Baudelaire the Bricklayer
(After Seamus Heaney’s Follower)
My father worked like a pack-horse.
Striding the grounds he’d survey the site,
Study detailed plans of the house
To be built, his eye a theodolite.
A bloody perfectionist, he’d cock
His head, calculate the gauge, determine
The bond, and drop a plum-line from the top
Of the frame for square, all the while
Looking like a loony with a knotted
Handkerchief for a hat. But he was no fool.
Once a fresh batch of mortar was knocked
Up, he would reach for his tools.
Now his hands moved through air in time
To conduct the scoop and spread of mud,
The lifting and laying and tapping into line
With a hammer, handle or blade
Of the trowel each and every brick
In the walls he called his “works of art”. Yet I
Failed to see beauty in stacks of bricks
Or a world in a grain of sand, cement or lime.
The building site was a foreign place
Where men spoke another tongue,
Dressed in ridiculous bib-and-brace
Overalls, and whistled songs out of tune.
I never could wear hobnailed boots,
Or take to digging holes with a spade.
“Maybe you’d be better off in a suit”,
He’d say. “Or learning another trade”.
So I got through the days by reading Baudelaire
And Rimbaud, drinking absinth, deranging the senses,
Deciding that life is elsewhere
While raking joints and mending fences.
I failed to follow in his footsteps,
Slipped sometimes in my sand-shoes
From dodging discarded clinkers, broken batts,
Bricks with double frogs, other nomenclatures.
My father was annoying to work with;
Yapping always, always the verb.
Today his walls still cast a shadow in which
I see a boy awkwardly scrawling his first words.
Baudelaire the Bricklayer won 1st prize in the 1997 Maroochy Arts Festival Award
