This photo captures you both together
only when you were both preparing to leave.
Our backyard olive tree's beige trunk
backgrounds the smiling faces:
Te Matua with her daughter -
upper arms gently met,
both chins angled obliquely to meet
temporary union of joyous eyes
squinting into the late
October Fremantle glare.
She is dressed for her return flight -
you for your work with daughters
that starve themselves
in ways theory cannot explain.
Yet here, it's the distance that does it.
Played tricks on you both:
too close, too far -
stay here for now, we'll move back then -
conjured ways of coping
with decisions made long ago,
that make for the great isolation
and how the isolated demand
their recognition by gradual disappearance.
Lightly held arms & rubbing noses
pass through eyes searching beyond absence -
starved between such feasts of touch.
Even now, its neat guilt frame stands
like a testament to perpetual hunger
on our Kauri fire surround in a room
where not a year ago she shed tears
recalling her own Mother's death
when she too was in her mid thirties -
stroking her hand at the bedside
in the Nelson General Hospital.
Answering Systems are among the cruellest
of post modern devices, with merely a minute
of unilateral message to make, before the machine
monotones a signal like a cardiograph in asystole.
Your father's voice broken, breaking down -
choked on the news he read from his
own hand's scribbled bedside notes -
there's no oxygen getting in
last stages
chronic obstruction
air hunger
not the best
Being on a plane within two hours was not enough.
Hanging on - in Sydney,
she's gone - by Christchurch.
An hour late - at Nelson General.
Still the distance gnaws
without the leaning frame.
I rearrange it, straighten it,
set it next to the one
of you with our daughter -
her little leg dangling
from her tree-house
can only just be made out
above the trunk of the same tree.