Where new writing finds its voice
Poem

Portrait of Our Death

Kate Kilalea

There were four of us, following a dirt road which began
in the foothills and went right on up into the mountains
where a little cottage was waiting for us.
We were driving slowly, packed in a little blue hatchback,

it was getting late and the rain which had started earlier had begun
to pelt down. And then, coming round a sharp corner,
we lost our grip, the wheels skidded, wrestling with the thick white rain,
the mud, the car was headed for the edge of the cliff.  

The driver, my friend, said ‘whoa’ like one says to a horse,
and lifted his hands from the wheel. And I remember
as the car began to spin the mountains turned green,
and as it edged slowly towards the end of the road, 

we leaned inward, as you do in films, looking through the windows,
mesmerised, as though in a cinema, as the valley opened up
like a passionate, open-mouth kiss. We should just have tumbled in,
instead we were left hanging, un-fallen, not yet dead, the radio still
playing.

The driver, my friend, looked green. Our Death was not, as we’d imagined,
a little blue car climbing down a steep gorge without a ladder,
falling dangerously like a dress strap or a bad hand of cards thrown down
in disgust. We stopped too soon, we were still as rocks, as upturned beetles,

as cows chewing very slowly at the roadside.
The driver, my friend, sat thinking, smoking a cigarette.
The rain looked at us with big cow eyes. So ...
Not dying is smoking a cigarette and your shoes caked in mud

from tramping around in the rain (and suddenly being very very hungry). 
And the mountains are slow old men playing cards,
and the heavy grey clouds are just a washerwoman sprinkling cotton
before ironing it flat. Yes, as it happens our Death

was pure mathematics: the steep angle of the cliff
that didn’t meet the speed of the car. Death was a thing measured
in increments, making this about 66% death and 33% not-death
(a bit deathy), probably, we decided, the mosquitoes in this heat

would suck us dry before our Death got us. We might have
made too much of it – it was just a slip of the wheels,
a bag dislodged with a jolt from the back seat. Our Death was
spending the rest of the weekend talking … But really,

our Death was just a minor character, somebody who appeared
about ten miles after a town called River-Without-End
and then disappeared again, it was the tyre tracks we’d left
a childish signature scrawled along the road.

Our Death was energetic, it was exciting
it was what didn’t happen when we went hiking
and found a waterfall and threw ourselves off, gleeful,
into the deep black cold pools lying underneath.