Greg McLaren’s ‘A House’

from After Han Shan

I see a darkness above the houses,
above the light at their windows
catching in the eaves.
We are driving away

in your old car, its rattling door
letting the cold in.
The night is a wide space,
entering everything.

You stop, we crunch on gravel
by the side of a road,
looking back at the soft glow
behind the hills and the dips

the river sits in. We regret
the quiet city. For years
you’d hoped to find your brother there.
He never showed.

You explained the mauves and grey-greens
of your grandmother’s jacaranda
and the gum-forest past her back fence.
I am longing, I think, for a house.

I go out into its back yard,
tired of writing another
letter home. The sun is low
in the flat sky, between the trees. 

The horizon takes on the colour
of bruised jacaranda flowers.
A car door opens and closes,
a light goes on in the house next door.