воскресенье, 16 сентября 2012 г.

Photographs the Size of Poems.(Poem) - Quadrant

 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. 

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