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Sport 14: Autumn 1995

1. 36 Arthur Street

1. 36 Arthur Street

The sun is bored.
It grows heavy and orange
and drowns itself in the horizon.

A hawk rises clumsily
from a tree,
cursing those that disturbed it,
its black print frayed at the edges.

The girl has left her thought here,
mingled with the crispness of
the evening’s ghost,
mingled with the pictures
she glances at in memory.
Dandelions grow like a meadow
and she hides in every sticky petal.

When my family had worn themselves into the house, we left it and let your family fill it up. I was not aware of ‘things’ then, thinking that when we visited again the rooms would be the same. My body changed the whole place for me, it grew up and cannot hold my little-girl nostalgia so convincingly. I say the house looks smaller, but it is me who is bigger, and I have no words to account for this strangeness.

I left my first conscious thought on the doorstep of that house; staring at my scraped knee and blue sneaker, my mother called my name. I remember the grey concrete footpath and my dirty laces but they blur into other pictures, and are ultimately never as clear as this one.