Famous Reporter # 30: December, 2004

 

SHEN

                        [two poems]

 

The one that got away

 

The story uncoils as soon as he enters

my office, slithers out of his hands

before he can even take a seat

in the chair. He is fishing for answers

but every throw of the line

flails at a wall of wind which fling

all his questions back. He chucks in everything

he can think of as bait.

He thinks he was a hard man,

but fair, and he think he told her

he loved her many times, and he tells me

that he had lots of opportunities

but was always faithful;

but he just doesn’t know.

The happiness of two young people

who were once deeply in love

shimmers beneath the surface

of the water, elusive. Both of his hands,

roughened by carting wood and metal,

were ready to haul in dreams

of laughing babies and a house paid off

and school holidays in Robe,

but nothing came within reach.

He is clenching and unclenching

his fists because being angry means

he won’t have to cry.

Yesterday he went around to collect

his things and found she had

piled everything in the rubbish

and that she had sold his fishing rod.

 

 

 

 

    Knowing your place

 

 

Putting the labels on things

in the factory is his least favourite job;

he hates the way the glue

sticks on his fingers for days after,

but he doesn’t mind stacking boxes.

It’s boring but he likes the neatness

of putting things in their place,

the bar codes and serial numbers

on each one clicking like a key
in a door. The edges of the boxes

line up perfectly and reach up

from the dust of the floor so the forklift

eases them into place with nothing more

than a little hiss. He still remembers

the ten months before finishing school

when things didn’t fit together

so well, when the blunt ends of his bad marks

and his awkwardness and loneliness

had tripped him up. He still can’t say

how he got through it, just that the blackness

finally sat up and crept away one day.

Maybe there’s more to it – the way he wrestled

life back, though it whispered death

over and over to him, but the knife’s edge of his past

slips silently under another box

and lifts it high up, where no one can read

its label or give it a name.