Unfolding Sydney

We are drinking the last of the whisky.
They had taken us to their old neighbourhood
in Balmain, to a crowded raucous
thai restaurant where you can bring your own
wine and you must yell to be heard and
sometimes it is nice to yell. We unwrap
our shoulders from our jackets. We order a snapper
and I open it with my swiss army knife. We
are on the verandah that is sheathed in thick
see-through plastic and we are yelling
at each other in the most intimate way.
These are good people and this is
something that escapes out of the
edges of things, it might have leaked out
of the snapper's white meat, this
escaped truth. Later, hiring a taxi,
seven people fall out of a pub door on
the side of the street, it was a very
London way of falling and maybe they
were British. We were on the edge
of our unfolded map of Sydney.