Dear Alyse, Poem by Rae Desmond Jones

in the hour after you left
your brother coughed & slurped his soup
& argued with Arnold Schwarzeneger.
Arnold was talking through a glass tube
& fifteen years of mayhem but he was winning,
which leads me to how the house
was full of the absence of you.

this must be what it will be like
when you stride through the door to
job/university/marriage/trip to paris -
but whatever & whenever is hurtling
towards us it is like those big steel birds
flying over & I hold my breath when one flies so low,
scarey but inevitable, although
i wish that when you go to meet your life
it will be wonderful & sweet & painful
as lives should be (not like those aeroplanes.

last night it rained & this afternoon
jagged rocks of ice rattled on the roof
& when I took the dog to the park the grass
was soft & muddy.

hail had stripped the spring seeds
from the trees & they spilled across the ground,
a lumpy carpet in the bleak fluorescent glare
as cars slooshed smoothly under the railway bridge.

the moon shot through the clouds & the trees
shivered as her silver eye winked & the park sparkled
with laces & rings of light