Remote
A man is prodding something on a grill
using a long pair of tongs.
A boy is holding a blue book
whose cover has the words
Heroes of Olympus in yellow.
There’s a woman too and she is holding a glass.
‘I like the idea of a cool red’
she says to no one in particular.
Perhaps she doesn’t even say it.
A low brick wall runs around the property.
They have paid a substantial amount
to feel a certain kind of exclusivity and it’s true
the wall goes some way to doing that.
You know where you are
and also – just there over the wall – where you are not.
It’s also been incredibly hot.
This too is something they have paid for
and the pool with its constant low functioning hum.
Everything is quiet now it’s evening –
even the boy who is deep in the making
it more complicated and clarification that is literature.
But I don’t want to make too much of that here.
I want to watch the woman sip her drink
and not think. I want to be here
where there’s a pair of large electric gates
that open very slowly and very slowly close
so that each of their comings and goings
has become something of a ritual
as if the move from here to there
were full of significance
and laborious to achieve.
Sometimes the boy likes to play with the remote
– pause the gates at a particular point
so that they’re neither open nor closed
which his parents don’t like.
His father gets angry: ‘what are you doing?’
and there’s a moment of bright tension
as the boy looks up at the man
because it’s perfectly clear to him what he’s doing
with the gates suspended there
in time and the space
between them probably just enough for him
– and he’d love this, their little fleet-footed one –
to slip through and run down the lane
holding the remote up high, turning to laugh at them
stranded there behind the gates.