Fay Zwicky

“Feed Fred and sit with him and mind he doesn’t walk about. He falls. Tell him his ute is safe back home. Thinks someone’s pinched it, peers around the carpark all the time. His family brought him in it and he thinks it’s gone. He was a farmer once . . .” I take the tray. The ice-cream’s almost melted round the crumbled orange jelly and the soup’s too hot. I know I’ll have to blow on it. Hunched, trapped behind a tray, he glances sideways, face as brown and caverned as the land itself, long thin lips droop ironic at the corners, gaunt nose. The blue and white pajamas cage the restless rangy legs. In and out they go, the feet in cotton socks feeling for the ground. “Are you a foreigner?” “Not exactly. Just a little sunburnt,” and I put the jelly down. I musn’t feel a thing: my smile has come unstuck. I place a paper napkin on his lap. He winces. “You’re a foreigner all right,” he says. “OK,” I say. What’s one displacement more or less, wishing I were a hearty flat-faced Fenian with a perm and nothing doing in the belfry. Someone like his mother. Or a wife who spared him the sorrow of himself. Now he grabs the spoon. “I’ll do it.” “Right,” I say, “You go ahead. Just ask me if you want some help.” The tone’s not right. I watch the trembling progress of the spoon for what seems years, paralysed with pity for his pride. How does a dark-faced woman give a man called Fred who cropped a farm and drove a battered ute a meal of soup and jelly? Outside the window, clouds are swelling into growing darkness and there’s a man hard on his knees planting something in the rain.

Dead to the world I have failed you Forgive me, traveller. Thirsty, I was no fountain Hungry, I was not bread Tired, I was no pillow Forgive my unwritten poems: the many I have frozen with irony the many I have trampled with anger the many I have rejected in self-defence the many I have ignored in fear unaware, blind or fearful I ignored them. They clamoured everywhere those unwritten poems. They sought me out day and night and I turned them away. Forgive me the colours they might have worn Forgive me their eclipsed faces They dared not venture from the unwritten lines. Under each inert hour of my silence died a poem, unheeded

Tell the truth of experience they say they also say you must let go learn to let go let your children go and they go and you stay letting them go because you are obedient and respect everyone’s freedom to go and you stay and you want to tell the truth because you are yours truly its obedient servant but you can’t because you’re feeling what you’re not supposed to feel you have let them go and go and you can’t say what you feel because they might read this poem and feel guilty and some post-modern hack will back them up and make you feel guilty and stop feeling which is post-modern and what you’re meant to feel so you don’t write a poem you line up words in prose inside a journal trapped like a scorpion in a locked drawer to be opened by your children let go after lived life and all the time a great wave bursting howls and rears and you have to let go or you’re gone you’re gone gasping you let go till the next wave towers crumbles shreds you to lace— When you wake your spine is twisted like a sea-bird inspecting the sky, stripped by lightning.

She slumps in the disabled bay clutching a waffle-cotton gown around a spreading paunch, shambling breasts. Why not say ‘I’? For that’s who sits at 6 a.m. waiting for the health club pool to open in the rain. A grown woman, after all, supposed to know her whereabouts. Today’s my mother’s birthday, a 1907 Aquarian of the self- denying kind, ‘never say “I”’ her motto. She had me nailed for years. Her voice drowns out the radio’s chattering static. Now I’m the same age she was, dying, observing noble savagery: a gathering knot of skinny women, tight black butts in leotards, regulation sneakers, Brazil-waxed calves, gripping i-pods, mobiles, water bottles. The men stand back, silent, sullen, balding, bored and out of it. Health stalkers, renouncers of smoke and flame, deniers of brimstone. One hell of a century: between the holocaust and the atom bomb who are these people? Between the deep and shallow end, never say thank you or good morning. Avoid eye contact. Signals may be misinterpreted. Slow Lane, Fast Lane, Walking Lane Only’s where I’m at. The moving parts count laps: twenty five’s a half-hour’s worth. I sing myself a rumba to keep rhythm; the Speedo wall clock ticks a strict 4/4 defeats my ruse while dove’s feet skitter arrow-wise across the perspex roof. No Diving Running Eating Smiling Share if lanes are busy. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. The waiting crowd are all, like me, up early talking or silent, more vivacious than galahs, more foolish than parrots. We stand and wait, walk up and down in the rain talking or not, holding in sagging muscle, spreading paunch, talking about things that must matter. So much seems to hang on getting in that door.