The Land

Principled bushland,

tough and stubborn,

despite man’s calling card,

and the screaming headlines of fire –

a role model 

of truly landed gentry,

through howling wind 

and frightening bulldozers,

flood, drought,

and disease –

despite the shock of cities,

the overlapping sheep,

overweight, seed-born banana trees, 

apoplectic factories,

the gum trees do so much better 

than human teeth –

for every church wedding,

there’s the screech of a sulphur-crested cockatoo,

a lizard’s silhouette;

for every mine and sweating furnace,

trails of ants crisscrossing the cement;

for all this good society,

an evolution, exiled by distance;

for all the stately fakeries,

mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes;

for all the jewels around a woman’s throat,

so many more underground –

beliefs

that refuse to cohere into facts,

and depths so many more times

than these slag heaps ever could rise,

a hopping toad and crawling snake,

and wings above the parking lots.

The Photo

The photo is of

Aunt Angela,

age nineteen,

ten years of schooling,

now working the farm,

her dirt face smiling

for the camera.

The pose is a brief respite

from her hard life:

up before dawn,

milking cows,

collecting eggs,

then all day in the fields,

sowing or harvesting,

and, when needed,

strangling a chicken

with one twist 

of her rough-hewn hands.

This was before

she married a soldier,

moved to an army town,

worked part time 

manning checkout

in a small grocery store,

and had children,

five in all,

who all married

and moved away,

became a widow at 40,

and, for her 50th birthday

celebrated by moving

into a small flat

in the city,

working at a repat hospital,

scrubbing floors.

And it’s long before

she grew too old

for anything but

a nursing home,

shrunken and bent,

aching all over,

but still full of memory,

and with enough 

of a smile left

to welcome the occasional relative,

near or distant,

and regale them with 

tales of her early life,

right up to and including

the time this picture was taken,

but going no further,

as if nothing happened 

to her or to anyone,

between that dirt face 

smiling for the camera

and her dying 

and leaving

the photograph with me.

That Ritual Of My Young Adulthood

I’ve done the long bus ride.

That’s the long long long bus ride.

LA to Austin, Texas.

Couped up in a tilt-less seat

too close to the closet-sized

bathroom for comfort.

We stopped at Barstow, that I remember.

I wondered what bad thing I did in my life

to warrant a layover in Barstow.

But there was the woman 

driving a red sports car in Phoenix,

who pulled up beside the bus,

blonde she was and all summery,

and she looked up at me and smiled.

But she was the exception.

Beside, I was inside.

And that’s where the talkers were.

And the mothers

with screaming babies.

And the boys punching 

each other in the arm.

And the cowboy 

three seats down

with his radio tuned 

to a country station

and playing it loud.

And the obese guy who

decided that, out of all the empty seats,

the one beside me

has his name graffitied all over it.

And, worst of all,

the fitful sleep.

And the dreams.

There was one where

I was sitting up 

at some drug store counter.

Sure, the strawberry shake 

went down good.

But it was the elbow room

that stayed with me.