as of now... you are gone...
to the one place on my bucket-list
that is yet still to be checked off
I continue to exist here
in my own unique reality
of an awareness of time and space
and remain
in a fellowship of others
who each one
can reconstruct their memories
of your presence here with us
from the ephemeral network
of their recollections

there are still events
I can recall
and archive here with written words
that might one day
again refresh
uncertainties and doubts
that soon pervade
advancing age

only yesterday...it seems...
there was the garden walk
in a windless calm
of an autumn sun
when barely legible labeled grafts
were examined and assessed

we met in academic technological association
where you imagined you could measure
certain elements of reality
to quite incomprehensible quantities
of parts per billion

and I was distracted into thinking that
quantitative conceptual abstraction
was an undertaking
worth pursuing

we jousted with little lances
on a table of colliding balls
and each displayed such skills
that suggested an ability
that was more in our imagination
than in the performance

we mowed and pruned
and mulched the soil
and harvested the vicious burrs
of numbered castanea trees
then tried to sell their processed nuts
in frozen packs of crumb

we cultivated coppice woodlots
and came to understand thereby
the practicalities and perils
of sharpened power chainsaws

we endlessly shared
our allotted portion
of computer-based frustration
so generously dispensed
by the guru purveyors
of what is often so uncritically described
as technological progress

many were the adventures
of cosmic speculation
that journeyed out into the night
encouraged in their boldness
by many iterated modicums
of apple and feijoa wine

parts of our existences
yours and mine
became incrementally entwined
into a sort of casual symbiosis
a mutual interaction of support
that has enhanced
the rites and passages of our daily lives


your being...
was dissected from mine
by a whim of fate...
But what you were
continues unchanged
within the archives
of my recollections


for Peter    from Nev    Anzac 2022