Title: Sport 40: 2012

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2014, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 40: 2012

Lynley Edmeades

page 364

Lynley Edmeades

Meal

This scene, I tell you, is full of cinematic promise—
look at the fat waitress eating peanuts behind the bar.
And the lighting—so dull it is almost damp.

But how do I talk to you, now that you’re dead?
The great muck of not-knowing gurgles at the back
of my throat, coming up amalgam, like a pine veneer.

Dear table, chair, cheap food, beer—what company
can you bring? No, correction. Dear ghost-of-you,
dear friend, who cannot eat, speak, sleep, or do—

join me, while I scrape my way across this plate.
Indulge me with stories of what it might be like.
Let me imagine, just for this meal, that you might be real.

page 365

The Order of Things

Sometimes I forget the three, four, five
of the things that have been. So I go back
over it, to keep the order alive.

Remember that yellow house on the gravel drive,
our castle-on-the-hill cum weatherboard-shack?
Sometimes I forget the three, four, five.

I remember my sister wanting some Levis
and the Christmas that Mum gave us a kayak.
That was when Granddad was still alive.

There was that shed with the vacant beehive,
where Dad built a tree-house like a bivouac.
But really, I’ve forgotten the three, four, five.

I remember walking through the farm, and I’ve
come to thinking that was with a knapsack—
to kill the weeds but keep the grass alive.

When it was time for me to learn how to drive
I asked how I’d know which gear came next.
It’s difficult to keep the order alive
when I get confused with three, four, five.