Right then, dad, I have at last

set foot in Hobart,

strolled Salamanca Place.

You'd have

a proper cob on, seeing just

how swish it has become, so

Left Bank, arty-farty shops

and small cafés, young cappuccino'd

long-haireds planning how

to rescue rain forests. No

Ma Dwyer and her Blue House.

The Museum at Battery Point

displayed a photograph of a ship

you sailed, a tin-pot of a tub,

black-smoke funnel, straight-up prow.

At The Bavarian Tavern I read poems

about you. In a corner sat a me

some ten years on … beard, glasses

and the nose … except his name was Otto,

accent thick with flavours of a kind

— but who can tell? — impossible to us.

It was a moment, almost what

I'd come for, which was to meet

and greet the you-in-me, bosun,

in Salamanca Place.