At the appointed hour the houses migrate,
walking on their pincer legs with the surety
of a crane, taking up different allotments
in the same street. We wake to an aria
spilling from a neighbour’s window, thrumming bees
who cannot find their nest, their queen.
A man’s barnacled voice counts off the names
of the ships in the bay below, while the scent
of coffee wanders down the cobbled alleyways,
drifts under umbrellas and plays hide and seek
with the vanishing shade. Later, we take out
a rowboat, oars slipping under the glassy surface
of the sea. I scale and gut the fish as you build
a small fire in the bow and we savour the idea
of freshness. Eating the blackened skin reminds me
of the fruit bat who snoozes all day in the jacaranda,
then makes whoopee at night, crying out
in a language that inhabits this space beyond sense.
Apprehension comes slowly, it’s a physical thing,
like the heart beating in the chest, the body
awake to the presence of disease, the bluetongue
basking on the sandstone with one eye open.
So much of living involves learning how to wait,
without knowing exactly what we are waiting for.
The purple blossom sticks to the wet bitumen
in a pattern that intrigues, that appears theatrical.
We leave the darkened cinema with our senses
stretched, footsteps echoing insistently behind us,
the headlights of a Volkswagen trailing our car
as we head for home. We manage to lose them
at the traffic lights, wondering if any
tectonic plates have shifted in our absence, if
our house is where we left it three hours earlier.
Poem
Waiting
Andy Kissane