i.m. Bettina Gorton

i.

When I drive through freeway towns I look for you
in the sealed front doors of houses, turned away.

I look for you on the couch-grass lawns of February suburbs
between the privet hedge and standard roses with your back to the street.

When I come home from winter holidays I can tell you have been there
drinking window after window of light till it is emptied and grey.

I think once I saw you walking the curve of a disused rail line
where the track shrugged off its sleepers and climbed into the heat.

ii.

However early we woke, you were already waiting,
slippered in dawn’s sedated light,
a first glassful of distance in hand and the cards set out
with the sound of somebody closing in: step step step turn,
step step turn, step turn, turn, only you had already gone
along paths of smoke into the smoke-coloured ways
where in place of footsteps, only ash falls followed you.

Because mallee scrub is the colour of thirst
with an infrastructure of patience,
you’d been divining a path across it ever since you sat down
on the screened-in verandah in that drought at war’s end
and found even the burning days would upholster you in stillness
and the nights antimacassar your hair till you could rest without stain
upon the fine print of promises.

iii.

Out of smoke you came walking. Your face
made a cloud in that cloud-haunted absence
over the courtyard parterre where our noon
shadows snagged on our heels, planning to lengthen.
Then somebody saw the time and we left for the wake.