Poem 95

Written in 1984 and included in my Original Composition portfolio … that year to help support myself I did some casual work on a house owned by a guy I’d worked for as a researcher in the Psych Department at Victoria … the house was in Wright St very close to where I’ve now lived for seventeen years … now that I think about it I’ve got a courtyard of bricks possibly recycled from similar Mt Cook buildings … all this time later I can’t remember which number Wright St the house was – although the full-grown home-owning me must walk past it virtually every day …

… the title is ironic of course, the poem observes nothing is truly stable, all things must pass – including the young man methodically dismantling history …

The Stable

Today I spent knocking a hole
in the wall of an old stable
working from the top down
finding first one or two wasps
sleeping between the orange bricks
then the dry husks of slaters
milky-white
             I pulled out a window frame
and tore a mass of spider web
it pumped in and out in the breeze
like a heart

I became adept at striking the mortar
from the bricks the clean unbroken ones
stacked aside for a courtyard
the broken and the half bricks piled
in a heap
          this wall was built to stable
the horses that pulled the trams
up Lambton Quay
                     I have knocked it down

just before sleep I see the action
I used today the mortar
falling from the brick
                        the wall is almost down
it’s easy after all to clear the past
a hammer a lever
six dollars an hour