THE EGYPTIAN ROOM - THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM  higher up then it all seemed      somewhere above the narrow  dark stairway to the small room our childhood  somehow depended on      standing on our toes  our noses barely at the glass      we understood  even then      and felt the edges of something  difficult      that afterwards troubling our dreams we would  not put words to for a long time      coming  in from the winter's city streets dripping with cold  with mother      to this private place      where so many years hung  on the faces of the dead      and in the deep glass cases  of green painted wood      things folded away for so long  still mattered      it was the closest  we had ever come to death  knowing little then of even pain      standing afterwards  somewhere within the warm deep folds of her dress  losing later at lunch in Woolworths amidst the noise and fuss  things I think I went back to show them yesterday  on the train      through a wet and winter city  clattering up the noisy stone stairway  to the same room      after so many years to see  that nothing had changed      only what I  couldn't hold back      standing where she once stood  for us      beside King Khafra's cast      seeing with different eyes  in this small dark old room      crowded  with a class of kids no less absorbed with that same strange  spell and sorrow      clutching always at the heart of things  here      where it will always be a kind of summer      along  the banks of a green Nile and in the Valley of the Kings 43

	MAKING SINKERS my father would always let me spill the sputtering lead from the small primus burner into his thumb prints in the sharp wet sand
	spoon sinkers
	for the dragging surf off Christmas beaches
	and I had thought
	that none came back that I had lost them all from the long lines between his own forbearance and the restive sea
	snagged
	on rocks or the deep dark floating weed beneath the glaucous waves
	one got through
	I turned it up years after the firmness of his hand upon my own uncertain twitching line was gone
	a small dulled pendant
	it stood for something more now the alchemy of all that I once had from him poured without my knowing then and found with some surprise when I first needed something to hold me cast off from an altogether different beach without warning into a strange and difficult sea
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