'I still wish on the evening star and I suppose I always will.
Every child loses something a whole life can't fulfil'
- Sophie B. Hawkins, Lose Your Way

i.
I do not seek perfection anymore.
It is carefully measured blocks
on pages of a varnished notepad
and serves only to remind me
of flaws in a peculiar design.
Walls papered with petals
of mortality's daffodil,
caught in the light, mute faces
observe lengthening shadows.
Long passages and creaking
floorboards of the past offer thin
comfort to me now that I am older.
Mistakes are pedantic professors
from whom I learn, or die; and life
is a triangle.

ii.
We lived in a shady road
lined with Jacarandas.
Stone's church, our house
offered magic; not warmth.
Now it stands demolished; razed
to the ground'a buried coffin
clasping relics like brittle leaves.
Dead people still chat and laugh
inside its walls, where discarded
fragments of who we were exist
shrouded in thin veils of sunlight
and dust particles dancing
above stained carpets.
I drove past the other day.
No evidence of it remains.
All the years before reduced
to a child's futile yearning;
nostalgia's fabrication.

iii.
Memory is a clever illusion;
a kaleidoscope arranged by pain
and perspective.
Recollection conceals vinegar
with thick dollops of honey'yet
the cost of forgetting is greater.
Frailty has become the yardstick.
Somewhere between seasoned
colours, a small girl still waits
upon the landing of a staircase.
She will always be there.
Always waiting, hoping for someone
to save her.

© Copyright 2002-2006 Candy M. Gourlay

Older first appeared in Lingerings Magazine, Spring 2003.

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