‘Visiting’ [for Stephen]
by Tony Birch

I trace your life along the river…

Photo of Tony Birch
Tony Birch
Poetry
Published by Cordite Books
in Broken Teeth

Tony Birch

Dr Tony Birch is an Australian novelist, short story writer, poet and academic. Tony's most recent collection, 'Common People', was published in 2017. His previous novel, 'Ghost River' (2015), won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and was longlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin Award. His other works include 'Shadowboxing' (2006), 'Father's Day' (2009), 'Blood' (which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin literary award in 2011) and 'The Promise' (2014). Tony was awarded the Patrick White Literary Prize in 2017. Tony is a frequent contributor to ABC local and national radio. He has taught creative writing at Melbourne University for many years, and is the inaugural Bruce McGuinness Research Fellow within the Moondani Balluk Centre at Victoria University.
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Cordite Publishing Inc. is registered as a charity with Register of Cultural Organisations. Its publications are Cordite Poetry Review, an Australian and international journal of poetry review and criticism, and series of print books.

I trace your life along the river below the Cat-Walk, where we hung like sleeping bats, from the rusting girders we left behind in morning light, to fall through summer heat and touch the velvet waters waiting for our young bodies sixty feet below. We lifted the skirts of a Skipping Girl, strobing the night with an erratic neon dance, she lit the riverbanks infested with years of stolen car wrecks inviting wet lovers. Until the day came to dress the Girl and order her to perform for the peak-hour crawl, homeward bound capsules, heading into the eastern emptiness. Today the river's edge is beautified, bridges are caged in safety, Deep Rock lies drowned beneath a strip of freeway and the long-abandoned sweat shops dazzle in glass and steel. Sitting at the falls where we ran reckless, I skip stones across the water and conjure memories of you. I see us here on summer nights. Together we carried the river home with us, in our hair and on our skin.