THE AGE OF SMALL THINGS

Old statisticians never die: their samples just get smaller

Houses revisited where

we holidayed confront us

with furnishings, magazines,

décor, beds and utensils,

from our world that pertained

when we were here decades ago,

surprise us with vivid replay memories

insecurely linked

to the passing trade

of now.

When we were thirty

renewed encounters with places

from our childhood surprised us:

trees once tall

had shrunk, the long mile

we walked to the shop as kids

for lemonade on holiday

was now quite short.

Ten years since last

I repaired our letter box

atop a garden post. 

Today it was askew,

screws rusted out.

This was not how I remembered it.

LOST FOR WORDS

How long had I known him?

Forty years or maybe more

I estimated.

 

Sitting opposite at lunch

his eyes stopped me:

I could not recall them

so bright, his skin so clear,

no trace of angst,

no elements of previous ambition,

 

conversation a little slow,

his stare, though happy, fixed,

fine movements missing,

mini-twitches, small adjustments:

were these the beginning

of Parkinson's Disease?

 

I was lost, though not shocked

when two days later

I learned that he had died.

PRENEZ GARDE À LA GUILLOTINE!

What ever happened on the way

to wee? Oh dear: so tell me when 

he sadly lost his head, this man

whose little body marks the door for men?

 

Who could have done this tragic thing

vandalizing by decapitation?

Poor chap would have had no interest left 

in his bowel or bladder function.

 

This was the old French way I guess - 

no messy bullets, mainlined medication

or electric shock – just a sudden 

clean chop finale to all meditation. 

 

It’s a warning to all urgent males:

take careful aim and do not let it drip. 

Woe betide the man who in his haste

undoes his zip and simply lets it rip. 

A small but quite effective guillotine 

is kept here just to deal with this

offence – details left to your imagination –

if you don’t learn precisely how to piss.

PASSING

The sudden disappearance,

the flames, then the desiccation

the evaporation

the fragmentation, the spicules, the dust

scattered at sea or more likely

at an intersection in the CBD.

 

That was where he worked:

each morning a cappuccino

from the same coffee stand

packed lunch – the coffee

the one luxury

he could afford.

 

He loved the sea

would have owned a yacht.

He’d take a bus from Kogarah

on the weekend to watch

the fleet sailing

near Middle Head.

 

Stutter and dyslexia kept him

in the most menial of jobs

in a large commercial corporation

no family no friends to speak of

and then a week after

we learned his dog had died 

he did not come in.

 

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

for the fiftieth anniversary of the Sydney University graduating medical class of 1966

Lined up, we wait the starter’s gun,

we’ve come from the extremities  –

the fingers and toes – of the

places to which we’ve moved over decades,

awkward, grinning – maybe

we should not be here?                 

none tight in Lycra – hmm –

tattooed by age – sun spotted,

wobbly jowls and bellies, sagging cellulite,

yellow capped and crowned teeth,

titanium hips and knees, bypasses and stents,

hearing aids, surgical scars and missing bits,

pills for depression, hypertension, impotence

and the obligatory statin  –

we know the tricks of acquisition

and privileged consumption

of scarce resources for interventions

to keep old engines running.

Starter’s gun, but what about

the race we’ve run?

Who won?

How could we tell

and does it matter now?

What’s the nature of this race?

There should be a director

to define our destination,

explain our social purpose,

how fast we are to run

when to wave to grandkids,

how to vote, what to sing,

how to deal with super,

that sort of thing.

Looking down the track

toward its end

it seems quite short.

There’s a simplicity about the landform  –

fewer buildings, less traffic,

quieter people  –

through cataracts,

with dodgy maculae,

we see an Arthur Boyd horizon

almost empty, one

painted in his later years –

blue, blurred, and just possibly benign.

TO BOLDLY GLOW

Orange fluoro underpants hung
on a hook in the gym change room.
The waistband read Tradie –
others further up the food chain    
would boast Calvin Kleins, Bonds
or Chinese Armani lookalikes.

 

What kind of guy inhabits
these, I wondered
as the waist was narrow
unlike mine –
a plumber or mechanic.
in the gym working off 

an ache after last night's
celebration of whatever?

 

He sauntered in while I was showering:
I recognized him as the guy
on the bike beside mine
who was mopping up water
when I arrived so I asked him
if he'd any sweat left?
He’d dropped his water bottle,
he said and laughed –
maybe five years younger,
a whippet who pedalled
five times faster and further. 

 

Maybe he built racing bikes
by day and rode them, rejoicing,
on the road and in the sky at night,
nine-tenths naked so
his fluoro underpants would show. 

BETHLEHEM REVISITED

“We’ll have to change the place
for our Christmas do,” Sharon said:
we’d planned for a restaurant.
Sharon’s my niece:  I asked why?
“Shane can’t go out,” she said.
Shane is her latest boyfriend
so was he ill or freaked by crowds
or fresh air, I asked?
“He’s under house arrest,” she said.
“He has this thing on his leg

that beeps the cops if he steps outside.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He’s on GBH remand
for beating up my husband,”
she explained.
 

I thought I should change the subject
so I asked who else might be coming
to celebrate the birth of Jesus with us.
“His five kids and my four,” she said.
“Well actually only four of his because
Zoe is a material witness
and allowed no contact.”
I rang off and poured a drink,
well, three in fact.
 

So let’s say shepherds came:
they’d find chaos
like the stable in Bethlehem –
a manger and a wise man or two,
authorities keeping track – and the child?
I think he’d do just fine.

COMING OF AGE - I

“You are old when you’re born,”

Stephen Simpson* said,

speaking more as biologist than philosopher

though like a stem cell

he’s pluripotent and could be either

neither or both.
 

So much living and dying

during those nine months:

clefts, gills and neural ridges

thrown up, filled in, torn down –

a time-lapse drama of evolution

played on the foetal ocean floor.
 

Your cells by nine months

are wearied by wars

have forged truces with alien forces

built machines underwater

visited palaces drawn from fine tissue

played parts in evolutionary dramas

relaxed briefly on now sunken islands.
 

By birth your genes have had their day

your destiny set. I've heard

earnest clerics say we should

be born again. Terrible penance

surely to go through that once more.
 

 

*Academic Director, the Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney

DO NOT FAWCET

He passed me in the push on Pitt
a strong determined stride
a yellow fluoro shirt – good fit,
and on it metres away, I read

in bold black letters

‘INFANT FEEDING.’

 

Yes, you can hire a man discreet
to pay your bills and cook,
walk your poodle down the street,
but infant feeding made me look

how could this man

do such complex work?

 

In his bag did he have cash
and toy-lets to distract,
gavage tubes and milk, with dash
of brandy , bribes lest they react,

books of instructions,

sedatives for fathers?

 

Now closer to me I could tell
his sign I had misread  –
‘INSTANT PLUMBING’ – very well:
maybe he is a Jack of Trades

able to feed sprogs

while repairing taps?