SHANE MCCAULEY
The Past
- Look how the past grows on you
- accumulates like barnacles
- or plaque
- and the present shrink-wraps
- you until at last
- you must make more space
- must delve and sort and throw out.
-
- But where to start?
- Here is a drawer of old letters
- old friends old lovers
- ice cold fire hot words
- that froze and seared
- now so pale and bleary.
-
- To burn or shred
- or to be left there forever
- unread? To destroy
- would be a sort of murder
- of this past or at very least
- exorcism of some harmless ghost.
-
- Perhaps just close the drawer -
- what has not been riven
- has long healed by now
- and is forgotten and forgiven.
Shane McCauley's
most recent collection is Glassmaker, a hard-cover collection from Sunline Press.
He lives in Western Australia.