Hundreds of red snappers
are washing up dead on the shores
of Coromandel Peninsula.
Pete Postlethwaite died.
The pleasure of
his company is immortalized
in celluloid, digitalized.
But my memory is not like
it used to be. I’m fading away
bit by bit, word by word,
act by act,
gobbled up by the hungry ghosts
of time.
And so are the people,
places and things that
were so important,
as well as those things
that are better off forgotten.
It’s not that time is irrelevant,
it’s that time is both merciful
and cruel,
a mystery that lives
like poems inside a poet’s mind:
sepia pictures
in transitory frames,
washed up on shorelines
between other worlds
and nether worlds.
You sleeping in our bed,
me, writing of flesh and blood,
still hungry after all these years
for touch that mimics the spine and bone,
eyeless and drifting away.
