Driving Home
The houses slip past. Sometimes with your own pause button,
your swivelling neck, you can see for a brief focused second
a family freeze-frame, changing the channel,
or closing the venetians, keeping the blue flicker in –
hundreds of slides for actively curious:
slides, houses, each soul its galaxy.
Slide 12: an adolescent, caught
in aluminium frames, side-on to evening.
His truculent cobweb stretches the suburbs –
he has eight teachers, two dogs, and a mother,
three frightened brothers, one caning headmaster,
partridges, pear trees, a lady from Welfare.
Someone is talking about him at dinner –
unlikely hub to an unremarked universe.
Driving home, you pass thousands of houses.
Each is behind you, each network, in seconds.
Your own cat’s-cradle, carousel of slides,
resumes its primacy. You turn the key.
Across the evening sky come skeins of birds
looping home to welcoming trees.
(Previously published in Poetry Australia n. 86, January 1983, and
in Effects of Light: Anthology of Tasmanian Poetry, edited by Vivian
Smith and Margaret Scott, Twelvetrees, Hobart 1985.)
|
