Kevin Hart: ‘To the Tune of “Haibun”’

To the Tune of “Haibun”

I am flying over the Pacific, aimed at a little church on the fraying hem of Brisbane. When I wake, I will be there, in that other world, where shy houses retreat behind wide verandahs with blinds pulled down, where hydrangeas in beds are covered by vast white sheets by women in loose floral dresses, and where time stretches a trifle in the afternoon. When I wake, I will almost be there, at that bashful church, no more than peeling weatherboard, and I will have walked from the train two flowering blocks along a road that never ends, past golden shower and poinciana. I will have smelled the jacaranda and I will never have left those streets. I will have become a Moreton Bay Fig, planted right in the middle of the park, buttressed with roots. When I wake, I will have become a man, I will take my seat with the others, I will stick to it, and I will smell the wet, ripe air, which will settle around me like a cloud on the Lamington Plateau. When I wake, I will walk up to the lectern, and I will speak while standing beside myself. And when I hear the rain begin to fall, I will look out the open door of the withered church with its bleached and swollen paint and see a torch of sunlight, I will not see my father. But then I will wake and, wilting, run a finger along the long, polished box that I will carry, with men I do not know, and we shall slide it into a low black car that will slowly drive along the endless road, become a fly, and never be seen again:

Warm raindrops plopping
On the vines: my father’s death
Puts down roots in me.

Kevin Hart