Thirsting for Lemonade

by Heather Taylor Johnson

  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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