This love was beauty and beauty is loss

 

 

Afterwards,

I sit under streetlights in Fremantle

and try to find the texture of the poem that has to come  

 

I came upon them

hunched over each other at the Cottesloe train stop

and, awkwardly, I sat to wait two seats down

She was fake blonde with mascara eyes and the heroin look;

he was grunge with a mane of dry black hair

 

Their conversation rollercoasted: in minutes it veered across

anger, delirium and joy,

spoken in a language of their own:

guttural, naked, bubbling from a well deeper than any I know

Their love was the colour of fresh blood,

the pace of a failing heart that quickens then stops

                                     

                                    then beats again

It was evil - they had passed into a higher realm,

leaving behind the frailities of my love 

            - the mere jealousy, the affirmation, the need to hold -

and had stripped love to its purest most primal form:

a frightening union that flared in the night

turning the indiscernible blackness into a harsh spotlit wonderland

 

And then the train tore through this world, drawing a press of people to its doors

Moving through a pool of honey I lost them as I found a seat

My peace shattered forever a palimpest of unease and desire  

my inadequate thoughts pulled into the lovers’ chaotic rhythms

trying to fit them and failing, hurting in this love beyond me

 

The next stop a last glimpse struck me confused as they stepped off/

paralysed I thought wildly of following them out but the traindoors hissed

and reflections from the inside quickened, multiplied as we stole forward

choking them out in inane detail, the dull tired faces, the mere talk

 

Six minutes into Fremantle

my head resting on the glass

The loss of something sliding from my grasp

something I knew

I could never hold

only view,

from a distance -

the loss that is beauty after it is seen

 

- Nathan Hobby 22/10/99