Unanswered
for David Miller

‘Everyone is queuing at everyone’s door.’
‘Alone’, Thomas Transtromer

I have questions to ask myself.
Nothing has changed, everything has changed.
Something is growing towards next summer,
when a stranger threatens to arrive

claiming to be related.
I want to want this to happen.
I wonder what will occur,
join the line of expectant fathers

who cannot fathom how the world will change.
In my dreams I paint and write
in a cold white apartment in a busy city.
Now my life will never be like this.

*
I had questions thrown at me.
The door was flung wide and
our neighbours crowded round.
Friends came to visit; and stayed.

How did I view the world?
What did I think I was doing?
Why couldn’t I paint pictures?
What were those poems about?

I circulated a sheet detailing a plan
of action. They were not convinced.
Work became tougher. The words
dried up and stayed away.

I hardly ever visited my studio.
I had to cope with having nothing to say.
I had no answers to any questions.
Couldn’t decide who to ask.

*
I had questions to ask the visiting writer.
I remembered him in a corduroy jacket
with long auburn hair and a beard. Not this
besuited reader with lecturer’s glasses.

I told him a story about a drunken poet,
how difficult and violent she had been
when staying with a friend last year.
He told me he lived with her now

and that she had a different version
of events. I was reduced to silence
and my lukewarm pizza, a glass
of overpriced Italian beer. He smiled

and it was okay. But his answers
were fluid and obtuse, deductions
from sacred texts, magic and mythology.
The uplighter reduced the room to dusk.

*
I had questions to ask the composer
about how his music had changed.
Why the lovely splashes of sound
had become linear patterns of noise.

I told him that I had fallen asleep when
listening to these pieces in concert,
unable to find a focus or pattern
to hang my wandering mind on.
Sound and no-sound, cadence
and chaos; the important question
of repetition and trance. Every
something is an echo of nothing.

every question contains its own answer.
The music began again, challenging
me to dislike it, imperfections and all,
asking me to ignore my opinions.

The sounds that accidentally occurred
shifted the possibilities. Process
absorbed everything that happened,
reminding me of things I had meant to ask.

*
I had questions to ask the doorman.
About what was beyond the door
and why it hardly ever opened.
Why there were no maps.

I joined the queue, a line
that snaked through literature
and language, between the lives
of everyone who’d ever asked.

We all wonder. The door
to the future is resolutely there:
a myth, a metaphor, a metafiction –
until you bang your head on it.

I searched so hard for clues
to the topography of beyond.
I caught the bus into my past,
journeyed to question my friends.
The bus did not arrive for thirty minutes.
I watched the sea, marvelling at the light,
followed the meandering journey of a seabird
as it scavenged along the shoreline.

I panted my way from the bus up the hill
to the terrace house via a short cut
to the back door, down a narrow alley.
After wine and talk, a generous lunch,

I found my voice again, in the cold clear day.
A moored tanker had taken refuge in the bay.
It was piled high with yesterday’s blockage,
towed unanswered questions away.

It is dark as I make my way home
and I turn to a friend’s book
in a spirit of acceptance, as though
being offered a gift for the moment.

Doors and shadows, metaphors and messages.
Spiritual letters: prose-poems written in disbelief,
a correspondence of doubt and negation.
I cannot fathom how my world has changed.

‘For living there is scarcely any time at all.’