1. THE
DISTURBANCE
Frogs chant,
way out in the night,
like the old lady called Millie
who paces the corridor and cries
“Help me!
help me!”-
a plover disturbed from the tussocks
at midnight.
“Nurse!
nurse!” she
wails,
day and night,
her voice reedy and rusted.
She is as fragile as a dogwood skeleton:
dry and brittle, and fine as tannin-stained
lace.
2.
DEMENTIA WING
Once, she almost flew back to her room-
glided on an arabesque of flamenco,
lifted on a warm updraft of memories of Rio
Tinto
with her wild boy cousins in hot pursuit;
told how the gang of cousins had daily pushed
her wicker baby carriage around the old
headstones,
so that she had learnt to read in a cemetery.
She would coach me to say:
Soy guapa!
Soy linda!
and I went along with it,
just to make her smile her beaky smile.
She broke her pelvis, they said, and
during the night, no-one could sleep
for her screams.
I heard it some days-
like the sound of a seagull
high up on a cliff-face
being buffeted by a westerly wind.
I would go to her, when I could,
and marvel at the unnatural fragility of her
wrist.
I’m so ashamed of myself! she once said.
The day they moved her,
I heard her wailing like a banshee
in the corridor. They pushed her bed along;
it was covered in a nest of cardigans and
scarves
and it looked like a drowned albatross corpse
tangled in flotsam.
We found her room- she and I.
I put her to bed
and pulled the vinyl armchair to the window.
You’ll be able to sit here, I told her…
you’ll be able to see that patch of sky
and those two trees,
pointing hopelessly to the crowns
of two peppermint gums in the distance.
They told me she fell.
She broke her neck.
She’s sedated, now,
and her hands are trussed
to the sides of the bed.
3. THIS
IS DEATH
Home again;
the place stinks of dead.
I discover a rat
under my bed.
It is light as paper
and leaves puffs of soft fur and skin
strewn around the floor like bulrush fluff.
The cast has been cut from my arm,
the limb a corpse belonging to someone else,
the muscles wasted, tendons rigid with a kind
of dying.
Layers of skin waft through the stale air,
like desiccated snowflakes, defying gravity-
a waterless snowstorm in a dry and airless
globe.
If this is death, I tell myself…
then it is as weightless as a dandelion clock;
as painless as a dead bird’s flightbone,
hollow and full of sunlight.
4.
THREE LITTLE GURUS
I picked up a cicada with one skew wing-
it was not an empty cicada,
but a full one;
something inside it was as dense as a
sugar-pea.
Its eyes, I noticed, were brown glass beads,
and behind its transformer-like head
there was a velvet band, lichen green.
Its willow-veined wings
were filled in with isinglass
that crackled like paper when you poked a bit
and rearranged to see whether anything
was breaking out of that small crack at the tip
of the tail.
The tan, articulated limbs flexed,
like the furry legs of a guru, in fact,
three little gurus
sitting in each others’ bony laps.
One morning soon,
there will only be an empty cicada shell,
crunchy, like a gum leaf;
its legs, splayed twigs.
Meanwhile, we wait.
5. IN CASE OF FIRE
Yesterday,
Mrs Roberts said goodbye to her husband,
after
forty-six years.
“He was my
best friend,” she said.
Mrs Roberts
had to say goodbye in a makeshift chapel
at one end
of the big dining-room;
the chairs
were the sticky blue vinyl ones
that scream
incontinence;
and there
were two big ugly vases of fake flowers
scrounged
from the corridor.
A plate of
yesterday’s scones were iced
with a
jaundiced yellow
and served
up for afternoon tea,
and the undertakers
greasily eyed the staff
who came to
give their condolences,
for what
they were worth.
Two of the
ladies appeared and sat through the fifteen minutes,
but they
didn’t really know whose coffin it was.
There were
just Mrs Roberts,
and her
daughter from England,
the only
two touched by any grief.
Having
knocked back some instant coffee,
the
slitty-eyed priest explained that the two mourners
could
follow the coffin as far as the store-room doors.
After that,
the undertakers would continue on alone,
across the
gravel between a blue shipping container
and some
wheelie-bins and builders’ utes.
Mrs
Roberts’ daughter walked with her,
as far as
the double doors.
The
undertakers slipped through,
with Mr
Roberts draped in the Union Jack.
I watched
the backs of the two women
as the
double doors closed.
IN CASE OF
FIRE, KEEP THESE DOORS CLOSED,
was
announced in duplicate,
as the
heavy doors met and clicked shut.
6.
JUST A LIGHT, NOT GOD
Too early
for work,
I drive to
the esplanade
just to
watch the waves.
Part of me
thinks this is a waste of time-
not going
for a purposeful stride
along the
hard, wet edge,
but just
sitting in my car for five minutes
with the
window down-
watching
the water breathe the air.
There are
no waves.
There is
just the faint swell and shrink
of the
water’s breathing.
It is even
too early for the seagulls.
All there
is,
is the
bright silver-white resting on the surface;
the
silver-white glinting.
I let my
eyes open to the silver-white memory-
the
silver-white shifting god-thing.
No wonder
people talk about God as a pure light, I think.
Separate
sparks of growing-shrinking light
reach
toward me,
like the
burning phosphorous spittings from a sparkler.
Finally, I
turn the key in the ignition to leave for work.
It is not
God, I know that.
It is just
a light.
I am glad.
