i.m. Quinton Duffy 13.11.1971–10.9.2005
I
I sit alone watching a Japanese anime film
on a large screen.
A moth flickers across projected light.
II
I’ve been trying to write about a death,
my grand daughter’s father, aged thirty-three,
a perfect human being
who loved Japanese anime films.
Past midnight in a hospital ward
my daughter kisses his inert head
while her mother and I look on.
III
There was a “famous” incident in his childhood.
His mother hears him, aged five,
chattering to his one week old sister,
asking questions.
He appears crestfallen in the kitchen doorway:
“That baby doesn’t seem to like me.
She won’t talk.”
IV
My daughter’s regret – and she laughs –
he missed the fifth season
of The Sopranos,
The Brothers Karamazov
is buried with him, unfinished,
his shirt sleeves as he liked them
partly rolled up.
V
The females of the household
(my wife and daughter) resolve
Ada, not yet three, and I
will shower together –
“a male presence.”
VI
Three weeks after Q’s death I fly down to Julia.
She wakes me after midnight.
We drive the old brown Volvo to the hospital,
the same car as three weeks earlier.
It feels like the same journey
as a small child struggles for breath.
By three a.m., after antihistamines,
Ada’s pedalling a plastic car
across vinyl tiles
in the fluorescent calm of Emergency.
There are lurid flowers planted on the wall.
VII
I read about an improbable event:
one of the archaea
that light up marshes at night
fused with an oxygen eating bacterium
and became us,
all complex life,
and the improbable fungus
too small for hospital microscopes
that killed Q as he lay in an isolation ward.
VIII
It’s six months since Q’s death.
I sit in a glass room typing letters
for a research foundation.
The garden wilts in the sun,
overgrown with climbing roses.
Tomorrow I stay with my daughter
who carries his unborn child.
As the sun declines I switch off my screen –
I’ve an hour to mow the lawns.
I change into a torn t-shirt
and faded trousers
ripped with splashes of white paint and yellow chlorine.
My mower starts with one pull –
a surprise – but now it can’t stop
until the petrol runs out
or I jerk the lead from the spark-plug.
Its staccato roar consumes the grass on my driveway.
In the street a young man
is packing his young family into a car.
They hurry to close the doors,
alarmed by this obsessive old man,
red-faced and sweating in his clouds of dust,
as I reach the grass on the verge
and mow beside their car.
The blades are spitting out topsoil fines and dead leaves.
A pebble ricochets.
On the opposite footpath an Asian girl
holds a handkerchief to her nose.
The young man parks down the road and is back,
mild-mannered, fair hair and egg-shaped head.
I depress the throttle to hear his reproach:
“You could at least have waited!”
“I was embarrassed,” I say,
“I do the lawns in a particular order
and I’ve a tennis court to mow before it’s dark.”
He nods and walks away.
IX
My postscript, aged 68.
Julia telephones
and reads a poem of nineteen syllables.
She asks how many syllables for a haiku.
“Seventeen,” I reply.
She’ll send the corrected haiku
as a text message:
“and you can put it in a poem –
So it will be preserved.”
This is Julia Lehmann’s haiku,
(now a syllable short):
“Widowed 4 years, I find
the wig you made from your hair,
(still scented).”
X
A postscript to the postscript:
I have to set up the camera again
with my self portrait
for a final tracking shot.
I’m 69
and having radiotherapy.
Lying on the slab
surrounded by lights
in an empty room with pop music playing
I shut my eyes
so I don’t panic.
That night my daughter
texts me another haiku for Q
(the number of syllables correct):
“Always fluorescent
in the room where you died,
my howl is a ghost there.”