The long years

The long years

The long years

these are the long years and these years
are the years which pass quickly.
                                these are the middle years.
these are the years when we realise
we have been going about living
                                     the hard way.

remember driving at night
along Coronation Drive,
           beside the river.
remember this as I remember it

as I remember          the canvas fans
on the ceiling of the Renoir Café.
                I was sick with influenza,
you were going away to France
or, maybe, that time, you were going
elsewhere                     and as I remember
the shade of the shabby fibro verandah
where you handed me your notes,
         written closely in pencil
on small pieces of paper,        each page
a different size,                     your notes
on existentialism                    which I kept
in a small black folder in a cupboard
and which were lost,             later,
when I looked through the house
after everyone had died,
                                          as I remember.


these are the long years
      when conversational moments stretch
into stories repeated and repeated
until everything, the whole lot, falls
into a kind of overwhelming sincerity
       and it is then        that I become
         so self-conscious      that I can
no longer hear what is being told to me.

remember                the auditorium
in which no one believed,
     in which they performed,
and the boy who had an erection
  halfway through his song,
the clock on the classroom wall,
the mustard colour
      of a particular summer dress,
the patches of sweat behind the knees,
          the stifling afternoon heat,
the terrible poems that you took seriously,
and the way we caught ourselves
                                       remembering.

remember,              if you wish,
that I meet with with you, each time,
    these days               to honour
    the spirit of torn-up letters.

these have been long years –
      the unwritten letters would tell you this –
that, once, I was so very upset
    that I hit myself on the head
        with a shoe,
and that, just before then, before
becoming distressed,
    I had been thinking about
    the electronic staircase in Japan
    where each step plays a musical note
              when stepped upon,
and, earlier that year,
I had placed a postcard on the windowsill
    above my table –
a detail from Lorenzetti’s painting
    ‘Allegory of Good Government’,
which I had seen in Siena in an earlier year.
it is the part of the picture
    where Peace, Strength and Prudence
          sit together on a patterned couch –
they look relaxed, as if bored by government,
   Peace is so laconic she looks as if
       she will fall to sleep
            and drop the olive twig she idly twirls.

as I remember                   something
viewed from the back seat of a taxi –
    a woman stood              facing
a cyclone wire fence,
   tears made damp spots
 on the straps of her sun dress,
the man placed his hand
       on her pale bony back,
it was so very sad           as serious
    as if they might kiss.

remember the present            or yesterday
as I remember              the idea of our lives
      and our actual lives,
and your use of that term,     again
     and again, ‘re-invention’
as a cure for loneliness –
like watching a woman
    with a string of pearls slowly
         testing each one
                                        in the wine.

here we are waiting     for the natural end,
    for some future winter        as I remember it,
and in these long years
we may eventually locate       the places
    beyond memory             in imagined countries,
where English is the last language.