In Memoriam Bruce Keller
A city is a citadel, a citadel is a soul [ancient], a soul
a theatre [rock].
Dreams invade and do what dreams do: the unexpected.
You once made school kids wait for Waiting for Godot
and now I wait for you
from an oval door cut through its crumpy, water-stained, old red velvet curtain.
What would appear: a little dog, or the master of “winged-rats”?
All the pigeons in Potts Point know that you’ve only joked in naming them so:
you loved them, substantially, like you do all residents of Potts Point, and the waters
and the watermarks.
One person etched into your childhood is your grandpa, you once said.
He had fished in his lone boat in the misty bay of Sydney while you sang with the avant-gardes.
Yes, water, more water, ever-more water
the dance of water on many rooftops.
After years of crappy weather
our landing in Hanoi was a welcome draught.
So we went (pilgrims, or beggars?)
The luggage is light. A respectable coat?
One would finally find it
at a secondhand or what the locals call “SIDA” shop.
You are too big for all coats.
Bruce! Bruce! They called your name
from many corners cut into cơm bụi (“hah! Rice & Dust”) street
as if annoucing a new theatre,
where props were lamps, echoes and fragments
of our meals half-eaten. Yes, they called,
as if you were one of the La Hán
who had skipped the permanent sit-in performance in a mountain pagoda
for a now promised new, more challenging act
acts that befit tigers and lions
& puppies and children (i.e. huge and small cuts!)
The street sweepers next to us were no strangers.
These latenight comers, post-history, re-enactors,
like leper-poets: the whole history of a city
is in their raised dust-calligraphy-strokes.
We watched and meditated on the clean streets
and jotted down: After all, it's in the hands.
*
That year, 1995, near Tran Hung Dao Street
when the city was offering its coffee like the last meal
you had already become one with the large trees,
a little fey rain, volumes of nocturnal mass,
the gig-lamps, dark water, ghosts, Molière’s and Chekov’s,
and the abandoned theatre (to this, we came a bit too late,
knocking at its door, only to realise the Apologies sign, the list of actors
and the writ-large “UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE”).