You could take this and stretch it out endlessly.
Shit and blood in the bowl. Dusk through the window.
The sly, high whine of mosquitoes banging off mesh to get through.
But the walls reimpose themselves and broaden the view.
Like a neighbour backing off apologetically
you reckoned you knew.
The faces of owls
you named after Jupiter’s moons
blink in the wood grain between the bath and the cistern
as hands out of nowhere
uplift you into
an accusatorily quiet corridor.
You sense they’ve been waiting to do this for some time. Two rooms take their leave of you on either side, neither of which are answering you.
You imagine lamps cocked and daylight needing saved against the evening.
The living room, you know, contains a wife-in-waiting,
who has steadied herself to wave
without looking devastated.
If you tried to hold on to her you’d bruise. You think of everything you have to lose,
in the order of love, and have just enough time
to remember the stammer
on the tongue of your wayward granddaughter
when you find yourself swept outside
like a royal visitor
on a whistle-stop tour of Australia
being re-wound.
Stars start their cold fires
over a house which is already down to postcard size.
Only you are still shocked.
Dam water. The rear of trees. Possums come out to watch.
Old Man Kauri knew all along. And a sky
being bled of itself
is nothing to the fall at the edge of it all
you find yourself surging against.
Exhaled from the forest as your vision goes black.
Defeated as the child after birth
who cries to get back.