After Bruce Dawe’s Life Cycle

Faces with eyes that I’d recognise anywhere, as far away as childhood. We meet at funerals, with clean clothes and creased faces, returning to this town to say another goodbye. The concrete carcasses of supermarkets, chip shops, Bunnings blister. I’m here for the memories, the two or three flickering scenes of you, the adventure hero, the fallen tree of my childhood. In between us: your coffin, thirty years, a lot of football. A broken man in a hoodie delivers your eulogy, on the field you were the air, lighting fires, light and free as the ball itself, and you did things on country ovals that people still remember. Kicked a bag, got yourself a medal to hang around your neck. Perhaps that feeling haunted you, the life cycle, three-quarter time, hope, the wind advantage in the final term. You told your brother you’d go at 50. The only plan you ever made. You lived somewhere beyond physics, learnt to swim by throwing yourself in the dam, found the bottom by tying a brick to your toe. For a moment we are there, cold hands, mountain ash, leeches dripping from the leaves, the roaring wind. You are stopping the game to show little me, watching from the sidelines, how to signal the goal. I can’t see your face, but I remember what it was to be near you — climbing so close to the top of the tallest tree it’s possible to see the world and feel it crack beneath us.