The uber-principal of a great state school
always taking up arms against a sea of
testers: in the pick up bay as I wait
she says
your daughter talks too much and then
deadpan I wonder where she gets that from
and though parents might groan
the children always got it
The concierge resident owner
and glad to welcome woman at the
bluestone retreat full of the history
and bonhomie like an auntie for the
ages.
Red wine she said the telly the footy
a slight tremor beneath it all
Hugh Grant wittering while the fire crackled
as did some tension: we unworthy.
At the Apollo Bay festival in
the bowls club two nights running her
sextet blew and swayed latin and soft bop
to carry
my mind from the faux pas glut
I was mired in: thankyou
I said
at the end
It’s nice to see your smiling face
she said
The heart of the Trojan
war in her smiling deep
cornered eyes: my
dissembling camera
caught the black and white
prism of her politeness
and my longings.
I sat unsung through her
student theatrical disaster: much later on
Swanston Street: if I give you my number
will you ring me?
NO
borne along on the tail of her social
comet’s bright brief passage I tottered
in my new town on the edge of an imagined
belonging and asked the world
of her / the physicalslashastral
world where she would always
be thinking of me: as it turns out
I’m lucky;
she thinks of me occasionally.
Stockroom bound at the sticker
selling business run by the personally
transformed gleamsters who
had us ’share’ every Monday morning,
his untransformed Englishness
dripped into his herbal tea:
‘we’ve got quite a reputation for our packing’
he said tightly after I’d shoved something in a box
somehow
and repacked it
with extreme prejudice
An endlessly recurring return to
the comic days of yore the glasses was it all bottletop
or the sandy hair or the grin, forming the lips
around the word ‘cor!’ as excitement over
the newest band or kind of ale
faded into a redcheeked, armchairbound puzzlement:
was this all there was?
a true exemplar of the
awful stepmother, to hear
it told, with the weighing and the muumuu
and so on, but later on and later on
in another life she
was in English deniability as we ate Sunday
roast in Wembley Park and her artificial smile
and vowels filled the room
Thin for all the wrong
reasons and invisibly
bending under the weight
of all the step-sibling memories
of long ago slights but always
within her lights generous
to no avail but as bridesmaid
counterpointing the oldest
friend, and finally as bride
with her niece before her
casting flowers
in a new dispensation
