There, being Monday morning

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Published 20140204
ISBN: 9781922182241
Extent: 300 pp
Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

”So why’s he dead?’, the reasonable
and polite enough query as children witness
from the distance, the body moved to a van
with white sides and frosted panes.

I was born, there’s no question of that.

I am in a dozen framed photos on this
table or that mantle. The clothes alter in each
picture, the face grows more attentive, you

can tell what school from the crest on my cap,
you can tell the girl beside me with the wind
in her veil like an angry invisible bee
is very happy that morning. Where? is another

of the many reasonable questions. ‘You’ve got
me there,’ I say. There is a copper beech
bigger than the house it broods over, I have
sometimes thought of it as caring, which

of course is my fantasising, a tree being simply
that. There, at another time, was a jetty,
a village with five syllables in its long
Welsh name. There were good and bad places.

There was sitting in a car watching children scamper
to another car, that was the saddest there;
and walking by a river, its broad dark current
bearing chunks of pumice from volcanoes,

a woman once said were like skulls in a hurry.
From a hundred examples I might give you
I select a handful at random, a sample
of what may occur on particular days.

I appreciate that addresses, next of kin,
official forms – they are yours to attend, I’m
sorry. The last witness, only this morning,
walking a spark of pure temperament

on an orange lead, her glancing back,
walking on, ‘getting on with life’. Is that
an answer, now I’m discovered? A considered
decision. Don’t let the children see.

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About the author

Vincent O’Sullivan

Vincent O'Sullivan is a novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer and editor.His poetry collection Us, Then was published by Victoria University Press in 2013,...