Twelve noon Monday, 38 degrees and rising.
The phone’s rung twice
and someone else has fallen off
the twig while military files of micro-
ants move in on ancient crumbs.
Who said we’d live forever?

And yet (the strand of memory unscrolls)
and yet I hear as clear as yesterday
the lines I spoke as Charon
in our Latin class’s play, circa 1942:
‘Manum mihi da, puerum,
pulsum sentiam.
Obolum mihi da.
Morituram te saluto.’

Never let them tell you Latin’s dead,
snorted Beatrice Short, BA Hons.
ramming a rolled-up map of
Imperium Romanum into poor dyslexic
Margot Dumbrell’s ribcage.
The language of oppression
sticks forever.

Our fathers were at war.
We’d read about the dead-eyed ferryman
a grubby bugger meanly clad
in our abridged Aeneid
wheedling proof of death,
a silver obolus, some antique coin
placed on the tongue before burial.

My mother, innocent of pagan rites
preferred a prettier role for me,
something garlanded and girlish,
Persephone at least. But I was dark
and death-drawn early, chose to rub
against the girly grain. We’d grown up
graven with a sharp dynastic proverb:
‘Have it but pay for it.’

Charon’s stern allure sat too familiar
on my stubborn head: ‘You want to die?
Well, pay for it.’ Behind the mask
I spoke with a flourish, nothing forgotten,
nothing grasped between this world
and the next.

The distant shore blurs, lost in fog.
There’s water between us, I’m here
on the bank getting used to so many
leaving, ceasing ceasing to be
beginning again, rising from where
the roots began
to face

The truth of the matter

It’s difficult to write about one’s own work. I’m apprehensive about the potentially reductive impact of the writer’s seemingly sacrosanct words on a trusting reader. Now in my eightieth year (call it the death zone), my fears aren’t alleviated by the feeling that my work may no longer be relevant, and that the social politics of poetry seem to have become a substitute for the art itself.

I learnt first about Charon from Dr Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary (1868 edition), a gift from my mother, ever eager to foster her eldest child’s genius. Living like a dinosaur without a computer, the Internet, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I still have this faded brown canvas-textured hardback found in Hall’s second-hand bookshop in Prahran, my name and address proudly inscribed at the age of ten on its marbled frontispiece. An embossed silhouette of Charon copied from a Roman lamp adorns the cover. It remains to this day a cherished reference book.

Leading a sort of posthumous existence surrounded by ghosts of family and friends, my own life as poet and musician was grounded early in those great lyric standbys, memory and mortality. I’m still working on these themes, knowing a little of how ancestral memory may enrich as well as plague.

Like many of my poems, ‘Charon’ takes the form of an interior monologue both narrative and reflective, letting associations of thought form their own patterns. My younger self seemed permanently preoccupied in a juggling act between the active and the contemplative. Now it’s contemplate or perish.

I am more sceptical of renewal than the conclusion of this poem might suggest. Taking advantage of the few liberties the trade affords, poets often posit their ideal world ahead of the realities they’ve been obliged to confront: the self-indulgence of self-reinvention and/or escape into a higher detachment that allows us to appear more profound than we actually are.

Like anyone facing age and decay, I’m just trying to make the best of a bad job, trying to find the right words for what I hope may take me near the truth of the matter.