In need of goodness and mercy
I am being lulled by visions of still waterswhen my father's memorial service gets edgy.Smoke pours from a meter box outside.Firemen scurry importantly like comic extras,unable to locate the smoke's source.Spaced apart in orderly rows we swivel,casting sideways glances through tall windows.
Organist and minister struggle with focus,walking in shadowed valleys en route to death.My frowning brother once worked as a fireman.Like me, he has toiled in many fields.Between wife and sister I can't see directlybut the angled windows reflect like mirrorsso I maintain decorum without missing the action.
Earlier, my nephew watched us parking,long legs stretched out his car door,smoking, listening to football on the radio.I felt uncomfortable, fearing evil whenrelatives spoke to my pregnant second wife,exchanging crafty looks like the piousas if burdened with shameful news about us.
In the presence of what seemed enemiesmy mother told the minister I was a recluse.Listening to his practiced inflexionstrying to make a stranger's life interestingfrom the tidy fiction she has fed him,estranged by a smokescreen, firemen crying out,I feel this absurdity must surely stop.
Killiecrankie
I should have lingered on my last bay days,admired the shell-scattered expanse,the guardian mountain's changing colours.
I knew each walk could be the lasttracking footprints to the far rocks,working out who distant figures might be.
When the loaded crayfish plane took off,rising slowly through driven clouds,why didn't I monitor it until my eyes ached?
I should have waded up the small river mouthin the lee of dunes, beyond tide-crash,mind-printing those returning black swans.
Did I dream I carried a pointed stick,wrote a joking rhyme about leaving,watched waves wash my silliness out to sea?
Each day I jumped from the flat rockinto the slipways in shivering ritual,should have kept plunging in until exhausted.
I should have remembered our first summer,the decrepit shack where we understood myth,gazing past fishing boats towards Old Man's Head.
Why didn't I climb the bluff once more,haul on those ropes, breath banging in my chest,looking, looking over a dark sea at lamplight time?
Youth
Here comes Ian Smith, look at him,whiffy disapproval under a whiskery noseworrying the rest of his faux-suffering face.But I knew him as a tattooed ne'er-do-well.Has he forgotten or is this yet anotherexample of selective memory-warp?This poet-dreamer has distanced himselffrom the community of one that was himwhen he never fretted about the bomb,wouldn't be