Ripe

Somewhere behind the strong boy wearing shorts and a bright shirt

who laughs so loud with his eyes closed,

strung from sports shed to fence.

A gossamer net,

more gape than substance,

droplets clinging from an early rain,

refracting light and sounds and smells -

these make up my memories.

The summer barbecue at our Anne Street rental.

All above is blue, and the grass a dry Aussie green.

We are bathed in the too-sweet smell of stone fruit turning in the summer heat.

A blurry sense of my parents’ friends’ children, names long gone.

But in this fermenting peach dream, we are there,

climbing to a rough-made platform in a medium fruit tree,

our little legs running, scrambling, never to be still.

We ride a corrugated metal slide to the bottom -

one of my dad’s constructions (loose in that 90s dad way

sharp edges and left nails).

And we run again - climbing, sliding.

Again.

Again.

Again - now an endlessly looping scene

I can tune in to watch

with rheumy eyes and a tight chest.

My parents’ friendships must already have been starting to dry, powder,

but all my recall is adult laughter, the wavy heat of the barbecue,

and the grass under the trees littered with fallen fruit.

Nothing else happens, in this memory-scene.

It's only the peach juice that makes this vague atmosphere stick

with the power of a defining memory -

thirty years so far.

But, true, what a moment for the amber -

None of the desperate loudness that marked life inside,

when their friends had left, and every shuttered feeling came through.

Inside memories are the silvered threads that stick,

when you walk through a web unexpecting:

past clinging to your face and shoulder and hands,

making you thrash and scrape

for the unseen thing that has caught you.

Outside memories have their wonky sweetness -

just the wrong side of ripe.