30/08/2018 > Parnassus On Wheels

Dear Phidias,

I have noticed of late, as I’m sure you have also, that he may as well be a Pompey, this sorry excuse for a Prime Minister: a grizzling mouth, a balding pate and a flapping body, all draped from head to toe in such preposterous ideas

about the quality of the purple; have you seen how he perambulates the passageways and halls of the Senate? Always only three steps ahead of the microphones, his staff, and his publicists? You must know Phidias

all our Legions, from the noble Generals and thrice burnished Centurions, to the lowliest of spear carriers, are quite filled up with the deepest disrespect for him; and the citizen body has long past begun to think it wiser to ignore his endless

blathering about the impropriety of our civic levies and the grinding price of corn. So would it really be disunity to say that like a vengeful flock of furies; beaks snapping, feathers flying; we should fall on him now and strip him to his under garments;

then to apply our nails to his naked genitals, his limbs, his hirsute chest and his laurel crown? I can now only exhort you to prepare yourself Phidias: best it should be done tonight when the moon is shrouded and the nightingale

is stilled in its song. After the wine and the water libation, I will kiss him on his pale cheek, then dismiss the rest of his bored retainers. You must be waiting in the shadows that surround the stunted olives, crouched there tightly in secret with our other friends.

All your heads must be properly covered with your togas; that much at least may be marked as seemly; but I digress: there is no need now for further talk about the shouting and fear; all that will no doubt stain the linen. As to the dousing of the torches and the bathos that must attend his final execution:

all of it, my dear Phidias, should not take very long …

Pierre mon frère, at the ending point now, you’ve slipped quietly out across this winter’s dry flood plains, carrying a chisel, a paint brush and a pint pot, all in a small string bag.

I can’t quite comprehend what use these things will be to you; to drink the last dregs of the amber sunlight this side of the wall? To carve your name in triplicate? As if we will forget. The smock that they have dressed you in is already covered in dust or in sand, chips falling from the brickwork.

For now you inhabit a small camp by the banks of our blood’s river (the flesh, after all, does look so much like grass). You will stay there until you think it’s safe to cross over.

Do you have enough coins in your pocket, dear cousin? There will be others who will need paying before too long. Your mother my Aunt, waits as always to scold you. My mother, your Aunt, smiling, waits to receive you. My father, your Uncle who always treated you as a son, gladly waits to receive you.

Don’t tarry dear Peter, mon chéri: but those here who love you might also say, don’t hurry. While we are all at a loss now to speak to you or for you, we still desperately crave your company.

Sleep is the husk of a man lying slightly sidewise, covered with a hospital blanket, breathing in then out through an open mouth on a cool winter’s day before rain. His grieving wife sits quietly beside him.

The eyes are shuttered and without a tremor; they cannot now see beyond the glass. Out there several hundred feet below, I can see the Parramatta River; it is too far away though on this afternoon to hear its waters singing.

Liverpool Hospital, Western Plains, Australia, August 30th, 2018.