Two Thousand Fragments

 

You came into the kitchen

ostensibly to help me with the coffee

we hugged

maybe we were both thinking,

no deliberate night is perfect

 

We drank the coffee; it was fresh and smooth

but it wasn’t millennium coffee.

Mitchell took his silently, fending off more attempts

drawing further and further into himself

lost in a well we couldn’t reach him in

 

Later in Fremantle, eight minutes to midnight

that Kafka panic

as a corny didgeridoo player took the stage to make the countdown:

there was nowhere to go

just the scraggly grass, people sitting on it half drunk or whole bored

the teeny boppers screaming and jumping at the stage

the nasal screech of the player

The beach, you suddenly said

we started off running and then, self conscious, half running, crossing the railway

line with three minutes of the century left

and looking out to see the lights all off at the beach, its darkness

an aeon away, hopeless    we turned back

sat straight down on the grass at the outskirts of the crowd

me thinking, this isn’t how I wanted the last moments to be

 

random disconnected events: a splurge of fireworks shooting up

the crowd chanting something two one (me catching on) zero;

happy new millenium, you said -

the countdown a random quiet flare in the night

thrusting us, unprepared, into the new century

 

at three am we walked along the beach

four birds flying low in front of us

grey silent ghosts in the moonlight

we were timeless seers and in the excited darkness

we could see all things: past present and future -

where had we been, where were we to go?

it was easy; we knew for sure

later you noticed one of the drunks in the shadows

and  wanted to check he was all right;

I said I’d seen five others like him   you replied,

‘And you just walked past them all?’

 

Hungry and tired at 4 am in King’s Park,

the world stuck forever in an apocalyptic night

strewn with a century’s debris

a vacuum cleaner droned,

a couple of shapes shuffled in the darkness

and I kept on stepping on beer cans

 

We sat on the grass bank

the first light came, a suggestion to the east

and suddenly the bank was lined with silent people

families, couples, lone hangovers

all looking out to the east expectantly

 

the light grew, golden and fresh

the clean of a new century

and in it we seemed white and smiling

 

When the sun appeared at the top of the hills

The crowd cheered.

 

- 8/1/2000