|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Light-years had passed since his leaving. He had landed. Was there a message to deliver? An Annunciation? On the coldest night of the year, the ambiguous angel crouched on the roof of the Dresden shoe factory, awaiting enlightenment, for why he had come and what was now expected of him he could no longer remember.
Throbbing wing-beats dissolved to a mere tinnitus of memory; celestial sky-dazzle of sun, stars, moon spilled through the back of his eyes. He sucked snow to refresh his soured breath, brushed flakes from his eyes like tears. But in the coming he had cast a fine figure: burnished halo levitating over golden tresses, the pearly gloss of his outstretched wings. And the air rush as he plunged, the joy of it.
For fourteen days, we stayed above the bay in the holiday house at the top of the hill. Every day we ate from cans, re-read old magazines, occasionally spoke to one another, but never about why we could not leave the house. Some questions were never asked. Often we could hear the waves and imagined them breaking on golden sands. Five of us waited for something to change.
On the last morning, rain streaked the car windows. We sat in silence while Dad dumped the rubbish, locked the doors of the holiday house at the top of the hill. Then he drove us back home, a ten hour journey past the place where the mountains meet the sea, across three braided rivers, (Rangatira, Rakaia, Waimakariri), and along one-way shingle tracks where we grew used to Mum’s sharp intakes of breath before each hairpin bend.
Rain drums on the corrugated iron roof. At five o’clock, we hear a car door slam. Slow footsteps up the path. The verandah’s floorboards creak. Dad humps his suitcase into the kitchen and the cat remembers him, wraps its tail around his leg. I stop shelling peas though Mum goes on rinsing the sheeps’ hearts we’ll have for tea.
Dad reaches in his pocket, tells me to hold out my hands! I snap them open like a peapod and into my palms soft-falls a tiny porcelain house with four leaded windows under a neat thatch, pink roses climbing the walls.
In my clasped hands the house grew warm as if the fires and lamps were lit. I wanted to move in. Late that night I wrote a poem. Mum found it, tore it up, put the pieces in the bin.
After the wedding guests had gone my daughter, curls tumbling golden skirt flying, was dancing with your son to music of their making which you interpreted as a waltz and we danced too.
Next morning when I thought you had already gone, it made me jump to see you back in the kitchen doorway. Silent. Hesitant. Silhouette with briefcase. Magritte’s man without his bowler hat. Somewhere, distant music played but with a change of key.
Papers laid across the table, you read from their thin vocabulary. In phrasing staccato. Born in Vilnius. Murdered in Dachau. Basso ostinato.
Died in Auschwitz.
basso ostinato: “a short bass phrase repeated many times with varied upper parts”. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music)
|
|
©
of
all poems featured on this site remains with the
poet |
