Two Poems

To blend into the background, I slip into my father's clothes. It's not that they're nondescript—a floral shirt and a Chinese tiger tie—but there's a collective cultural blind spot when it comes to dead men. I walk through the crowded market, thronging families parting and reconnecting around me without breaking step or even noticing, their waves of conversation passing through me like prayers. I don't want to slip into the figurative language of faith here, but I'm tired at the end of a long, long week at work, and I console myself with the thought that it's what my mother would have wanted: and before I know it, she's walking beside me, with a sunflower silk scarf and a bag full of nuts and pastries, greeting friends and strangers alike, and I have to reconsider my whole conceptual framework of post-mortem social invisibility. Jesus Christ, I say, looking as if for the first time at my ill-fitting shirt and loose trousers that terminate somewhere around my shins. I know Mum doesn't approve, but she understands and—even though I'm an old man now and she's, let's face it, dead—she squeezes my hand and assures me that no one can see me anyway, and that everything will be ok.

Even after the disaster, the school's still standing, a looming monument to something we've forgotten. All around is flattened, and the creek's choked with rubble, but the school's pristine, as if newly opened by a plump mayor cutting a ribbon, and all set for an illustrious future of chalk on slate and banging desk lids. There are, of course, no pupils, but they left behind murals in every classroom and stairwell, and the echoing space is a lush Rousseau jungle, aswarm with tigers and toucans, vibrant colours singing a song of when all the world was young. Ferns and rubber plants conspire in light and shade, fat fruit sags in swags down once-echoing corridors, and in the vine-choked gymnasium, a fleshy figure reclines, naked as the Sun. Her golden arm sweeps flecked air in welcome or warning, and her serious lips shape seduction or the seven times table. It's foolish, indeed, but I need to know, so I tug my gloves from my desiccated hands and fumble for the catches on my sealed helmet.