A Love Poem, Bellingen

 (for J.D.)

Against the eastern wall of a shed,

Of a morning in autumn—nine-ish

—Because dew drips from the eaves,

And an early frost still starches the ground.

In the shaded patches the capeweed’s like doilies.

Three children shyly eager from the city,

And a poddy calf, like a gift,

Its unfamiliar warmth sleek against their bare legs.

Each shudder and little stamp of it

Sets them ashiver too.

—It’s their entrée to the high gust, cloud-tumbling,

Wind-silly delight of days ahead, fragrant

With promise, the dawn-to-dusk unfettered expanse

Of otherness which they’ll remember as their lives harden.

They giggle and squirm.

And their uncle.

Light rubbed in places on his cheeks,

He almost smiling,

His hand, you note, ready there—

“Steady there young miss.”

I love this man, his calm,

The decency and strength of him

In the way the kids lodge against him

As if this were forever.

That said, these were not my people.

I never met them, was never there.

They were hers and she is gone.

And so have they.

They have all gone:

The kids hugging this man

Are in the city they never were to leave.

And he of the good things:

Those hands resting on the kitchen table

As if cupped under a frightened bird,

The voice, of water working in lost creeks,

Out from the black of the tool shed,

“I daresay you could very well be right there”,

Who knew scale, and the limits in most living things,

And so knew cruelty only as curious, baffling.

He is kept to this photograph

—That look which retreats

Just as you feel the warmth of it, 

Like sunlight in the corner of a winter valley,

Accepting me as if I were a friend.