LEAVING MAPS
THE EGYPTIAN ROOM - THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM
higher up then it all seemed somewhere above the narrow
dark stairway to the small room our childhood
somehow depended on standing on our toes
our noses barely at the glass we understood
even then and felt the edges of something
difficult that afterwards troubling our dreams we would
not put words to for a long time coming
in from the winter's city streets dripping with cold
with mother to this private place where so many years hung
on the faces of the dead and in the deep glass cases
of green painted wood things folded away for so long
still mattered it was the closest
we had ever come to death
knowing little then of even pain standing afterwards
somewhere within the warm deep folds of her dress
losing later at lunch in Woolworths amidst the noise and fuss
things I think I went back to show them yesterday
on the train through a wet and winter city
clattering up the noisy stone stairway
to the same room after so many years to see
that nothing had changed only what I
couldn't hold back standing where she once stood
for us beside King Khafra's cast seeing with different eyes
in this small dark old room crowded
with a class of kids no less absorbed with that same strange
spell and sorrow clutching always at the heart of things
here where it will always be a kind of summer along
the banks of a green Nile and in the Valley of the Kings
MAKING SINKERS
my father
would always let me spill
the sputtering lead
from the small primus burner
into his thumb prints
in the sharp wet sand
spoon sinkers
for the dragging surf
off Christmas beaches
and I had thought
that none came back
that I had lost them all
from the long lines
between his own forbearance
and the restive sea
snagged
on rocks
or the deep dark floating weed
beneath the glaucous waves
one got through
I turned it up
years after the firmness of his hand
upon my own uncertain
twitching line
was gone
a small dulled pendant
it stood for something more now
the alchemy
of all that I once had from him
poured
without my knowing then
and found
with some surprise
when I first needed something to hold me
cast off from an altogether different beach
without warning
into a strange and difficult sea