Bryan Coleborne: ‘Poem to My Father for Christmas’

Poem to My Father for Christmas

When you come I want you to take my rod
And all the tackle in the canvas bag.

You pause as you settle to cast your mind
Now that your days are drawn by memory
And your words drift in a wavering voice
Which struggles against the current of thought

As you ask me to remind you of this time
Knowing that you may not remember
The words which float from the ledge of your self
Beyond the horizon where Voyager rests

As if I could ever forget those days
When you clambered ahead down the Goat Track
At the end of Narrawallee Street
And out to that shelf as old as the world

Where the fins of fossils swam through the rocks
And the gutters were bright with rainbow fish
As you cast far out ahead of us all
While a pod of dolphins was stitching the sea.

Ahead of us all you cast out again
Into the channels of dream which flow
From the tidal pools of my childhood
Guarded forever by the whale-shaped rock

Which retches its Jonah of stone into time
Then floats to the surface like a fable
From the fissures of the Permian sea
Where the surging waves bubble with steam

As glaciers slip their rivers of rocks
From the Pigeon House to the swimming stone
Which blows as it taunts the ghost of Ben Boyd
Below the lighthouse at Warden Head

Where I watched you cast into the depths
Of a day of dream I remake in my poem
When I caught a groper on my blackfish rod
In that horseshoe gutter brimming with foam.

Ahead of us all you cast out again
Beyond the bombora where fantasies
Of silver sweep as big as transoms
Drift through the kelp of the swaying seas

Past leatherjackets with spikes like lances,
Past Wreck Bay, where the drowned sea pilots sleep,
Past Point Perpendicular, where the ghost
Of Melbourne guts the belly of the deep

Until you come to Narrawallee,
Where we walked along the shoals of the beach,
And Mollymook, where our mother faces
The surf forever, dreaming beyond our reach.

We sit beneath the lemon-scented gums
Where the sky brims with the brightness of birds
Reminiscing the afternoon away
While the light dances on your drifting words

As I sort the tackle in your fishing bag
Into the stanzas of my mind: those floats
You showed me how to tie, that old green
CSR treacle tin with hand-made weights

And shavings of Hunter Valley rosewood,
The spinning reel I know I will always use,
And those star-shaped sinkers, constant pieces
Of that past which I will always fear to lose

Until I return to that rock platform,
The floor of the sea for the first dawn,
And cast far out to the blowing whale
Which guards the summer when I was born.

Bryan Coleborne