Selected poems
Item 23
1.
Her chair goes back. She lifts her pitch.
She’s checked that last ignoble itch.
You know quite well that, on occasion,
she likes a little conversation
and likewise know you ought not feel
ten minutes more would be ideal.
You catch her glancing at her watch.
And thinking of a thoughtful scotch?
Is her smile what it’s been for
as she shows you out the door?
Why is it that you never share
the deeper reasons that you’re there?
Once more the news is far from drastic.
You rummage for your piece of plastic.
2.
Your doctor is away today
but, yes, another one’s OK,
an older man who’s so relaxed
you’d almost swear he pays no tax.
Your BP lately’s been quite high
but he’s an offhand sort of guy
who reads your record off the screen
to check out where his colleague’s been
and talks benignly all the while.
You’re growing to admire his style
and sense somehow that he’s well-read,
more from the tone than what he’s said.
His final phrase though makes all clear:
It wouldn’t be too cavalier...
3.
Your doctor sends you to another
just to see what he’ll discover.
Her worry proves to be ‘all clear’
but, wait, there is a problem here;
that dot she thought was background speckle
or, at the worst, a harmless freckle
is not a form of dermal static.
He thinks it might well prove dramatic
‘down the track’ a year or two.
You’re hastened to the surgeon’s queue
and so on to a skilled excision —
which, luckily, needs no revision.
Although your epic’s not by Homer
your dreams are free of melanoma.
4.
Anxiety is the state of play;
your BP’s way too high today.
You know your GP won’t have space;
you’re on the phone in any case.
The name they offer sounds exotic;
no time now to be neurotic.
He checks your BP. It’s quite normal.
His manner’s cheerful and informal.
You move on now, with some confusion,
to what you fear’s a small occlusion
in an artery or vein
that’s in the groin — but gives no pain.
He tells you it’s a wisp of plaque
(waving quietly in the dark).
5.
You’re more than grateful in your way.
You think about how every day
from 8 till 6, from Mon to Fri,
she helps defer the day you’ll die
along with others just like you,
who, worried by their symptoms too,
surf them nightly on the net
for all the wisdom they can get.
But sadly when she’s sick as well
your buoyancy is shot to hell.
Where’s the miracle you sought?
What’s not there in that report?
She’s good with death but now you see
there are no tricks for entropy.
A Sentence in Memory of Ralph Wilson
for Kyle and Harriette, his children
Twenty-five years from his death
we gather to remember
swapping anecdotes like bank notes
weathered in our wallets
the one on how as deputy
he’d learn while pausing in a doorway
the names of all three hundred new
Year Sevens in a week
and how when actors failed to show
for one of his rehearsals
he’d stride the stage himself
recite their lines impeccably
and never for an instant
suspend our disbelief
and likewise in that run-through when
he tumbled off the stage
continuing with broken arm
and that play only one among
a lifetime’s round two hundred
our wonder at those two lives lived
a wedge of sleep between them
and how he’d manage both as if
there were no greater calling
a wife and kids offstage as well
thriving nonetheless
the languages we knew he knew
but rarely used outside a class
German Latin French
their lexicons and grammars
vivid in his brain
no need for any trip to Europe
his knowledge of his century’s
savage opening half
its play of light and dark
and the nineteenth to explain it
and then towards the end
his narcolepsy at the lights
the honks that got him going
the party where he nodded off
mid-sentence on an elbow
and woke up two hours later with
a fighting Nevertheless
and so it is we offer up
these readings to ourselves
of things he would have liked to hear
imagining thereby to hold
the timbre of his voice
the substance in his gestures
as if we interchangeables
might somehow one day come to have
a share in that uniqueness.
Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-five collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry 2015) and Hard Horizons (Pitt Street Poetry 2017). His Elegy for Emily: a verse biography (Puncher & Wattmann) and In medias res (Pitt Street Poetry) were published in 2019. Codicil, a mini-selected translated into Chinese, was issued by Flying Islands (Macao) in 2020. He also reviews Australian poetry extensively and has run monthly poetry readings and jazz concerts in Canberra for many years.