My Father’s Room

 

On the third floor of an institutional building

down a corridor of polished linoleum

past jabs of chemical smells 

was my father’s well-lit room.

 

There elaborate blown glass sat on a long desk:

snaky titrators

test tubes

a magnetic stirrer.

The lights and ‘don’t touch’ buttons

of a mass spectrometer 

‘that cost more than our house.’

 

Shallow sealed dishes 

had something that looked like Vaseline inside

blooming with brownish spots.

 

A white coat hung 

on the back of a chair.

 

What happened there?

Forty years of his time. 

Searching smaller, smaller, smaller

bacteria

enzyme

atoms of carbon fourteen.

 

He tried to explain when I asked

far too late

what he was looking for.

I stopped understanding halfway through.

I can still see his sad, forbearing smile

at the silence.

 

We never did talk enough

though we did express our love

more than father son clichés  

would have you believe of those times.

 

I don’t remember when 

we stopped visiting his lab at weekends.

It was a boyhood treat,

my brother swinging his legs 

over the echoing stairwell,

the joy of the magnetic stirrers 

spinning vortexes in a jar,

our fear of the unstoppable thing

with four spring legs

we knew as ‘the shaker machine.’

 

He never really left,

haunting the place long after he no longer worked there.

That room would always be his.

 

 

Semaphore 2025

 

The sea is waving flags at us 

but who will answer?

 

On the beach, a Port Jackson shark, 

teeth bared, 

grey, dried-out leather shrinking back 

from cartilage skull – suffocated 

in algae-slick water, 

the warm detergent we made of the waves. 

 

A fog of luxury villas, 

strawberries from California,

data centres and server farms,

Canavan and Adani and ‘you have to keep the lights on.’

The gas and the wars and Woodside and Chevron,

Raptors, and Rams, and ‘it’s coal. Don’t be afraid!’ 

‘Coastal property values’

and ‘will we get prawns for Christmas?’

and ‘what if the tourists don’t come?’ 

 

Meanwhile, decaying in the weed, 

flathead, leatherjacket, 

worm eel, fiddler ray,

spotted puffer fish

say the same thing – 

 

couldn’t breathe.

 

Can’t breathe.