#1404 - a ghost in the godhole - vale Andrew Burke

 

1404

4.308

5.xi.23

a ghost in the godhole

 

for Andrew Burke

reading your book Historic Present

again for the page proofs

 

 

you’re with me

and the irony is not lost

that, at this stage, the conversation

should be one-way – your way

 

no nagging!

 

but isn’t that the poet’s joy

to remain in the manner of words?

 

you’re with me

on the train from Kyoto

and now on the flight back to Hong Kong

 

this Hong Kong Express is a shit airline b t w just saying

not that you’d be needing to book anything soon

and if you come back it’ll be gone by the time

you’re doing interplanetary booking

 

who knows?

you might be doing some kind of a wing tip dance right now

or you got your own personal cloud

I’m too dim to see

I’ve never put anything past you

so why start now?

 

I really have no idea how this works

except that one religion is as unlikely as another

 

so we had might as well make up whatever appeals

 

and still there’s your godhole

always has been

 

anyway they wouldn’t let me take my travel guitar on board

which is annoying because it is actually designed to fit

in the overhead locker – just one of the ways

a cheap airline might not be so cheap after all

 

this thing with the guitar, it’s the first time it’s happened

anywhere in world and in it’s in a soft case of course

so it is a worry … I crammed some t-shirts in for extra padding

 

I wonder how it is with the harp or the accordion?

gossamer, I guess

hardly excess luggage

and always required en voyage

 

anyway, fingers crossed, I might as well enjoy the fleece out there

and your invisible presence

 

you did keep telling me you might shuffle off the mortal

but I wouldn’t have it –

more bloody poets’ excuses (what won’t they try?)

 

you know we’re averaging one poet deceased per annum

at Flying Islands – this is not a good KPI to be meeting

if this goes on, we’ll be renamed ‘the posthumous press’

 

anyway, to keep you in the loop

(considering the plausibly amorphous texture of eternity)

it’s just about Halloween (if anyone cares) and Melbourne Cup

on Tuesday too – it’s amazing how things go on without us –

batteries, all kinds of accounts, the wardrobe lying in wait

 

guess we all go out in a birthday suit, whatever else besides

 

have you gone to the godhole yet, b t w?

‘shut your godhole’, I hear you say

fair enough

 

we miss you old friend

 

but we have your words

and now these in particular

an historic present

can think of it as gifted time

 

yours is a book of frailties, of joys

a simple chatty pool of reflection

sex knots and talking back to the radio

 

a book very much of the bookend quotidian

 

in the understated question

in the pun, in the quip

 

the wonder of the question buried

and the buried question of wonder

 

sorry to mention things interred

it might still be early for that

 

but never too early for paronomastics

I know you’ll agree with me there

 

I wish you’d used more em dashes though

it would have made some lives easier

 

I just wonder

sorry to bring it up again –

have you fallen down the godhole?

 

or are there many?

one each?

or a new one every day?

are there days?

 

if you’ve got any reception there

if there’s good news

or anything we need to know

 

you might just send a sign