Ten Years Yesterday

Ian's Elegy
by Jerri Hines

You flew skyward with Fantasia--
 Music! that’s how you knew love
 
exonerated, Johnson shrugs
ten Winters
since your head hit fist
before cell floor or ‘pillow’.
I won’t know
 
people take so much
air inside to die, sit up
fall against pillows
muscles released leave
only their mother’s face
resting small.
I saw you do this
 
struck by a honeymoon souvenir--
Seminyak-carved goanna
jewelled twice, each opal iris-full
witness through dewed buffalo
blades: Mum’s grazed frown
I found her in the garden
crouched by purple Cosmos
eye pearling for her marriage
I found you
pacing pavers at the bedroom door
 
people want so much
to hold on
to let go
to be held
 
captivated by our boredom
capturing what was left on camcorder
after DVOs, roaring lightless down backroads
monoxide hose
laceless sneakers, electro-shock:
laughter – two sisters locked
out half the day we swam in the desert
motel pool
bearded men watching from the pub
while you were gone to stake claim on opal
mines deep
 
cars pass so infrequently
you lay us down on red dirt roads to demonstrate
the law is superfluous
echidnas shuffle by
our ants eye view
 
twenty-two Autumns
back watching Men in Black you laughed
manic as the cockroach peeled
off its cadaver
I laughed
forever trying to connect
I know now
the smell of weed
 
how high were you
wind ballooning your Mambo shirt
atop Machu Pichu before hep-C
shrank you, turned you yellow
before that, skipping
school in Gosford with the Milats?
Had you already been forgotten
waiting for Pop in the carpark of the greyhound track?
 
here is my Fantasia:
you lived
we grew
conversed as adults
exposed our trauma
shush by shush:
paperbark roots leached of tannins
salt washed to silk
an old woman’s hair
a swimmer
supine, bleached
warm on sugared sand.

Jerri is a writer and social worker based on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Her poems have been published in Scum Mag and Concrescence. She thinks she was stung by a blue bottle once, when she was eight.