonishes him, and, perhaps, his clansmen.
He stands to read. They watch him
watching himself, uncertain, like him,
as he mimes patting pockets for poems,
whether to smile or exchange glances,
so they, watchers and watched,
moderate their expressions,
stay cool, will a heel-crunch of any emotion,
preferring the relief of effete jokes,
hope his voice doesn’t crack like his mind.
They make him weak, they make him strong.
He knows they discuss his increasing lapses
when he drifts off to the word sanctuary,
forgetful blunders that once never were,
so makes the effort to stay in tune,
drawing close to black night’s fire
though a yearning to cast off lures him
to travel light with his failing old pals,
imagination, memory, the first person.
Vistavision
A billowy ruckus of air, hammering
her dark thoughts, a staccato sound of war.
The pilot covering the famous yacht race
lands his helicopter on flat rocks
to collect his annual order of crayfish.
Stilled, their view is a sea eagle’s
from the small mountain they must climb.
This time she gets his smell of napalm joke,
prefers the dewy morning’s eucalyptus scent,
the enduring islands in the glittering strait.
A wallaby bounds across their track,
distracting her from the direction marker.
She misses it, and he corrects her,
another irritation, like his movie quips.
They see the helicopter lift off, bank,
circle the cove three times in farewell,
a gunmetal dragonfly flashing low
against the murky violet of scrub and scree,
the sea flogged by the blades’ commotion.
He strains to keep its ghostly flicker in sight.
On the track she seems to disappear like a dream.
Unreconciled
I moved only a few miles away, but long ago.
Walking around where I once lived
I feel like one who has been in far exile,
wondering why I have neglected this return,
discomfited smelling the tangy neighbourhood,
wood smoke, breakfast cooking, scattered leaves,
calculating sequences of events
involving my people in the clandestine past,
now vague, unlike memorable town landmarks.
In thrall crossing driveways I strain to recall
exactly what led to this estrangement
but chronological memory baffles me,
details waver, shadowy facts confusing.
I bear what seems like guilty sorrow.
For moving away? For being memory-drunk?
The town’s pool where our boy learned to swim,
superseded, of course, by a heated facility,
lies eerily quiet, its black water still.
I swerve toward the safety of my parked car,
leaving what can never be left.
Short-cutting through familiar back lanes
behind houses where newcomers spend days,
I pass a fence so rickety-faded
it could date from my boyhood.
I feel overcome by loss, imagined echoes,
want that fence imbued with its original hue,
straight, strong again.
