— The darkness of life first becomes known to
adolescence like a surrealist depiction of pre-cognitive lightning. And so it
was thus that I was struck on the chest a full blow. My old man on an interventionist
mission of marital redemption — Dressed himself up seven ways from Sunday.
Spruce, paced out steps, penitent steps in his head, his hair combed back and
organised in the mirror of Aunt Eddy’s bathroom — scrubbed forward false
dentures, waxed shoes, buffed soul, flowers bought at noon.
— At the back gate strode through high with built up confidence, ring
of marriage and ring of pride. To face his wife again with flowers and a
fistful of passion owed in arrears....for him it was the dawning of a new day —
Yawning out over plans and planned loves once confused and lost. Now found
again and polished up, carried up the path to the family heart.
Unfortunately Mum’s day had begun earlier.
Under the fragile pink sky draping life in its post stormatic cape, and
though she knew he was coming, she could not trust him in her space yet, and
left urgently; space intact but heart like weary punch drunk circus pugilist. A
heart as big as Phar Laps and ready to relent and give way to peace love and
contemplation. Too far past however the black stump of no return....she wept
fleeing or fled weeping, I can’t remember which....
When I saw him stroll through the back gate my heart burst into flames.
Danced before my eyes like mirror shades of the trance — Caught a glimpse of
the game in a way I couldn’t fully comprehend...but felt it...the
import-gravitas of such — Surge to sway giddy in the horror of my juvenile
naivety, rotor-bladed like so much
talked about roses, in the twilight of a furiously burning millennium close.
Fearful Fuckin’ Reckoning...Titanic shirt front of the soul...
And his pain must have been so
much worse than my own...
I might as well have been blind. Darkness so thick ya couldna see ya
hand before ye face...
Further still I might now spare you the detailed portrait of the colour
of hope seeping through soles of his best feet forward. Draining colour from
his face —
Last ember bright but only a moment hence, blink out....
FADE TO BLACK
bearing straits roaring out to sea,
sinking surely stone,
liquid jungle of bone,
immeasurably depthy greatness of dark great beast,
fantastic fucking dark shark of life ocean jungle.......
...but I didn’t get that far then.
Enough that I was on the drunken steps to the set of someone else’s
urban stage production —
And the act rolled on; Me lying on my bed as the old man poured petrol
round our house. He’d “Fuckin’ show her now!”
I told him I’d burn with our beloved old house, and the situation
deflated beyond anger’s vorpal-bladedness — Could not cut a sweet swathe thru the Black Sea
and could not set a man free...
Anger is usually the last bastion of a man determined to wrought his
will on the ugly mug of reality — If he’d been a solipsist he could of written
it all off as a bad dream or a dream that’d gone bad. Like an apple forsaken in
its bowl; decompose to earthy brown; fade to black...
Deconstruct it all to black?
And alas-alack he believed most strongly in the preciousness of Her
& the ‘wholeness’ of Us, Family —
Perhaps he had a vision of himself that led him out onto the Great
Australian Night trail lit up by MimMim light; An Australian man on the trail
of his life, with a map of where he meant to travel and a beleaguered sense of
its own divergence into fields of the past. Recognised now, only as points upon
the map….Upon Horizon Treasure Map. Pots, rainbows and the gilt edged frost
bitten lakes at the end of them. Glancing back then forward, a few pauses on
this otherwise frenetic trail. Too hard to read the map whilst keeping the
lodestone on the road. Damned shortcuts and cul-de-sacs that cost the sort of
time that never-a-moment-spent of could ever come again...set forth in new
directions...
His teardrops exploded, rolled down the hill of his cheek and ignited
the old map in his hands. He rubbed his eyes and found that he was still lost,
swaying on the backyard footpath of our old house — Limbo like old ghost haunting itself in its
old house on its old hill overlooking great old vast wretched unknowable ocean
of its future.
He must have thought he’d die
alone on such bluffs — Love crashing out in crescendos with breakers breaking
forever breaking, forever breaking..........
She spared him such fates in the end—
Still, we all must reap what we’ve sown.
In a monumental act of selflessness, she forgave what had too-late-already-past
and focused on the future that limped into itself, never quite the same. She
remained and found freedom in the honour of remembering what she had loved in
him. Fixed Focus on afore said, giddy future, limping into itself for eight
more years till he died —
For mine, the cigarette cancer had killed him off a decade or so
earlier....like a partial absence for the last few years. And maybe in his way,
that I just impressionise for you now, he was still out there on his ‘trail’. Studying
the ashes of his old map and trying to recollect where he’d digressed at, where
he was hooked at, where he was frying.
