Some good news; our old friend Larry we haven’t seen for twenty years is coming to our party, bringing his new woman. I am a separated man, he tells me, his words queuing up, jostling as if rehearsed before his call. I imagine his heart pounding as he explains why we lose touch; distant shires, domestic duties. I think it’s our need to report happiness, not gloom. He insists his marriage breakdown was amicable, although I had said nothing. It’s none of my bedroom business. I, too, edit our lives to sound like a beloved sitcom. We have told no-one this shall be our last celebration.
The night I first dated my younger wife, Larry was present with other romantics their age. If some of those dancers could have glimpsed their futures that blazing beat might have shuddered into silence, frantic arms, legs, jerking, then still. Now they compile tapes of their outdated music’s favourites to tap their fingers to when stuck in traffic, or driving long distances like many of our guests do the hungover day after our party. Larry, on leaving, tells us we are legends, praises our hard work, survival. My wife fusses our tall array of children to avoid looking at me when he says this. I once again use irony as a mask, mock-bowing.
It’s not the trees, the tall lemon-scented eucalyptus, its dropped leaves that release springtime perfection when I mow through them, or the stout spreading old peach where one lad broke his wrist falling like Icarus from boughs dappling the sun, or the jacaranda’s hard aromatic wood, its blue blooms like a painting brushing our big picture window. It’s not the towering golden cypresses under which we buried pet cats, dogs, even a horse, or the shady avocados grown from composted pits, ideal for breathless hide-and-seeks when phantom figures flitted in, on, behind, and through their dense leafy arbour. It’s something else that shall remain saliently in my memory like the final tune of my old-time dance nights. It’s the door frame where I measured their heights, biroed ascending figures. Of all the things you can’t take with you, now I have been told the time has come for this late sojourn to end, it is this.
‘midst avocados
long after seeking has ceased,
to stretch which can’t last.
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