Ab Origine

Like animals in the dark
we listen for death,
its footfall soundless in the hush,
hardly breathing, we know it is there,
that something inevitable has our name on it,
and we are afraid to move,
caught up in dissolution’s imagery.

On nights like these I wander Maitland Road,
its past and present which are mine,
and diamond memories
pinpoint my youth and light it up,
like stars that glitter
through the bleakest black.

My mother lived in Mayfield
and I used visit there.
The house sailed high over Maitland Road,
lit up by the car-yard’s lights
and her hills hoist sagged in the garden—
sparrows making love on it.

Beyond, the buildings of Maitland Road,
a peculiar dirt-red brick,
loom sour through the car-yard’s flags.
Once these shops had a name and a place
immutable as Park Lane in Monopoly.
Now nothing stops at the Terminus
and old shops look at you
out of empty eye-sockets
that are all To Lease.

Once we had our glories—
above head height
there was a Don’t Spit notice on every pole—
as if we spat ten feet above the ground.
There was our grocer, superior and smarmy,
who didn’t know his was a dying race
and sold his goods like favours.

There were our own eccentrics—the mad haberdasher
rotting with his stock in four broad windows.
And shocking, like lunacy’s soft laugh
that other shop, too much for Mrs G,
where unbanked coins crept up the stairs in piles,
and filled the bath,
while bales of unsold stuff flooded the floor below,
and you and Mrs G stood up on them,
transacting business, but with eyes not meeting.

Now, Maitland Road trams rattle only in old minds
and the feathery swish of bike tyres in the wet
has given way to calls of angry cars
and sirens day and night that rape the ear.
But to me it is always dusk in Maitland Road—
the butcher’s cart comes tilting down our street
and from the houses smells of burnt rump steak.

The smells of Mayfield still are heaven to me—
chemicals seductive in the air
and a pittosporum held prisoner
in some brief front yard
sends sweetness to me.
I tell my dog to sniff it up,
to smell my youth, my yearnings,
bound up as they were with putrid air
and lights that swam like jelly on the creek,
always thick to the waist with mud,
the home of eels and other novelties.

I carve the past like a leg of lamb,
knowing where the good bits are,
ready to chew them again.
Mayfield tastes,
where crisp and crunchy, later learned,
were not the thing at all
and beans so soggy they could hardly float
boiled long on every stove,
came up with the prawn sandwich—
melody contained in grandeur.
The taste-buds never forget, remember too
the broken biscuits in a paper bag,
and fruits with specks that could be had
if you dared be so poor.

My memory is a patchwork quilt,
patterning old bits of life
seen from new angles.
People stand out brightly.
I see my naked sister
dancing on Grandma’s verandah railing.
I see my other siblings for the first time,
gazing intently at the world
like characters from drivers’ licences,
I hear our days filled with the clean
unladen bickering of kids.

Once Maitland Road was a river of men on bikes,
in basic black or brown,
changing shifts three times a day.
Men who are dead by now from brute mute battles
against cancer and the rest.
They were short people,
their shoulders broad for steelworks or for war.
Their wives who helped them die
hold heartfire in their faded eyes
like girls as soft as milk.
Firmly Catholic, they walk to church still
though the parish is bleeding to death
and priests too far between
and only good for gossip.

The old church stands behind them,
filled once with the great wide
generosities of Catholicism
so loved by children—
you got to throw down rose petals
and your sins could be as good as anyone’s.

Thinking backwards jolts the heart,
as I see them then and now,
ghosts whose faces sit in gentle lines.
Our parents seemed inelegant,
except they were so elegantly themselves,
so gracious to each other,
as sure of themselves as of their prayers.
We who have escaped,
riding our brains to further suburbs,
would like their humour and their grace,
finding the comforts we have made
too thinly stuffed with hope.
We don’t smile as we die,
we who have made our own deathbeds
and must lie on them,
but journeying round Mayfield
helps me plait
a wreath of rosy moments
to wear into the dark.