Highbury

No. 20 Martin Road
Sydney, Australia


Even with them gone
it feels somehow like trespassing,
slipping up the path
between the eucalypts and casuarinas -
almost as if two old men
sit musing on the portico
beneath the blue Aegean ceiling
framed by the proscenium.
 
A granite sphere
surmounted by a small
seraphic effigy
serves as a mnemonic
for Byzantium; apart from this,
few markers of the journey's course
are visible, just as a ship,
except for superficial scars
from foreign seaways, gale and storm,
shows little evidence of harm
encountered on the voyage,
once the blazoned labels and smudged
names of ports of destination
chalked on cabin luggage
go ashore to stay.
 
This house was a klepsydra
for memories, relived intensely,
spaetlese and lexia of days,
the sunlight filtered gently;
scimitars of leaves feigning
cutwork embroideries,
a fretted screen
through which a distant glimpse
of Alexandria could sometimes gleam.
 
I think of how a vessel,
parted from Aegean and Levantine,
aches in all its timbers
for the touch of brine;
how the timbers of this house
called Highbury, raised high and dry
on simple Federation brickwork
sometimes pined to be away,
lost in the blazing azure
of the furlough flights above the sands,
the currents washing Chios,
the slow-moving ferries to Piraeus.
 
How sombre the park must seem
in unrelieved fatigues of green,
when your companion takes his leave
and you are left to soldier on.
 
I sometimes drink before I dream:
this spaetlese was right for them...



i.m. Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris


from a work in progress:
The Book of Lost Addresses

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This poem first appeared in Stylus
Poetry Journal, January 2008:
www.styluspoetryjournal.com