On a hot summer’s day
on the driveway of Tom Collins
House,
near the path up Melon Hill, an
old stained
VW Beetle stood like a wreck awaiting
the final ball,
tattooed by time, loved for its
every spluttering mile.
The bonnet was up, Lucas was
tinkering
and we were talking away, away
from literary gossip, away from
farm work’s
lonesome nights in the bush. We
talked
against the built-in obsolescence
of
modern manufacturing, we shared
the sentimentality we had for old
things -
cars, his skateboards, my manual
typewriters.
Inside Tom Collins House, Lucas
built and set a possum trap.
He could turn a hand
to more than words, he could
turn an ankle to skateboarding,
too.
Where’s he gone now
to tinker and build? Where
is he setting his next narrative?
Now, skaters at the suburban park
leave a space as they hurtle and
turn,
police scan traffic
for the patchwork Vee-dub,
and I smile at the possum stain
in our old back shed and think
of Lucas tinkering away.
-
Andrew Burke
-
1st December, 2013
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