Night
Watch
Time is elastic, its zenith fit to breaking
when you wait for the ambulance – now leaning over
him,
now rushing back and forth from house to street
straining
for sirens, night so dark and wet and quiet out there.
Listening for breath in a slight boy of fifteen years
is an ancient art requiring silence. Kneeling on your
hall floor,
ear right to his lips, beside the frenzied shouts of his
father,
whose panic of pacing is the only thing he can offer
him.
Your own son watches his friend from the corner,
slumped, slightly beaten, the first fire of alcohol
seeming
less necessary than it might have been, not worth the
effort now,
while the friend he tried to carry home lies on his
side, still.
Slapping his rump to try and wake him feels like
assault.
Strange to be able to do things he would never allow,
ice you run across his cheeks a cruelty. Beyond limp,
he will not jerk away, open his mud-brown eyes.
When they finally come, wearied knights of the new wars,
they cannot rouse him, tell us it's not good, open his
lids to pupils
so huge, so pitch and utterly void, his mother gasps,
sinking,
and you never saw anyone so unconscious who wasn't dead.
You make your son sit and watch. They strap on an oxygen
mask,
fail to open his mouth for a tongue block, quietly ask
what he took -
vodka yes, but weed? pills? needles? No. Just vodka.
Straight.
“He
was kicked,' your boy says, 'they punched me in the head.' And
vomits.
Clipped on a stretcher, they lift him out of the hall.
In the long night,
fourteen hours twisted in tubes before he rouses, you
remember
they loved pizza by the swimming pool for the last three
birthdays, watched
videos, Xbox, played Star Wars with Darth Vader the only
enemy -
and when you turned sixteen no-one had parties at all.
Robyn
lives in Ireland and Australia so she launched her new book Lines
of Drift (Doire
Press) both there and here.
I caught the Aussie launch by Catherine Bateson at Collected Works
here in Melbourne and invested in a book. I must say I liked the epic
poem Unbroken
Stone In A Stubborn
Sea –
but just too long for a blog I reckon. Again the scroll scroll scroll
problem. But this mini-drama called Night
Watch caught
my attention. Such a shriek of a poem. Recollected in tranquility,
as they say.
http://www.doirepress.com/writers/k-z/robyn_rowland/
