in my dream I fall like you dividing for a second or two the stacks of poste restante water which flow round the piers like ice I have revisited many times the scene of your crime against us all for suicide is a punishment and we have suffered that dismal repair of corrugated iron tacked across the shipping shed roof on the wharf, where you probably didn’t intend to end up which swallowed you slower than water coughing you up on the rebound broken open like a cup and lying, like a statistic, spread out like a public thing even those of us who never knew you have lived with the patched roof and your name, which must never be spoken driving across the completed bridge I always talk to you I’ve two fine brothers – weren’t you curious? did you farewell your wife, a woman sometimes cruel but newly delivered of a son (my youngest uncle, three weeks old. Still lives alone) when Dad’s immediate maternal progenitor as our uncle called her lay dying, I visited. Only once. Watching your widow sink among pillows right in the centre of the bed, I began to cry. Vehemently nodding, ‘Good,’ she said. The last words of your generation for mine. Cathoel Jorss
