"Phantom figures waiting for the bus," a poem by Ian C. Smith

Drinking rum listening to Sharon Zhai’s haunting One Fine Day knowing his own fine days shall never bless him again, he smells rain heading his way.  Fragrances remind him of events, atmosphere, from cigarettes in public bars to lavender drying in window sill jars.  Sun-damaged, his tired face seldom smiles, unlike his photographs displayed on a dusty credenza.  Managing the fear of dying alone he spurns regret, bed made, book next to his lamp.  At the hour of sparrows’ retreat, momentarily, he feels something loom behind him outside, staring.  The light poor, he imagines the ghost of times past lurking there.  Wind rattles his closed doors, the low-pressure trough sharpening his sense of what is lost.  Remaining days dwindle.  Those skin cancers persist.  His sigh from the heart’s havoc turns into a cough.  He’d like to spit out this fret, this empty ending.

Before their phones had no cords when he fancied he would write a poem each year about their lives but quickly lost interest, they walked with their dogs around familiar tracks hemming contoured slopes past fallen boughs, hollow logs.  Catching the breeze, smelling woodsmoke,  like the discoverer of secrets, he said: Look at the moon.  Listen to that mopoke.  As their footsteps followed the tread of unknown dead he thought there must be a German word for that when light rain began and she raised her face.  Now he wonders if she thinks of those times of grace when their dogs sniffed death’s spoor then rolled in grinning bliss.  Did they understand the sheer reek of this?

Plunging into life’s bustle he accrued multiple former addresses, none of them on Easy Street, before putting down roots to place, to rural contentment.  He now believes too much was about him, the half-baked quips, his manias, the ways he attracted attention, all the restless echoes of his mind.  When the years had done their silent assassin thing, a fragile idyll had fizzled out.  Sometimes end phases register.  Other finalities swoop past, a rush of wings unheeded like old dreams.  Adrift in the present – a blur back when it was a vague confluence of imagined pilgrimages’ destiny, a heart-warming dotage void of embarrassingly repeated anecdotes – he resisted a solo physical return from ruin to riches.  Then a sun-shot late winter morning as luminous as summer lured him to drive, just go, expose himself to the possible pain of this universal idea of going back.  There, the silence seethed, bees in early blossom.

Uncertain if he isn’t hoodwinking himself he steps into yesterday like an archaeologist discovering a prehistoric civilisation.  The trail is overgrown,  The monstrous lonely twitch of the place.  His eyes lock with a fox’s.  Then it has gone, bracken swaying.  His haleness has vanished, too – think Yeats’ tattered rag on a stick – as if down the now hidden deep dank pit he skirts that he dubbed Dragons Lair, entertaining their children.  Keeping a sharp eye out for snakes in Eden abandoned, nostalgia, sentimentality, and false emotion, all that dumb stuff he loathes, gang-tackle him.  He mentally cringes, knows he should quit groping at shadows, make the most of days’ wonder whirling by.  And he shall.  But ducking below branches’ weave remembering those long gone dogs, and again at the school bus shelter, his heartbeat pizzicato, he was so close reaching for the intangible sequestering him from what he loved.  So close.