After your service, Wal.

I am driving back from the plainness of a church,

back down the way we came this morning for your funeral,

back through and back into the world,

back from where we had been collected into ourselves,

hearing the dumb hooves of words,

held by a damp, mizzling light there,

stripped and reduced and freed.

Each one of us—sharing like communion bread,

what we share with you—a death.

I am driving back through the light of an ordinary day

as if on a flight, descending into the torn waste of it.

It seems scrappy, dirty—the blown plastic wrapping, 

the wearied brick shopfronts, its pouting adverts.

Do we have to come back to this? 

The greasiness of it, a film on my skin.

The dead, we feel, are finer in their names,

even as already, as always, they’ve begun their erosion

in the memory.

Driving back I try to fix what I hadn’t needed do before—

the more I try the less I grasp—your crooked smile,

the dry-leaf whisper of your voice, the skin cancers you earned

in Occupied Japan along with a heart lost to envy or bitterness— 

they slip like steam venting from a factory.

I try, like looking at a star, to view you obliquely

but it hazes. This has happened before

yet learn again what it is we lose:

that there will be a name, a date, back there,

as when cleaning a desk we find an old Christmas card

and try hard to remember, knowing we’ve forgotten

what we want to capture.

In the early evening’s dusty pink I see out into a paddock

two men returning to their vehicle bearing

a post between them. Steadily

As if they are used to the weight and to each other,

And dropping it, they straighten.

One calls his dog. The work ’ll be there tomorrow.

Seeing them is a funny kind of relief from all of this day.

Like your evening whisky, Wal, it’s clear and steadying.

A day, its work, has ended , as it should.