I.

The scale that weighs my face tips towards

the spot where shadows mingle on the road,

on the pavement and on other strange faces.

It is a heavy face, amplitudinous, strange even

through the side windows of cars parked

on King Street this side of old Newtown

like transient turtles, waiting for the waves.

Where the eyes had been—the eyelashes

scaled down to mere tiny lines, the slits

that defied at first the whole of continents

they call Asia and Europe and Polynesia and

the Pacific Islands in their deceptive sheen

in the light, and underpinned at last the

indifference of strangers towards their

incongruity—could never find solace in

the teem and vagabond of the inner west.

I had been to St Clair and so had my eyes,

so had my face, where an interloping emu

or a small bovine would sometimes sun itself

in the pastured greens of the reserve leading

to our old backyard that my uncle used to

call his expansive workshop of dreams.
II.

To get to where my uncle’s family used to live

from the centre of the wide jungle of the city

is to travel back to the overlapping enclaves

of suburbia and into the cacophonous chatter

and diaphanous grip of suburban xenophobia

(or reverse claustrophobia). The train leading

to the leaf-laden streets lazily embarks at

St Marys, a locus of blatant tattoo parlours,

empty pop-up shops, disregarded playgrounds,

archaic street signs pointing to welfare offices

and even a lone shabby port of a Filipino shop.

If the train arrived belatedly, a mad flurry of

feet and huffing bodies trampled over stairs

to catch the every-thirty-minute shuttle bus

to the nearest main artery winding towards

the weird ensemble of cul-de-sacs on Meru

Place. The street name itself invoked the

fantasy of time and space drenched in the

strange fascination of memorials and old

kingdoms forever lost between the sea and

the shore. But it’s the street where my uncle

used to live, where I used to die little deaths.
III.

Going back to the place where I first breathed

the clear smogless air of Sydney, where the

clowns of indifference first danced in my head,

where the temerity of growing up quickly in time

blossomed like a flower in the misty nightscape,

proves to be an epiphany, a turning point of

sorts. It’s the same streets with wide girths

and clean gutters, the same grass landings full

of green lush and lavender tufts of wild weeds,

of houses of pseudo-affluence standing tall,

of swirling driveways and unfenced-in smirks

of tots on three-wheeler trikes that used to

shout chink chink as I walked by on the way

to the bus stop—an ugly memento of a moot

circumstance—and the same tree-lined memory

of a time when the inherently vicious nature

of man belied the freshly sweet air of new

freedom. Getting back to St Clair, it now

gives me clarity—I have grown old but wise

to the call of hate and regret. It’s the same

old place, but I am not the same. I am one,

for once, with wisdom in a haunted face.