Dad
Under the car
in the shed
at the races,
a small man
with short
square hands
he wanted to be a brain surgeon. Where to
start?
Dad and Love
Dad and Death
Dad chasing Mum
around the motel
room
on their wedding night.
Mum doing the washing,
me airing the dirty
laundry. The first wife was beautiful.
She
was very bright, very fast.
Dad went
away, fixing trucks
for William Anglis,
driving gas masks to the
wharf,
got jack of it, enlisted.
When he came back she was
gone. There were kids, out searching.
They found all sorts of
things:
God and the army,
poetry, money. They met up at
Christmas,
talking of Dad,
how he got out from under,
wiped the grease
off his hands,
spend ten years bored to death
in the car yard on the
corner
of Cimetere and Charles Street, Launceston,
how he should have
stuck with the movies
when the talkies came in.
Threepence a head in the
back
of the Oddfellows Hall at Deloraine,
kept someone on to play when
the sound cut out. How he's ordered the box, prepaid,
his only
regret you can't get those pressed cardboard ones
they have on the
mainland.
Plastic rose and a ute.
No cards, flowers or
condolences. More pressed ham? Go on, it's
Christmas. There are other branches to the family.
Uncle Dan was a
rat
which got Frank into Duntroon.
Auntie Mol dressed him up for the
interview
which was a dinner.
It's all class and manners there.
He got
in. They reckon he's ASIO now. Gee it's cold for December
Dad's
locked the fire into the wall.
The house is an icebox
but it's
cheaper. I don't want to be too negative.
Dad stores his love for
me
under the lowboy
in a tin held up by a magnet
and in the desk behind
the false partition.
The top rolls back like an eyelid.
It's neat in
there.
He says you can't be too careful. When Dad meets
Death
he's sober. Winding back the speedo
he says she'll go for
years.
Death, cunning as a meat axe, plays dumb
kicking the tyres.
Dad
says it's human nature,
everyone takes you down;
it was better
before,
people had standards then.
Death yawns.
Dad gets shifty, says
come clean, are you really him
I want to meet the butcher
not the
maggot on the block.
Death says you've got to come down
Dad says that's my
final offer
anything less and I'd be giving it away.
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