VITA ENIM MORTUORUM

The sunlit, grassy hill

in Timaru Cemetery

where we buried him

acts like a cupped hand

held to your ear

capturing and amplifying

the calls of the gulls,

the ceaseless, low,

melancholy susurration

of Patiti Point.

It’s a sound bred

amongst vast,

empty Antarctic solitudes

under pale sky,

and ends

as countless pebbles

sucked and rolled around

in infinite wet mouths,

borne on biers of bull kelp

and bladder wrack.

A surf beach,

it only gives fragments back,

like the Alzheimer’s

that held my grandfather’s

last years captive,

gnawing away

little by little

at the shoreline of his memories

until the irreducible essence

was all that remained.

The sea

will take the bones too,

in time.

The waters rise

to meet us all

as we float down forever,

but for now

there is solace

in the white noise

of islands contoured

and redrafted.

For now

we have our memories.