Waking he wondered where he stood.
He rose from bed, stared at the mirror -
clearly a person had left the room.
He was now the sole occupant.
They wandered out, he thought, walked
out on life. But life he thought, what was it?
After all, it's so often written about: waking
a shower, a meeting, talking, eating,
working. That all seemed 'real' to most.
But to him. Possibly not. It was his other life.
And before the event happened, before this event
changed his life, turned the capsizing
currents against him, it was all merely
a test of nerve and endurance - brute strength -
if he was to get through it, the criticism
of why he was the way he was.
He placed a towel over the mirror so he
could no longer see his face, but his mind
still pictured all that had happened, all that
was him, and faced with it, he searched the room.
THE PICTURE
(for Daryl McLaren)
A picture of you, standing by a
tramper's hut, the bush forming the back-
drop to the fall; so many elegies
whistling in time, as if sluicing the ice
that carpets the valleys; and so
cold up there when the darkness
comes…Walking through the bush once
I looked inside a spider's lair, a hollow
trunk clothed in webs, a tangle of bodies,
caught and taken, is that also how
we must go? Climbing these hills, peaks,
dangling from a precipice, like so many
friends before the fall, and just that
picture of you, defiant, by the hut window.
