Diptych for Two Mates
His eyes are light as lasers,
betray the depths of the ocean,
and are as gentle as silk.
He holds himself humbly,
firmly, his expression is a bridge,
to vision, to humanity,
to compassion and erudition.
He speaks with the elegant fragility
that holds, carefully as a vase,
the taste of Romania,
and floats about in fragments
that tastes like a book
to be read in a pub.
“Hi, Peter”. He says the words
with such care they’re like petals
that drop on the rising breeze of conversation,
into to my ears, echoing
across the short space like Van Gogh’s
paintings across the spaces of history.
“You coming for a beer, after?”
Those eyes hold me like a breeze
holds a yacht in the harbour,
pulling three words from me,
not like a tug boat with an ocean liner,
but like a catcher, a keeper,
capturing a ball. “Yes, of course”.
We go, sit around in the shadows
of the Woolpack, and the company
talks animatedly about all manner of things.
I yatter passionately.
He’s a quiet man, still, observant,
leaning in to hear, with inviting passion,
with few words, but as enlightening as laser points,
I’m at home in the pub here.
There is a serious light of appetite
for conversation and company
In his eyes.
I haven’t seen him in over a year.
Attempts are as futile as
beating a virus in winter.
A message popped up on my computer the other day:
“Hi, Peter, do you want to go for a beer?”
I hear the words in my head,
formed as intricately as snowflakes,
and the eyes, sharp as lasers, soft as silk.
I can smell that book
to be read in the pub.
Last night I dreamt again of the first time I met
Luke the Westie Doctor.
He came in wearing battered labourer’s boots,
dinghy black jeans, and an old ACDC shirt
partly covered with an open brown jacket,
hoping, I think, someone talks to him
about that bogan Aussie rock band.
He was smiling, always smiling,
and strobing a frown that bore
two sharp lines on his forehead in the moments
something serious caught his attention.
Someone told me he was going to be a doctor,
and I thought, shit eh, as he sauntered around the room,
imagine that bogan flâneur operating on me.
When we did eventually meet, in this crowded place,
we sized each other up, eyes flickering like gunfighters
in some spaghetti western that never quite
got around to ever being made.
I mischievously teased him with theories of the origin of the universe,
an entirely speculative theory of time, all so incoherent
that I had no idea what was going on.
Eventually I discovered he was finishing his PhD
in some sort of Aussie literature
thank fuck he’s not a real doctor—
and he’d just published his first book,
“How to be Happy” or something?
No, that’s not it, “elegance”?
Yeah, got it, “An Elegant Young Man”.
I put him out of his misery and mentioned his ACDC shirt,
and he said he wondered if anyone would notice.
I woke up thinking of the intimacies we had
with hardly any antipathy at all,
and I wondered where I got those rather crazy words.
