Then,
My father,
Six foot two,
Shoulders back
And proud.
With blazing hair
Of orange gold
And hands
Like obliterators.


He takes me
In those quiet hours
Not far, too far
From sleep,
Crosses me
Across his chest,
And sings me
Through the morning
Drive, with the streets
So dark
Blue
And empty.

And at the tracks
The station lightly humming,
He tells me tales
Of the men
Who drive
Those dirty trains,
Across this dry
Flat country.

As the steam
Comes rushing up
Swallowed by
A starlit sky,
And the rails do their shrieking,
He lifts me up
Like Holy Cargo
Up Up
Into the cabin.
I wait for him
Then, there,
To come lurching up
Behind me.

He does not come.
Work ahead. The day has just begun.

These men
Of lore
At their gears,
Turn to
Further tales.
This time
Of ten foot horses,
Bellies big with
Human corpses,
Of towns where
Water runs like blood,
And the ladies
Yes!
They’ll take
To bed
When this
Ironclad
Centipede
Settles
In the west.

I am only seven then
But so much younger
With my mother
In my eyes;
Those eyes
We share
To this day,
Blue
Soft
And yet
Resilient.

They do not know
That what they say
Means nothing
To someone
So small.

In the cabin,
I sit back
As the first
Lines
Of sunlight
Hit
The railway
Lines
And the dull
Shimmer
Of the
Rails
Become
Forces
Almost,
Immutable.

These men
They carry
On
Through tired
Work,
Carry on
And on
With their sad
Little tales
Of the uselessness
Of women
Of the futility
Of youth
Of the idiocy
Of dreams
Of the madness
Of age.


They do not know
That what they say
Means everything
To someone
So small.

And in the
Perspex horizon
With the powerlines
Like visages
Of founding fathers
I watch my father
With his arms
Of light
Dancing
Subtly
Jerkedly
Angrily.

The lines
Beneath his feet,
The steaming shriek;
This body moving forward.

And, complete,
As he takes me from the cabin,
My feet dancing through the sky,
My body then, pulled close to him
Crossing his chest
Like a young fault-line,
He says in the mockery
Of only a true man
In the good
Old days
Women were
Like packhorses,
used to shovel the shit.

Ah, the good old days. They sigh. When men were really men.

Their skin
Their skin
Like glass with sweat
I could not say a word;
My mouth
Like a fine line
Across my face.

Some years
Later
When girls
Have become
So real
To me,
Their shapes
Glorious
Stitch lines
In the fabric
Of all else
He
Tells me,
(his head growing bald now),
At the kitchen table
Many times
Like it is the first time
And the last time,
Every, single, time,
That
Women are like horses
Always getting in
The way.

Silence.

His jokes,
Even then
(a boy as big as a man),
Are bones of meat
Stinking, ragged
Remnant
With the flies
Circling
Diving
Falling
Rising up,
The dull
Immutable
In their million
Beaded eyes.




It is when
I’m twenty eight
And these women
Will no longer
Have me.
And the lines, I use, like trench-lines,
Are the lines
That my father
Left me.

And as
I talk
Of broken hearts
Of the bitterness
Of being
Alone
But wanting
Nothing less
In the early
Hours after
Everything
Else

He says,
Son,
Women are like
Riding horses;
If you fall off one
Get on another
And soon
I’ll guarantee ya
you’ll forget about the first.


And I sit
There thinking,
All twenty-eight
Of barren nothing,
In this town
Where I always end up,
What is with
This old man
And the bloody horses?


So I
Ask my mum,
Secret keeper,
What’s with
His equine obsession?

But my mother,
Her mouth
Moving
Like strings
Across her face,
She doesn’t know,
Besides to say
He used to waste
His pennies
On the ponies
Always begging
For the big
Buck bux
And never
Winning nothin’.

Everyday,
My mother says,
He was there,
In his early twenties,
Flapping his tickets
About
Subtly
Jerkily
Angrily
Like a sullen pelican
Wringing out its wings.

And so now,
My father,
Six foot two,
Stooped,
One hundred and
Twenty kilos,
Drooped,
That golden hair
Gone white and grey,
That golden hair,
Gone white and grey,
And thin
So thin

A deforestation
Revealing
The lines
Across his scalp.

Those lines
There, almost immutable,
Dulled somewhat
By the quiet question
Of age,
Like fault lines
Like trench lines
Like track lines
Like stitch lines
Like power lines
Like blood lines
Like,
Almost,
A life-line
Between us.


For
Father,
In denial,
Voiceless now,
The glue factory
Is coming.