We are Aries cusp of Pisces
stubborn determination and a watery fragility.
We are strength and uncompromising promise,
our emotions need stroking every third day.
We have pride, horns of the ram;
fish circular in tidal spirals
because we’re romantic about perfection.
And isn’t it all just like a woman?
The yin and the yang with shampooed waves?
The muscle tees with amethyst beads?
The day you were born
my flesh and skin and blood and bones
had just turned thirty-one.
A warm sea breeze filled my breath
from three kilometres away.
My son was content with the magpie’s warble
and I ate grapes from a purple bowl.
Something sweet was in the air:
your first scream felt halfway round the world.
Sweet Caroline, our bond is more than this
more than you are my brother’s youngest daughter
more than we share a birthday.
Our bond is my hands reaching out to yours
while staring at the stars.
Seismic whiffs of that something sweet.
Bare feet
When my son said ting
demanding I sing as I held him
like the newborn of seventeen months before
there was no hesitation or clearing of throat
and the words came instinctively
As I went walking
that ribbon of highway –
Woody Guthrie I call to you
from a land where toilet water
really does swirl down
in the opposite direction
and where once I was witness
to the murder of a brown snake.
I call to you from the ancient place
so old its history was never recorded
and the present sometimes seems delayed
the future assured of drought.
The daytime sky is the same we share
though the sun seems much closer here
(you’d have burned on your journey without 30+)
but the night sky is poles apart;
if Orion is upside down
then of course I am lost
cannot be blamed
(though his arrow points south
and flies the earth’s circumference
and eventually all roads lead to…)
I saw above me
that endless skyway,
I saw below me
that golden valley
This land was not made for you or me
but my child in his habitat
will walk these roads, hardened bare feet
enduring three cornered jacks and shards of glass
and clean remains of white-washed bones
pointing out landmarks along the way
making landmarks of his own
leaving me
ten steps behind
always looking back for what
I have never been sure.
Woody, I am singing, a longing in my arms
with a weight much greater than these kilos
I translate into twenty-four pounds
my voice has become smoother
as I float down a river in my mind
(the Rappahannock, where else would I be?)
and forget about the brittle grass
that pokes at my bare feet
because I do,
walk this land
with bare feet.
Spaces
I suggest something different from longing
entirely separate from belonging.
I propose spaces.
Not holes or gaps
implying absence or worse
emptiness
but spaces as places
between what we know.
The big sky
my mother’s face
pizza sauce served thickly.
‘Awesome’ ‘cookie’ ‘garbage can’
my brother’s crooked eye.
SUVs and mountain streams
a bluebird’s song a hummingbird’s wing
tall glasses of 2% milk
my father’s towering body.
Vineyards
combustion heaters
‘partner’ not ‘husband’
and stopping to remember
he has an accent.
Port dolphins
gumtree bark
the footy the ocean
a roasted chook.
Imagined Phone Calls
One day I’m going to scrub-clean the cream blinds
hanging in our kitchen window. Sun reflects oil and dirt,
thick years of stove-top steam and drifts of sliced meat.
All I can think of is my mother’s house:
how it smelled like an orchard, a pine forest, suntan lotion
depending on where you stood, how anything wooden
was deeply polished and anything tiled
sponge wiped down. What I want to know is this:
when did she – loving swing shift working mom
husband scarcely ever there – find the time?
It is enough for me to wash the dishes
and the clothes, sweep the floor, count the coins,
reflect on cacophonies in our apricot tree.
It is morning when the sun is best:
our house is filled with a radiance
I have no part in maintaining
yet I am staring at the blinds
embarrassed, harassed –
if I called her now for an afternoon tea
and she accepted, bringing doughnuts…
and during the dish-stack / counter-clean
I pointed to the kitchen blinds
(or the long table in the hall, the bedroom
mirrors, the ubiquitous inside of the silverware drawer
which catches sneaky breadcrumbs)
I wouldn’t even have to ask.
Problem number twenty-three with trans-national lives.
Obscure, the Beloved
Each family has its own memories
its own celebrations
and secrets.
1.
A memory of on the road,
off the car-heavy truck-mucked interstates of the USA
driving ever reaching tar paths through fields and fields
and fields of wheat.
I wore headphones, reading Orwell
(it was that time of awareness in my development)
and I couldn’t help but wonder about the power of one word
over another, how I differentiated between background lyrics
and foreground story but then I remember singing
The Cure as well
so who’s to say what background was?
My father forever behind the wheel;
the horizon, so remote.
2.
We celebrate the night before the night before Christmas.
Often there is wine
but that is nothing new
and always a couch, salad bowls of popcorn,
Jimmy Stewart because we are American
(he reminds us of our fathers).
Every year on the night before
the night before Christmas
we commemorate togetherness,
recite certain lines from It’s a Wonderful Life
and I am enchanted again and again,
the simplicity of a complex life:
money, demons, family
and my father relating
smiling shrewdly
knowing this to be true.
3.
I can feel his longing in our DNA
but I am distanced by land
and have always been by time
so of course his secrets are his to hide.
Still, I wonder
when a man is alone and with himself
does he drift beyond the reasonable?
Dream of many and varied small adventures?
Are there rocks to hop, logs to jump
bears and snakes to overcome?
I’m sure, with him, there must be airplanes.
Is my mother even there?
So easy to imagine other ways
of being a man.
So easy to desire the substance of shadow.
Welcoming You
I avoid travel in cities
blaming the ages
of our children
throw out the obvious too
and busy and big insisting
it couldn’t be a holiday
if it had to be work.
I avoid interstates
though they’d save us time
and gallons of gas
because I cannot bear counting the lanes
ten in a row a solid grass median strip
dividing east and west.
Not even playing the license plate game
and winning with 38 spotted states
would make me think it was worth it.
You want to return to Australia
with Levi jeans and Nike runners
but I bypass shopping malls
their three-level glory.
I claim imported prices
aren’t much higher
when you work out the exchange
and consider how much you earn
and truly, we wouldn’t have room
in our suitcases.
There is a Navajo who sells his art
from a cork box the size of our shed
and if we bought his wooden
and coiled and beaded pipe
we’d feed his family for a day.
That should go in our suitcase.
And have you ever seen chipped
white weatherboard churches
on the side of a two-lane highway?
Where dandelions multiply
tall and yellow and wild?
The sound of gospel bleeds
through open windows.
And did you know you can drink water
fresh from a mountain stream
if you catch it in the cup of your hands
just where it cascades off a rock
as if it were a waterfall?
Come.
There is so much to see.
Notes
Spelling in this book fluctuates, as do I, between American and Australian English.
‘Why Australia?’
A hills hoist is a web-shaped clothesline found in most Australian backyards. The beauty of the hills hoist is that when the wind blows, it spins.
‘In Between’
92 degrees Fahrenheit is 33 Celsius, and in the humidity of a Southeastern US summer, and before the day has even come close to reaching its peak, it is daunting.
‘Lemonade’
In America lemonade is pure water, sugar and the juice of fresh lemons. In the summertime, it’s not uncommon to buy a cold cup of lemonade from children who have set up stands. In Australia it is carbonated and sold in cans or bottles.
‘Overnight Low of 34, but the breeze…’
The swag is a roll-out mattress, covered in canvas, used when sleeping under the stars. (‘Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong…’)
‘Spices’
“Pumpkin” in Australia usually refers to the many and varied American squash.
‘Leaving the Adelaide Hills’
An op shop is literally an Australian “opportunity shop”; otherwise known as the American equivalent “thrift store”.
Toohey’s is a beer brewed in New South Wales, so one you’d be likely to find on tap in Sydney. Cooper’s Pale Ale is a signature South Australian beer, so one you’d be likely to find on tap in Adelaide.
‘Split’
Beale Street is a downtown Memphis, Tennessee street spilling off the Mississippi River, famous for its history in the blues.
Cinqo de Mayo – the 5th of May – is a significant date to a small number of Mexicans, particularly those living in Puebla. It officially commemorates the Mexican army’s victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Americans have appropriated the day to celebrate Mexican culture. It’s a holiday much like St Patrick’s Day – but with margaritas or Coronas, and chips and salsa. The folded over tortilla bread filled with cheese and such is pronounced ‘kay-suh-dee-ya’, not ‘kay-suh-dee-la’. Quesadillas are widely enjoyed in America, especially on Cinco de Mayo.
Blackspeak is Ebonics, or African American vernacular.
The term “hard yakka” means “hard work”. With capital letters it becomes a brand name for Australian work clothes.
‘Sophia Street Ghost Stories’
The Mason-Dixon Line is the slave-day cultural boundary of the American North and South.
‘Spaces’
SUVs stands for Sports Utility Vehicles.
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Thirsting for Lemonade Page 4