Nothing at all to be done

The night my father cut his hand and lost so much blood, I saw him stand and stagger pale-faced and uncomprehending doubtful of the floor’s ability to hold him up. My mother caught the spurting blood in a towel and sat him down and I slipped into a realm without sound, where movement too was subdued. The air was thick with frying fish and a bright fluorescent light sat upon the still life there – the bloodstained fisherman’s knife pointing at the half-full glass, the chopping board heaped with fillets, heads and guts. Outside, I saw a bird flitter and land on the verandah, cock its head – little blue-breasted wren – wait as if all breath had gone, all time had taken flight and left it there. Later, Dad lifted his glass, alive with beer and light, the injured hand so deftly bandaged, his pride pricked hardly, and made a joke about the resurrection; but the wren was still there stuck in a moment it hadn’t counted on: too much weight for its impetus, the curtain drawing back to show the actors and their props so inanimate and nothing at all to be done.

Penny for the Guy

Exiting the Station my eyes hurt, just enough light and too many pints at the Manby Arms the night before; watched two men play pool, one with a hand behind his back all cocky-like – me and Keith taking pot shots at each other’s drink with torn off bits of beer soaked coaster (Sunday arvo, too many loose hours flitting round us like wind-blown crisp wrappers.) Along Broadway, three kids pulling a cart they’ve made from bicycle wheels and a wooden crate. I skip sluggishly left, take a half-step, want to avoid this collision. But they’re in my face, one wearing a way too big woollen jumper and a fiercely, friendly grin. ‘Penny for the guy?’ Holds out his hand, taut like a flower straining too hard for the sun, drained of colour. He must be eight. Among rags in the cart is an effigy I mistake for something dead, a doll the size of a small baby. ‘Penny for the guy?’ This is old England swinging and Big Ben and bobbies on bicycles and I’m a kid again in my backyard with Papa and all the Sky Rockets and Tom Thumbs and Penny Bungers and Catherine Wheels alight at once from an errant spark and we’re diving for cover behind sheets hanging from the Hills Hoist. I’d never heard of King George and Guy Fawkes was a hero every November ’cause I’d cycle down to the milkbar on my dragster with ten dollars Papa gave me to buy my wares. At Stratford station, I’m penniless and hung over and a long way from the shop and the time in this light with these kids and their Guy dead in his rags, eyes agape and a rude little mouth open as if it might utter something.

City of lost children

In the city of lost children the streets are cluttered with the vaguely-wandering and the stunned-still rooted like stunted trees or trees malformed around some terrible blockage. Across the rooftops carried by storms the cries of children break and fall; the walls show pale shapes, shadows grotesquely thin and over-tall and music cannot lift its soul to be heard at all. In roadside stalls hawkers peddle useless wares like silk ties and powdered rhino horn and shoe lasts to prop open doors in homes these homeless cannot enter any more. There’s no currency, no law, and time is hanging in the clouds too afraid to come down and restore a narrative of sorts: some sense like this was meant to be, or it started here or there and progressed and this is where it ends and why it came to be. No, the children wander murmuring or murmur stock still that there was a thread they pulled and lost and buttons fell not even catching light or sound as they hit the ground.

Why this wind

The universe doesn’t love you, won’t stretch its starry fingers down to caress the gentle nape of your neck, won’t mirror your steps as you tread the potholed roads with their solitary street lamps and dumb craning trees; it does not know what it sees. But I see you, my boy, even in the dark of your absence, even with the walls pressing in on me. When I leave my body and trawl the breathing night, the wet streets sparkle with your tracks, translucent things like trails snails leave, and I trace my way to you. When you leave this place to light up like spring blossom in foreign climes, between drinks and kisses and sweet utterances, stop to wonder why this wind, why the humid traces of an unremembered time, why the earth trembles while the sun smiles. It is my ghost still walking without its body collecting the flecks of you practising its lonely art. Everything it has it sends to you like a spell or a thought so strong it shines, has wings and can fly.

Nights I cannot sleep

Thoughts late at night when the wooden beams contract and the children roll and murmur in their sleep come crowding like the curious at a crash scene, themselves a sight with their mouths open wide, heads hanging down or turned aside, deaf, blind to their contribution to the moment’s poignancy. I cannot sleep but know what happened, this arrangement of different things at the same time hanging in the air like a frozen zeppelin, simply is, like a cliff face or an opening in the earth that took a town. I struggle against it, knowing that life lived lies tangled and heavy like the discarded nets of fishermen – it’s wet and real and populated with lice – but life lost is cruelly imagined like stories of near catches told with hands held wide – ‘I’ve not got the span to tell you what might have been.’ This is how I think of you, my son, late at night in my bed, as if you are one dead who might have lived and painted things. I lost you and your loss was incremental but I feel it like some terrible, single event that swoops down from somewhere high and hidden, hard beaked and beady eyed that wants to eat the heart of me. Nights I cannot sleep pass slowly with my thoughts and my sense of a great ill will and you somewhere having lived a whole gap of time without me.

Missing

The fifteen minutes you were gone little one, all the names I’d invented for you – smoocher and moocher and pook – went tumbling and with you couldn’t be found while the light outside was setting hard, the blanket above pulled tight. I was afraid for your little bones, the naked give of your skin with the house messy and the doors shut tightly, your sister crying and me looking everywhere. Your big brother disappeared years ago at about your age he left me and I didn’t look in every cupboard or under beds  I didn’t spill with my life out onto the street drive frantically looking. I knew where he was and who had taken him. If I had known how much he would disappear, the water surface still, the wind hidden in the trees, days stacked upon days in wonky wooden towers, I might have tried a little harder; but I knew where he was and thought that to keep my hand extended feeling for his fingertips was enough. When I went looking, he wasn’t behind a door, quiet and frightened by his own breathing and the way the house was creeping cold, wondering where his dad had gone – but you little one were there, while the boards contracted with the cold silence of your disappearance, and the sun raced round to find you.

My fourth Child

We never knew you hiding there – stars and impossible distances, the hum of voices, the rolling wash of the ocean you swam in – though we knew you were there riding time’s shush-shush into being, its gentle nudge at you, wet seal nose playful, insistent even at the edge of the precipice that swallowed you; it might have winked, old pup time and rushed you forward as it dived with you. We never saw the swell – but stood on rocks, salt crusting our skin and pointed at the horizon, a long thin line dipping disappearing with the waves; reached out, we did to imagine what might be drawn there – had hardly begun to imagine your tiny feet, chin tucked tight against your breast, little robin heart beating, perfect fists held tight against the constriction you had not yet imagined. How small the world is, how contained. We keep bumping into walls we had hoped might fall away; we have kept distances at bay and courted them while lights winked on and out and lovers like us fell down to pray or reach up and out certain that what they held was what they had intended to grasp.

You

You are seventeen, maybe eighteen. You are growing your hair or have just had it cut. You remember a time when you were seven and your older sister cut her own fringe and you laughed at her so she hit your bare arm with the scissors and you still have the scar. Maybe you don’t have a sister. You worry about your brother because he’s just got his licence back after having lost it in a drink driving incident that could have been fatal but only cost him money and a lot of embarrassment and forced him to reduce his carbon footprint by using public transport. You wonder if he’s learnt his lesson. You even pray for him at night even though your faith in God has been wavering lately. Or maybe it’s been renewed because you’ve seen the way people have responded to recent disasters, how they dug into their pockets for strangers, how they’ve cried tears for the suffering of others. Maybe you cried too and crying recalled the time the dog your parents bought you when you were ten escaped from the front yard and ran with its ears flying out behind it across the road into the neighbour’s garden and your father laughed and you stormed away even though it was your birthday and your friends were there and watching you. You thought the dog would be gone forever and you’d not had the chance to name it. You remember the crying you’ve done in your life. Only last year you cried because the girl you thought you loved left you. It wasn’t the leaving so much as the feeling that you were foolish dressed up in your clothes, ready to go out, when she called. You wrote a poem about it that you will remember by heart one day and repeat to a group of teenagers you’re working with. They’ll laugh and allow you into their world for a moment and you’ll remember how you felt being seventeen. You are seventeen. Some days the sky presses down upon you so that you are small and beetle-like crawling on the skin of the earth and then some days it lifts and takes you with it up so high and you look down and everything is magnified in such a way as to make it simple and knowable and if you bet on a horse you’d win. You don’t bet on horses yet. You probably drink alcohol from time to time. Maybe you have a lover. You want to go to university and when you think about it you imagine yourself there on campus with your friends all of you smiling and arm in arm and you taking a photo looking through the lens at yourself. Life on campus! The word conjures images of guys with long hair and capes and bats flying blind at dusk against a bruised skyscape but you’ve got no idea why. Sometimes you say the word over and over – camp-us, camp-us, camp-us – until it loses its meaning. You’ve done this a lot in your life and you wonder in more serious moments if words have any intrinsic meaning and if they don’t where does the meaning go when words release it? In classes over the years you’ve sat with friends and had philosophical conversations instead of doing quadratic equations or contour maps. Is my blue your blue? If I eat a potato and you eat a potato do we experience the exact same taste? Maybe my potato is your lima bean? No my potato is your ice-cream! Or here’s a good one: if I wake up in some strange place with amnesia and start a new life with a new identity am I still the same person? Your mother says you talk in your sleep. One time you sleepwalked when you were staying at your cousin’s house in Watsonia and you made it out the door and were on you way to the corner milkbar when your aunty grabbed your arm and walked you like a lamb back to bed. She nearly had a pink fit, she said. You wonder what a pink fit is. A pink fit. A pink fit. Pink. Fit. Your friend Anastasia saw a ghost. You don’t believe in ghosts but you believe in Anastasia and know she saw a ghost and because you are seventeen the two can co-exist. You worry about global warming and the current economic crisis and whether there’ll be a job for you when you grow up. You say that for fun, “When I grow up!” You like live music. You like indie bands. You admire anyone who can sing. You once did karaoke and swore never to do it again. You’ve written poems that you don’t show anyone. One time you gave money to a beggar who confronted you in Fitzroy gardens. He grabbed your arm and looked into your eyes. His eyes were steel blue but they looked as if they were receding, shrinking maybe – that if you remained joined to this man and looking into his eyes they would grow smaller and smaller in the expanding caverns of his eye sockets. You felt dizzy as you gave over the two dollars but later you wrote a letter to the editor about the plight of homeless people in Melbourne. That night you saw a shooting star. Anastasia says there are aliens. You say we are all aliens. Anastasia doesn’t laugh. That’s what you love about her. She understands you, knows where you’re coming from. You reckon that if you hang around her enough, the cracks in the concrete footpaths will disappear and there’ll be less chance you’ll fall over.

Remiss

I have been remiss because a while ago Moonbeam McQueen, a favorite blogger of mine, awarded me with a Blog of the Year Award, and as yet, I’ve not managed a post in response. I am a little unsure of my position regarding blog awards (I mean it’s nice to be recognized – and read – but it’s un-Australian to go shouting about your achievements.) Blog of the Year sounds impressive, and neat when you consider I’ve been blogging about that long, so I’d like to thank Moonbeam McQueen for firstly reading what I write and secondly for thinking what I write is worthy of some sort of mention. And I have to follow the rules here and nominate others (and outline the rules – where do they come from?) So I’d like to nominate the following blogs and bloggers for a BLOG OF THE YEAR AWARD (blaring trumpet.) Stacy Michelle at ‘The language we speak’ whose raw, gritty, edgy poetry inspires me to abandon my lyrical crap and say something real (something you can touch or hold between your teeth.) Emily at ‘Living Questions’ whose coolly observed realism is like a camera taking in things distilling them, changing them subtly. Two’s enough. As per the instructions: Blog rules are: Select the blogs you think deserve the ‘Blog of the Year 2012 Award’. Write a post and tell about the blogs you have chosen and present them with their award. Please include a link back to this page and include these rules (do not alter the rules or the badges). Let the blogs you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the rules with them. You can now also join our Facebook page – click the link here Blog of the Year 2012 Award and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience. As a winner of the award – please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award – and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar … and start collecting stars…Links to blogs I’ve mentioned: http://livingqs.wordpress.com and http://thelanguagewespeak.wordpress.com. Also Moonbeam can be found at http://moonbeammcqueen.com Over and out.

New apples (for my little ones)

Don’t fold your heart away or hide its pretty ribbons, little one, up there in your tree, the day still green like new apples. Don’t let the cynic sun that fries the leaves dry your spirit or make sèche your skin with lies about time or flight; leap like skinny frogs or flying fish in the happy air, or like sea spray over rocks, unafraid of the landing. Don’t fear an end to the magical circus tent parading elephants and dwarves and clowns and painted ladies in sequined gowns holding the strangely passive paws of ferocious lions; let the death defying high wire leaps of acrobats without nets be your guide – life goes on after every thrilling dive until no matter what your age. Time, the old sparsely feathered cocky, in his cage can only parrot how it is. Don’t live in time which squawks of ends to things, but space which, from your lofty perch, you’ll notice drops away and away until it blurs and fades, but there is no edge or none I’ve heard of anyway; no traveller I’ve known can say they jumped, leaped or tripped and didn’t discover some ground with the circus all around.