Grapes

What would it change to know? Not the future
but its mouthfeel. Not the scripture but its zealots,
hospital bacteria flipping birds in the carotid.

My mother’s father was curtailed
by bypass, then infection that spiked outward
from his heart. After we returned him to the soil

I watched his wife curl inward like an index finger,
months in the slipstream, a body a support frame,
grapes on the trellis bled of future wine. 

Years and I push her wheelchair up Taronga slopes,
years and my father’s tiger stance is ambling
like an unsexed tom. His crane teeters

amidst half-loaded skyscrapers. They cordon off
sick animals from public view. Some unhouse their elderly
to shunt them into homes. By piety or fiat

the labour will be paid: middle sons sponge mothers
who won’t allow their brothers, eldest daughters
purge accidents with bleach near the end.

No one is exempt. I don’t need a crystal ball
to remember looming young above my old people
as death rattled from their throats. I see my father now.

What would it change to know? In genetic therapy
there isn’t much I don’t already. But I want it. All.
They age me by a month before they draw my blood.

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Troy Wong is an award-winning Australian poet living and creating on Gadigal land. His poems have appeared in Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Griffith Review, The Guardian, Island, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Three Durians, is out now from Cordite Books.