69 Amapur Drive
Waking, slower with every passing
year, we discovered our breakfast
as a new found land
and went outside on bright
summer days (all the days
of our youth were summer)
to find the ships
had broken anchor and lay
sprawled
amongst the cabbages.
*
We went there on weekends - holidays at home
and sailed our beds to sleep.
*
Through the one kitchen window uphill
she watched us play and made sure
the passionfruit didn't get hurt
- he was downstairs, shut in his grotto
with the concertina doors
and the chaotic shadows of tools,
making time,
turning it smooth on the lathe,
and cutting each of the seconds
equal to its brothers
87 Campbell Street
They moved down from their hills to our stream
within the range of our cat
and rough autumn floods.
A station halfway between worlds:
home and school - all that there was.
each morning we waved, and returning we'd stop
for biscuits and cakes, always fresh, kept in tins
just for this purpose. Stilted words.
Pale tea. Dog-eared Women's Weeklies.
We sat where we could see the roses
she planted, moved down from the hills.
(I watered them once for a week.)
Sometimes she knelt in the thirsty beds
that drank of her blood and last years
pulling the strawberries we ate
in mutual silence.
Questions, no answers;
An uncertainty of legs.
meanwhile time grew
long and delicate
in a case made of brass
in the grotto brought down from the hills.
......................
He learnt how to cook,
and piled the junk of his life
in a room where guests no longer came.
Straightened the sheets, blew out
the dust that cluttered the corners
and lay on the tins.
Measured for one, counted the jars -
watched time stop in a heartbreak.
8 Swadel Way
Winter has crept back to the heights
where memory's longest.
The garden runs wild, sprouting long
stalks of desiccated seed.
Standing aside soaked in the dark
the fissure has widened
with walls of tall pine. Stepping stones
lead to kitchen benches, floors,
tasks to be done, scraped and renewed,
on Saturday mornings-
(and all the last days withered age
sends are dusk lit Saturdays).
Drivers grow worse; People today
have dangerous habits.
He eats with us now, mostly - we
got him drunk the first dry week.
Time has been left packed in its box
amongst the machinery:
The minutes grown old, the hours
all rusted together.