Sunday Drive.

Mann, Chris

Sunday Drive

   You were seated with me in the front-seat
   talking with the youngsters in the back
   about the junior school play, a history test
   and where we'd stop to have our picnic
   of egg-mayonnaise sandwiches, juice and tea.

   We were driving east on the Kowie road,
   just past the wattle trees beside the Stones Hill sign
   where there's a momentary view of hills
   and hilltop pineapple farms right down to the sea.

   I took my eyes off the road ahead a moment
   and glanced across at you as you sat there,
   the coach, the conciliator, the catalyst,
   the mother-artist twisting back over the handbrake
   to stroke a blob of sun-cream down an arm.

   I loved the way the black of your jacket
   set off the white skin of your neck and throat.
   You looked so animated, so happy,
   your head with that floppy straw-hat of yours
   framed in the front-seat window of the car
   against a summery Giotto landscape
   of poplars by a river, vegetables in a field
   looking so green in that biome of cycads and thorns.

   So what if that crazy hat, that day,
   those fresh-faced young of ours are gone?
   Love keeps opening you out from my diary,
   keeps making me place such moments before you
   like birthday presents, like offerings at evensong.

   Isn't this what my curled-in, porcupine-self,
   I wrote, was snuffling about and yearning for
   throughout those student emigre years abroad?

   Lonely and dispirited in a London bed-sit,
   I'd take a tin-opener to a can of pilchards,
   open a book by my plate and further my travels
   deeper and deeper into being and nothingness,
   my feelings then as torn, as ragged and circular
   as the edge of the upturned lid of that tin.