My father lies beneath lightglobes of blood, paralysed, his soft body swaddled in sheets. A nurse comes with blood, tends the abandoned ship of his flesh.

‘How’re things, dad?’

Tiny muscles move in his eyelids; perhaps he hears.

‘Treating you alright?’

His tongue is a bloated slug. A ball of saliva oozes down his chin. I wipe it with my hand, touch the wet secrets of his mouth.

‘Mum’s ok. We put her with Dennis.’

He opens his mouth, an empty red wound; I look away. I search the bland, unhelpful room.

‘Dennis says hullo.’

Urine chirrups into a bottle. Wordless, his eyes glisten like balls of glass. Blood and urine, with a slug body in the middle. The air is rancid with piss.

‘The house looks ok. I’m watering the lawns. Alright?’

But in the undertow of his drifting mind, he swims past islands of words, reefs of phrases, the familiar crunch of words; he hears only wind… The dumb collapse of breath our thoughts blown like bits of a torn book, the air shivering with nameless things.

‘Dennis will come tomorrow, if you like.’

His cheeks flutter like the shreds of some flag.

One of our better conversations.

 

(Published in Celebrations; A Bicentennial Anthology of Fifty Years of Western Australian Poetry & Prose. Ed. by Brian Dibble, Don Grant & Glen Phillips. UWA Press)