52 Words

It’s 1994 and I’m sitting in a cinema with tears on my cheeks. Gareth has just died and Matthew is at the pulpit, reading W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues as the eulogy for his friend. It wrecks me as few things have wrecked me, in my young life. John Hannah delivers a performance that makes me a fan for life. A fan that will follow him through the third Mummy film and Sliding Doors, professing an affection for both.

Three years later I see Auden’s poem on the page. I’m twenty years old, studying poetry, getting ready to spend two years writing an honours thesis about poetics and space and the city I live in. I’ve been published, as a poet. Performed my work at festivals. I wander the streets with notebooks in my backpack, writing draft after draft, hundreds of poems every year. I embrace the idea of quantity as a means of learning craft. It turns out, that’s not a bad way to learn.

I write some okay poems in those two years. I write a lot of bad ones. They were about girls, mostly. That’s why I started with poetry, why I kept at it for years afterwards. I was young and awkward and funny-looking. I didn’t know how to talk to people at all, let alone the opposite sex.

And I was foolish enough to believe that writing poetry would be my way of forging connection with the world around me. And foolish enough to happy, when that finally worked.

My favourite poem begins from a place of heartbreak and sorrow. Pablo Neruda doesn’t bother trying to hide it; everything is right there in the opening: Tonight I can write the saddest lines. He sets the parameters and everything progresses from there: the night is shattered; the immensity of loss grows larger; the inevitability of change is both a hurt and a solace.

I read Neruda as younger man, long before my heart was even bruised, let alone properly broken. I admired the exquisite longing of his words, back then. I craved the intensity of the feeling.

Years later, after my heart had been properly broken, re-reading Neruda’s poem wasn’t the same. I didn’t crave intensity anymore, could barely handle the feelings that roiled inside me. All I wanted was a release, the promise that the hurt would stop.

I read it again, very recently. It’s brilliance is dimmed, after all these years, but there is no doubt that it still shines.

In his book, Making Your Own Days, Kenneth Koch outlines a theory that explains poetry better than anyone else I’ve read. Poetry is the language inside language, he says, his analogy inherited from Paul Valery. It’s the language we turn to when words themselves are inadequate to the task.

It’s the language we turn to when I hurt is not enough. When I love, or I grieve, or I feel will not get the job done.

Poetry is the place we turn when words can no longer contain our sentiment, and we need the other elements of language to pick up the slack.

You can tell a good poet from a bad one by their ability to recognise more than this. To acknowledge that poetry conquers the immensity of feeling through more than the recognition of feelings.

A good poet see through the emotions and looks to the feelings, searches for ways to wring more meaning from words through tone and rhythm and language. They create structures, edifices that bolster the words and hold the weight of meaning upright.

A good poet works magic with all the diligence of a stage magician, utterly aware of how they’re directing the audience’s attention in order to pull off their trick.

And when they’re done, you don’t see the training. You don’t see the smoke or the mirrors or anything but the trick they want you to see.

It takes effort to love poetry. Books are hard to track down, and skew towards the classics. You spend more time reading the poets of yesterday than you do the poets of tomorrow. You trawl second-hand stores, breathing in the smell of dust and cellulous and lignin.

You find other poets and talk to them, because they talk about poetry in ways that other people do not. ­

My second favourite poem begins from a place of warning. Alice Walker states it clearly:

Do not give you heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious.

I read that poem for the first time just before the end of a relationship. Right before my heart was properly wrecked, like a car driven over the edge of a cliff and left to burn in the chasm below.

That opening sucked my breath away, left me trembling as it dawned on me that things in my life were not good. The rest of the poem barely mattered, although I found myself reading it again and again as the years went by. Slowly, I saw the other verses, building to more than heartbreak.

Years later, it occurred to me that I had more in common with the carnivore in Walker’s poem than I ever had with the victim.

At twenty, I would have told you that I wrote poetry to meet women, and it would have been true enough that I would not feel like I liar. It’s easier to retreat behind true statements, even if they aren’t the whole of the story.

At thirty, I would have told you I didn’t write poetry anymore, and that people are reluctant to let you stop. For years after I gave up writing verse, people would introduce me using poetry alongside my name: this is Peter; he’s a poet. Poetry stained my life the way ink stains the fingers, and it proved even harder to scrub free.

Today, I sit on my couch and gather books around me. I re-read Auden, and Neruda, and Walker, and other poems I loved almost as much as those three. I think about the years I devoted to writing verse, pursing poetry with a dogged persistence I’ve never truly brought to any other form of writing.

Not because I wanted to meet women, or because I loved the poetry itself. Not because of the attention, although I craved that for a while. Not because I thrilled at the magic of poetry, or enjoyed the diligent study of form and structure that came with it.

Our motivations for doing anything are far more complex than any of that. I wrote poetry for all those reasons. I wrote poetry for none of them.

I wrote because I wanted to be heard and the discovery that I could be was heady as drinking my first glass of wine. I wrote poetry because I craved connection, and was not good at establishing it in any other way. I wrote poetry because it presented me with opportunities, gave me a way of navigating a writing degree that wasn’t quite sure how to handle my proclivity for writing fantasy, connected me with other writers I could not connect with any other way.

I wrote poetry, drew what I needed from it.

Then, I stopped. Acknowledged that I wasn’t a poet, not in any way that counted.

I regret nothing about that decision.

It’s one of the few I can say that about, with any degree of surety.

What I love about Neruda’s poem is this: there is nothing special about heartbreak and longing. We all want. We are all denied. Even before your heart is wrecked, you know what is coming. There is nothing interesting in the longing.

But we want it to be special. We want our pain to be unlike any other. We want to be unique. For the world to acknowledge that we hurt like no-one has ever hurt before.

That feeling is there, in Neruda’s work. For years, I adored that recognition, blind to the obvious irony.

It’s 2016 and I’m sitting on my couch, watching youtube. I’ve searched for John Hannah and Funeral Blues, revisiting the moment I first truly fell for poetry. I’m not crying, this time. The room is brightly lit. Hannah is still magnificent, and so are Auden’s words, but they don’t feel the same at thirty-nine as they did at seventeen.

What gets me, this time, are the words before the poem, the acknowledgement of poetry’s necessity. Matthew describes his friend through other people’s eyes, then turns to his own feelings: Unfortunately, he says, there, I run out of words.

There, I run out of words.

For nineteen years now, the words have been there. I make my living articulating things, making them pretty and comprehensible, arranging things so words do what I want them to do.

And I know that it will not last. It cannot last. Words have been adequate for the situations I find myself in, but there are situations coming where they will fail me. I have both parents. I’ve lost no-one close to me. The day will come when those are no longer true. A day when I need words to be there, and they will not bend to my will.

When that happens, it’s comforting to think that poetry will be waiting for me, ready to fill the gaps. And John Hannah, reading Auden, will no doubt make me weep again.

It’s not that I’m afraid of flying. I am okay with being in the air. I like airports, and I like planes, and I like being in transit. There is a freedom to being between places, with little to do but wait. I read a lot, on planes, with a speed that I will never manage on the ground.

Nor, as the old joke suggests, am I afraid of the landing if things go wrong, although I do think about it as we taxi down the runway. I close my eyes and picture the moment of impact. Or, rather, a moment of impact, as I expect the image in my head bears no relationship to the reality of connecting with the ground. In my imagination the human body is like a squishy china vase, tipped from the edge of a table and allowed to hit the floor. In my imagination we do not squish, but shatter. We disintegrate on impact, reduced to wet, pink shards that scatter and take considerably effort to clean up.

But I am okay with that ending. It seems messy, but very quick.

What bothers me is falling. The helpless moments as I tumble, watching the inevitable rush towards me. What bothers me are those terrifying seconds when the end is coming and panic seems a perfectly sane response, because there is nothing at all I can do to stop me and the ground from connecting. There is time to think, as you fall. To realise what will come.

And it’s this that keeps me awake, the night before I fly. The terrible, awful but what if that is still less likely than being hit by a car.

It’s eight in the morning. I’m flying to Melbourne. I’ve already been awake for far too many hours.

#

The friends I love keep moving to Melbourne, and so I go down to visit. Rarely, at first, when I was young and broke. Now I am heading down for my second visit in six weeks. Melbourne has become an old friend, filled with old friends. Filled with people I trust with secrets, and hurts, and slices of my history, in ways that I can never trust the people I see every week.

When I tell friends at home that I am going to Melbourne, they ask the usual questions: what are you going to do? What are you going to see?

The answers are mundane: couches; friend’s cats; cups of tea and cups of coffee; board games and train lines that will get me from lounge room to lounge room. The occasionally café, in the city, when the logistics of getting around make it easier to meet somewhere central instead of visiting a friend’s home.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, the appeal of Melbourne was the city. The book shops, the lane-ways, the novelty of a city with a population to support the weird and the niche. I grew up on the Gold Coast, dreaming of places like this: art galleries and theatre and comedy and books. When you grow up young and arty, in Queensland, Melbourne feels like an obligation. It’s the place you run to, first chance you get, in order to find your people. It’s a place where you feel like you belong, instead of fighting for space.

I thought it was inevitable once, and the lure of the city is still there. “When are you coming down?” Friends ask me, and I used to have an answer.

“One day,” I’d tell them. “When my job working with writers is done.”

But I’m done with that job now, and Brisbane keeps me still. Keeps me by dint of a mortgage and new gig; by dint of friendships that filled the gaps after older friends moved away; by dint of its familiarity, the feeling of home when I walk down the street, but also its ability to surprise me when I remember to pay attention.

These days, when I’m in Melbourne, I think of the bits of Brisbane I love. I think of the trees on the side of the road in Adelaide street, which I had not noticed for the first decade I lived in Brisbane. I think of my café where the owners know me, and the bookstore where they know my tastes. I think of my routines, and my small flat, and my train line.

And I think, you now, I’m happy there. Happier than I thought I could be, once upon a time.

#

The first time we flew to Melbourne, we took an early flight. I was not a morning person back then, and I was not comfortable on a plane. Fear made me irritable, when combined with the lack of sleep. I loathed the cabin crew for being too perky. I loathed the short, painless flight because I was stuck in a window seat. I hadn’t yet learned the pleasure of being in-transit. I didn’t read, and I didn’t write. I just sat and brooded and killed the time. Felt the pressurised steel shell around me and imagined them peeling away, folding back like the lid of a sardine cane before you shake the contents free.

I pulled down the window blind so I wouldn’t look at the ground anymore. Tried not to picture ten thousand empty meters I’d need to fall through in order to reach the ground. Tried not to do my back-of-the-envelope mathematics: terminal velocity averages out at 60 meters per second; that’s a whole lot of seconds to live through on the way down.

We did not crash. We landed in Melbourne. I went to my hotel room and removed my shoes, made fists with my toes just like Die Hard taught me.

There was no-one I knew in Melbourne back then, except for the friends who were travelling with me.

#

An incomplete list of things in Melbourne that have, at times, been used to convince me it’s a good place to live: the bookstore on Collins Streets; trams; The Maltese Falcon; the Azteca Hot Chocolate at San Churro, before the chain spread across Australia and you could get their hot chocolate everywhere; Minotaur Books; All Star Comics; the cocktails at the Americano bar, where one doesn’t so much order as suggest a flavour profile and let an expert do their job.

An incomplete list of things in Melbourne that actually tempt me to move: walking across the Yarra on the William’s Street Bridge; jacket weather; scarf weather; the presence of deciduous trees and a regular Call of C’Thulhu game; the baked beans I used to order, in this café down in Brighton, which were smoky and thick and served with crusty bread, even if the coffee that came with them wasn’t the coffee that Melbourne boasts about.

In truth, if I go, it will be none of these things that does it. The friends who truly want me to move don’t bother selling the city. I’m a writer, and not the wildly successful kind, which means I don’t have money. The books and the cocktails and the cafes are extravagances, easily afforded on a holiday but too unlike my ordinarily life.

The friends who want me to move simply sit me on a couch and give me a cup of tea and proceed to talk about things. They remind me of who they are, and how they haven’t changed, and exactly why I miss them.

#

I told a friend about my fear of falling, once. About the empty seconds where the air whistles in your ears, giving you time to think about what’s waiting below.

“At thirty-thousand feet,” they said, “you’re probably not going to be conscious. They pressurise the cabins ’cause there’s not enough oxygen. I think you’d pass out for some of it.”

I don’t know if they were right about that. I prefer to not know for sure. Any second I don’t have to be thinking sounds good, when I am falling.

#

I made plans to move to Melbourne once. I had the date, and the budget, and nothing left to loose. Brisbane had not been good to me, after being good fro a very long time. My heart was broken, and other parts of me joined it.,I felt the lure of being somewhere else, where the past didn’t dog my footsteps. And so I set my sights on Melbourne and hoped that it would change things. I would move there, and I would find myself. I would move there, and I would belong. I would move there, and if I was wrong, it did not matter how I landed. Breaking matters less, when you think you’re already broken.

I recruited friends to move down with me, sold them on the city and set their plans in motion. Their plans went through, and mine did not. I got a job, and my heart scabbed over. I figured it for a short-term thing, that the job would end and I would move. Instead, I stayed. Bought a flat. Worked at my job. Looked at the things that broke me, and tried to fix them, one by one. It’s slow work, gluing yourself together. It’s never as fast as you’d like.

Now, it’s six years later. It’s eight AM and I am flying, sitting in a window seat with a notebook, a novel, and a weekend with friends ahead of me. The cabin crew do the seat-belt demonstration. We taxi down the runway. I lean back in my seat and close my eyes, feel the lurch as we take off and the plane begins its ascent.

We rise, and we are flying. Me and a plane full of people. There is space underneath me. More space with each passing second. And I’m not so afraid of falling now, although the fear’s still there. I open my eyes and I keep breathing, watch the seat-belt sign and wait for the moment when tray-tables can be lowered and my writing time has started

I should write about Melbourne, I think. I should write about flying.

Then I pick up my book and start reading, because the seat belt sign is illuminated and none of things can happen until it has been switched off.

I was thirty-nine years old when I saw my father’s beard for the first time. It happened quite by accident – he’d gone to the barber, asked for a close shave, and the beard he’d worn since I was a baby suddenly became this close-cropped fuzz covering the lower third of his face. Still a beard, if you wanted to get technical with the definition, but thirty-nine years is a considerable length of time to go without seeing a man’s chin. Its sudden appearance, as a visible entity behind the hair, made it a thing people commented on when they saw him.

I had my own brush with facial hair when I was twenty-two. It should be noted that I didn’t inherit my father’s propensity for thick, chin-hiding facial hair. Mine grows in patches, leaves broad swathes of the cheek unaffected. When I did grow a beard, at the suggestion of a woman I was dating, it mostly grew underneath my chin rather than on it.

I was not suited to facial hair, but I kept the beard until the end of that particular relationship, and I have never enjoyed the act of shaving quite as much as I did the day we finally broke up.

I would tell you my father, without a beard, does not look my father, but there are so many lies in that statement that it bears only the faintest whiff of truth. He doesn’t look like my father, with his chin visible, but the man sitting in the lounge chair with the freshly short beard was already so different from the father of my memories.

My father is in his sixties. He’s had a heart bypass, takes a series of meds for Parkinson’s disease and problems with his blood. He’s thinner than I can ever remember him being. He has trouble standing and moving, has trouble speaking at a volume the rest of us can hear. He’s not dying, specifically, but he has reached the point where the inevitability of death is always right there.  There is no longer any way to pretend that he will not be gone, one day.

The father in my memory isn’t a big man, but he is vital; a man who is strong and omnicompetent, underneath the omnipresent beard. He’s a man who surfed and played squash, all through my childhood; a man who built coffee tables and fishponds and canoes in his garage; a man who read The Hobbit to the kids in his classroom, and sang while he played guitar,

An ex-girlfriend once met my father and compared him to a dwarf. “He’s the kind of man you expect to fighting goblins with an axe and a beer,” she said.

And he was, back then, before illness started taking from him. He already had the beard.

There was a time, when I was younger, that people insisted the only difference between my father and I was the beard. Once, when I was seven or eight, a teacher actually put me in a fake beard to test the theory. These are the kinds of things that happen when you’re raised by teachers, and the people responsible for your education are also your parent’s friends.

It was assumed, perhaps, that the beard was inevitable. That one day I would grow one and the transformation would be complete. Instead, if I skip shaving in the morning it’s unlikely people will notice. If I skip shaving three days in a row, I start to develop the first hints of stubble.

There are men who can grow facial hair, and those who cannot. My father is the former, and I am not.

It shouldn’t be a surprise when your parents grow older. It’s right there, in stories. In television shows and films. Time marches on and people get older.Your parents become different people than you remember from your childhood.

Stories try to prepare you for that reality, but somehow, it’s not enough. Somehow, it’s still a surprise when you see your father’s chin, and it’s something that keeps bugging you long after his beard has grown back. Warned is not the same as prepared. It’s not the same thing as ready

And you adapt. You get to know the man who exists now, who is not the man you remember. And it is sad, sometimes. And happier, sometimes. And different, always different, even on the days you catch a glimpse of the father you remember in the man you talk to now.

You learn to embrace the duality. The man who is still your father, but is not the father of your childhood memories. The man who has become someone else, as everyone always does.

When I shave in the morning, I study my face. I notice the first grey hairs and the wrinkles around my eyes, the little patches of stubble that I missed yesterday because I still don’t shave with anything resembling a level of competence. It took me years to learn the very basics: shave with the direction of the hair; use shaving cream to soften the hair before you apply the razor; start with the cheeks and leave the chin for last.

It feels absurd that this is something that I still need to figure out, but it is. I do not shave well, and I cannot grow a beard. Not really.

So, instead, I study my chin. Try to imagine what it would be like, if I suddenly grew one of those beards I covet.

And somehow, I can’t quite make that image work. At worst, I can picture another patchy goatee, itchy and horribly uncomfortable. At best, I picture the rest of my life spent clean-shaven and comfortable.

Neither feels like much of a victory. Not today. Not right now.

So I rinse my face and get on with my day, rubbing my thumb over my face in search of the stubble I missed this morning in the hopes that I will finally – finally! – be completely clean-shaven when I leave the house.