Eighteen

At the University of Melbourne
…acute loneliness seems to be the most painful kind of anxiety that a human being can suffer. Patients often tell us that the pain is a physical gnawing in their chests, or feels like the cutting of a razor in their heart region…
Rollo May, Love and Will
Tiny boys in beige suits with shoulder pads;
girls compact as almonds in pink tulle.
On the plateau above the car park
an Italian-Indonesian wedding
being photographed against sandstone.
At the reception will there be
pasta with peanut sauce,
satay neapolitan?
The couple look into each other's eyes,
not needing youth,
in the throes of something else…
Thirty years ago I walked under
these plane trees with a sword
stuck through my heart —
not knowing, quite, what to do with it,
not taking myself too seriously,
almost, in the end, seeing the funny side…
Now, old scars invisible,
the only problem is
these seeds in heart-flesh
that cannot flower.
As if on a great sundial
that edge of shadow creeps
over well-shod feet;
over romantic love,
two intersecting tribes,
the wedding industry.
In sickness and in health
I have lived the loneliness.
Is this the learning life asks of me:
to turn sword into ploughshare,
forge long furrows of words?
The years are a sundial;
I stand on an edge of shadow—
moving which way?
There is sunlight, still,
on the faces of the wedding guests,
overdressed infants with stunned eyes
now carried in arms:
they do not know they are
a rehearsal for a poem —
another attempt to come to terms.
The colour of the stone
is mixed honey and clay,
untouched by the decades
I am glad are over
as life throws up scenarios
of burgeoning and risk and bravura,
and offers moments
when that which has been rent asunder
comes together.