Title: Sport 33

Editor: Fergus Barrowman

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2005

Part of: Sport

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Sport 33: Spring 2005

Angela Andrews

page 76

Angela Andrews

White Saris

for my son

What I knew of their house
was a blue garage door,
kicked-in at the middle.
A buckling dent.

You approach a scene like that
with caution. It takes time
to know whether to pause
or hurry, head down.

Their glowing white saris
on this grey marble day.
Outside the buckled
door, a station wagon, black.

I was thinking of you. How you
will find out. The black suit
you will wear. How the feel
of your best white shirt could hurt.

How silk might hang
in a cold wardrobe. I pushed
you through those people.
I pushed you along the road.

page 77

Holidays at my father's

We drive down Fenton in a bench-seat Holden. Belmont glints in Times New Roman. Motels and hotels fill our vision: Sequoia Tree, Sulphur City. Hell's Gate Lodge.

*

We eat black pudding for breakfast. We eat tank bread for lunch. We play Yahtzee on speckled brown carpet, rolling dice over a woollen landscape.

*

Anne owns an ice-cream parlour. Twenty-three favours, the most in town. Roll them so they're hollow in the middle, she says, and I can't get over how clever this is.

*

Men play golf among steaming vents. The dashboard skids with fags and mints. There is a hornet at my shoulder.

*

Don't tell Anne we stayed with Barbara, he says. Not that I would ask you to lie for me.

*

Anne likes my tracksuit. She positions herself at my side. Thank you, I say, my mother made it.

Your mother made it, she says. Isn't your mother clever?

*

The geyser bursts at ten o'clock. A man stuffs the hole with suds. Sometimes I fly there, sometimes I'm driven.

page 78

Sonnet

in memory of Ken Andrews

There is a white clutch of hands
on his shirt, a panic that
pulls apart. The buttons become
flying discs, the stitching
is yanked up tight. He is bare
in the night. Paddles pressed
to his breast, the face is grey, eyes
fixed, neck pulsing with the down-
ward beat of someone on his
chest. Now doctors dissolve
powdered drugs, arrange tubes, pace
in disposable aprons.
Male, late forties, Status One.
The white sheet faps at his face.

page 79

The pathology museum

You could go there now,
you could take the corridor
and hair-pin back, enter
the room called hearts.

They are in the dark
there, glass shelf upon
glass shelf, clear pots filled
with small dense lumps

that once knew crimson warmth,
once pumped a body full.

*

You take one
down, you hold it
in your hands.

Perspex shines.
The muscular
ball is inside.

Threads of edges
waver in fluid:
anemone fine,

formaldehyde
grey. The wall
is thick. The scar

is pale. The cusp
will not open or close.