The old bird came in sometime
flying round from Holland or South Africa,
settling, briefly, on Sydney –
turned white and brittle
then flew up.
I chose his watch,
a beautiful heavy thing
with a stainless strap
for his thick, fragile bones.
I counted up my pocket-money
and spent 50 cents at the barber-shop
on a watch-band of woven nylon.
I strapped it round my sleek and slender wrist.
It wound itself up with an internal fly-wheel
whose impetus you felt
by walking with swinging arms.
It was water-proof, and for years I took it sailing
to count the seconds before the starter's gun.
It got less use in winter,
lying quiet and dusty in a drawer –
giving me the pleasures of re-discovery,
of wiping dust from glass and shaking it
and feeling the fly-wheel spin.
I knew that it could run for life;
I've treasured this as knowledge he gave
– silently, and by accident –
though the thing itself one day vanished
from a bundle of cloth deposited on the beach
while I nakedly swam.
Though only 60 when he died,
the man had seemed, to children anyway,
beyond any psychic pain –
someone obviously waiting to die.
We couldn't enquire into his stooping shoulders
or his ironic smile.
For us, he just appeared,
perching himself in a high flat we never entered
near the departure-point of ferries.
But our parents had had some word of his arrival,
and in pain and anger drew silence round him
which children only partly penetrated:
we went with him
for ferry-trips escorted by sea-gull flocks
and for Sunday vists to the Zoo.
He gave me fairy-floss
and a black plastic yo-yo of the most envied kind,
the best that money could buy.