Isi Unikowski: ‘A Red Rhododendron’

A Red Rhododendron
i.m. Ivan Hrvatin

She has signed the forms in her diffident hand,

sent his suits to the Salvos;

someone in this gap time, from a distance

has given her a rhododendron.

Still in florist’s paper it stands

in the darkening hallway, a ferris wheel

of tiny red gondolas on the rim of colour

salvage from the porcelain cold of mourning’s reaches.

Fill your eyes, it seems to say,

fill your eyes with colour—

a tinnitus of air, sunset’s last glimmer

a prospect that the dead keep us in their memory

as once it was our departures that they felt the more keenly:

kids pushed into the car, the thermos, that cursory wave,

terse focus on rehearsed distances

to playground reports from neat, deserted towns.

Perhaps this colour, of all colours least familiar,

denying the possibility of vision,

is how they see us: as if, in leaving,

they had abandoned all other hues

but this one, almost too intense to be seen

in the expanse between waves,

looking out and forwards at us from albums

in frame after frame, asking:

who have you made joyous for your standing on this earth?

I allowed myself to answer that there was a choice

between one kindness and another

or one heartache and another.

I allowed myself to ask: what does it matter?

But if it doesn’t matter, who are we

that the merest descant of the spectrum

should so dispel our capabilities

that we feel compelled

to appeal to them to fill our eyes with colour?

It should be possible to prise open the covers of his life, look in the index under ‘r’ for

red and see grapes he crushed every year, the stained press, barrels and demijohns; the

car he drove for 600 kilometres without refueling, just to see if he could; the piano

accordion with red panels he took out sometimes when he felt happy, bits of tunes he

played, really, for himself. In the distance he has already travelled—face less clear,

voice less heard, hands less held—it’s still just possible to make out that gesture, in

each case the same: that slight duck of the head, to listen for fermentation, a fan belt, a

chord, and his nod of approval

And should that colour fill our eyes—

a car that, for a moment, seems about to turn into the driveway, a bottle

found half-buried under the house—

as that colour fills our eyes

we know we are remembered.

Isi Unikowski