Every afternoon,

the lorikeets gathered outside your window.

Green.

Blue.

Yellow.
They arrived in sudden bursts,

lighting the gum trees

before scattering again.
The nurses liked them.

They pointed them out

to visitors.

Something cheerful

to break up the ward.
* 
The year before you died,

your English began leaving first.

Small words disappeared.

Kettle.

Window.

Fear.
You stopped midway through sentences,

waiting for them to return.

Sometimes they did.

Sometimes they didn’t.
*

What remained

was Mandarin.

Not the careful Mandarin

you used with me,

slowed down,

repeated twice,

making room for all the words

I never learned.
This was quicker.

Certain.

A language that seemed to know

exactly where it was going.
*

When I was fourteen,

I answered you in English.
When I was sixteen,

I pretended not to hear.
By twenty,

our conversations had become a habit

of translation.
You reaching toward me.

Me reaching halfway back.
* 
At the hospital,

you spoke Mandarin all morning.

To the nurses.

To the doctors.

To me.
You kept saying something

I couldn’t follow.

Again.

Again.

Each time,

you squeezed my hand

at the same place.

As though the meaning

was held in the pressure.
* 
Outside,

the lorikeets shrieked

through the gum trees.

A flash of colour.

A burst of noise.
Gone.

Then back again.

The ward windows

shook slightly when they landed.
* 
I caught fragments –

your mother’s name folding into the room,

a village that sounded like weather,

rain pressed against corrugated iron,

a street I have never been able to map.
Something about coming home,

something about waiting at the edge of it.
You repeated the sentence three times,

each version softer,

as if you were handing it across

in smaller and smaller pieces.
I nodded too early.

You nodded back anyway.

Neither of us corrected the other.
* 
Later,

when the bed was empty,

I tried to remember it.

The shape of the sounds.

The order of the words.

I repeated them quietly

while driving home.
At traffic lights.

In supermarket queues.

Lying awake at night.

Each time,

they slipped further away.
* 
Years have passed.

The lorikeets still arrive

every afternoon.

Sometimes one lands

on the fence outside my house.

Its head tilted slightly,

as if waiting.

I stand at the kitchen window

and watch it for a while.

Then it leaves.
* 
I still don’t know

what you were trying to tell me.

Perhaps it was something ordinary.

Perhaps you were asking for water.
I don’t know.
What stays with me

is the way you looked at me

as though understanding

had already happened.
As though, for a moment,

the missing language

belonged to both of us.