Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
A Small View of Sky, poems by Lincoln Jaques.
A Small View of Sky
He sat in the broken chair
the only item of furniture
in an otherwise empty room.
The company of his own reflection
from the window with no blinds
He’d moved in with nothing
slept on the floor
breathing in the fresh paint
that plastered the growth of mould.
Not so much as an AM radio
to tune into human voices.
At first someone brought him
blankets, another a banana
box of groceries. Still others
came out from their simple units,
walking the path to his door.
Bringing utensils they needed themselves
they tried to build him a life again
his frailty an apostrophe to our mortality.
In the evening I saw a light burning
as he sat still in his chair
the untouched goods laid out.
He would move forward
reach out to an object
his hand stopping mid-air
as if to open an invisible
door into another forgotten life
where someone he knew waited
for him, once more to disappear.
A Letter for the Dead
A friend died last week.
I’m not even sure he was a friend,
more a close colleague, an ex-colleague
at that.
And I didn’t even know he’d died
until today, when suddenly I looked
out the window, and noticed a branch
of my lemon tree had drooped, heavy
with fruit, or weeping.
When colleagues or friends die nowadays
you rarely get told in-person. It’s posted
on Facebook, a News Feed item that pops
up. “So sad to inform all our FB friends…”
You stare as the pixels evaporate in a mist.
My last SMS to this colleague-slash-friend:
No worries…enjoy yr day. Catch up soon.
Thumbs up emoji. LOL.
22 May.
I’d travelled down to the cold blade of the Coromandel
the hills caving in with the Miners’ bones, the fog laying
in the valley like a tiger’s tongue. We hadn’t managed
to catch up. I was there in his town and it didn’t work.
I’d missed him again. Not the first time.
We were so close at that moment yet again something
got in the way. A week later on FB he’s pronounced dead.
Nothing seems real—no coroner’s report, no
doctor’s certificate—no reasons.
Only the FB fallout.
Today I drove through streets of dead mists; through a city
shedding its colour. It’s June, the sun barely acknowledges us.
But this morning after I read the outpouring of grief
online I noticed a cobweb that captured the early splinters
of light, soon to fade, and I kept driving away from the bland
grey skies, until I reached the city limits.
There I glanced in the rearview mirror
as a clap of thunder
made all the trees
shudder.
A Suicide
I heard, much later, that a friend of a friend
of some 30-odd years, got out of bed
early on that morning, the birds not yet awake
locked all the windows, checked the gas knobs
were turned off on all the appliances,
went back into his room. By then the birds
started to realise what was happening.
They get a feeling for such things, birds.
He dressed before his mirror in a fine cotton
shirt. Buttoned it up to the neck then unravelled
a silk tie—the only one he owned all his life—
the light beginning to come through the curtains.
The shoes he’d polished the evening before.
He’d planned it that way, to save time. A pair
of leather Clarks. He wasn’t extravagant.
He left his house, after locking the back door
behind him, putting the key under the geranium pot
knowing someone would find it eventually.
He would have taken the path leading to the
garage which he’d cleaned out, ready.
He went into the garage without locking the door
behind, that would be senseless and waste everyone’s
time. I’m not sure what he did after that.
But the lights were not turned on in the garage
and when they found him he’d made sure
that the noose would stop rotating when his body
faced the rear window because when they entered
the first thing he didn’t want them to see
was his tie, being ashamed that he only owned
one tie his entire life.
He would rather they see the clean pressed back
of the cotton shirt and his brilliantly polished Clarks
and the last light coming through the rear window.
© Lincoln Jaques
Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, including Landfall, takahē, Live Encounters, Tough, Noir Nation, Burrow, Book of Matches, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Blackmail Press, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards, and was the Runner-Up in the 2022 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. He was guest editor for the 2023 and 2024 Live Encounters Aotearoa Poets & Writers editions.