Friday 9 December 2011

Exterminator

Beyond these massive shrouds,
these enshrining blue curtains-
the city is quiet. Funereal.
A car, far off, a showy ute,
rolls its RIP’s along the road.
It’s almost as quiet as a country town…almost as quiet…
How I miss that tilting, subsiding house in the gully
where the chewing of a wallaby in the night
might be heard above the soft breathing
of a daughter, only feet away,
and the almost-inaudible vigil of the creek.
Thus, one life, sweet and terrible,
becomes the past.
It is merely the undendurable that turns
our coloured, waking griefs to
sepia, gravestone memories:
they are bowls of dried leaves and pallid petals
kept on the black-and-white tiled slabs
of our new and renovated lives.
The worst thing about tragedy is
how easy it is to set up.
After a while, you realize
that your days are spent
trudging over porcelain roses of loss.
You realize the day you filled the truck
was the day one of you died
(while you were taping up the fake flowers)-
that the day your little dog went away
to another home,
to be shorn and renamed,
was another of your deaths.
And you wonder if you will ever get anything back?
whether you will ever stop killing off your life?

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