PHOTOGRAPHS THE SIZE OF POEMS In our family album, you are the lost city, the spot marked with an x. Here in sepia you're nineteen, just out of the army, bent to attention, as seamless as your uniform. At your wedding, you're a thick black shadow on the velveteen curtains. Here, later, the paunch you'd never develop is settling above your belt. Your frown, like a breeze ruffling the surface of water. Perhaps the car was playing up, perhaps you were thinking of money and bills or something you hadn't done at work, everything in the photo is slightly blurred. Christenings. Birthdays. Often, it seems, you've dug up a smile and polished it clean for the cameras, while Mum looks on with a nervous, fluttering grin, as if she were always warning Do be careful, love, won't you. You rarely went to church but believed, I think, in manners, decency and facing up to lies. Sometimes there were Sundays like this one, where you've got us ready for North Ryde Methodist, mainly to show your pious relatives you could do the right thing by us. The minister, your cousin, welcomed us at the door, he was dappled with appeasement but in the service noted those he'd like to see here more often. After that, you stayed away, but you said it was all right for us to go back, if that was what we wanted. Mum had lugged us kids up to Ryde Oval to see you batting for the First Grade XI on this ambling Saturday. It's just on tea, the scoreboard drums your unbeaten hundred and you've hurried over to tell us about it. But she's had enough of mothering, and says something about sport that all wives must think. In the long shadows, you're ready to walk back out with your bundle of runs while she's wandered away for a cuppa with the other women. Secretly, glancing up at the game, she watches you take strike for the final session. And she'd remember how you charged out to the first delivery and were bowled, and the whole game was lost. There's nothing here from the month you died, and the year's only snap in the album is a cool Christmas Day at Auntie Dulce's in Bankstown. Though the gifts are all indoors, we three boys sag before the tent Dulce and Henry had raised for us, a thin windy house as frail as being alive. The back yard is a smear of weather. Dressed as if for church, each of us clutches the other's hand, you'd think we were holding each other up, staring into the lens like stiff Catholic apostles. The rain's bucketing down. Mum's somewhere else. In my dream it's snowing, the air's like ash and your breath looks like smoke. Wind makes its artistry in the cold, daubing flakes of ice all over the lens. I wipe them away but they come back, they're multiplying, dividing, like cells under a microscope. Your face is frozen to an oval miniature, glistening, out of focus. The camera shakes in my hands, the cold gets colder, and I call into the waste between us Smile, Dad. Smile.
воскресенье, 16 сентября 2012 г.
Photographs the Size of Poems.(Poem) - Quadrant
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