I found you hanging from the sky, swinging
like Converse from an electric wire,
and I tried to pick you from that vine,
to press you in a bottle of Chardonnay,
to drink with a wheel of Brie,
but you wouldn't go.
I felt you soaking in the gentle rain that sucked
my shirt around me like a corset,
in the holy sprinkling of water
that smelled like perfume in the air.
I breathed you in my lungs
and coughed you out in smoke
and cast your ashes off the Westgate,
watched them sail across Port Phillip
in a trance.
I heard you in the spray of breakers dying
on the concrete Hampton foreshore
last July. You turned to foam,
and spewed forth from the shallows,
and I sipped my coffee in the silence,
broken only by the babble
from the beaks of gulls
encircling, screeching from the air
and dying on the needling wind.