to the hum of a subaru 4×4

they invent an escape
the uncles have it all planned

criss-crossing old lines

where that big serpent story

slithers west
a comic opera of black men

a wallaby and a brolga

and a boy emu dulled

with a too-long-in-the-colony look

follow highway lined scar

trees deep into sky country 
from the back seat

boy takes in the mono-crop patchwork

picture-view flickering fields

weeping paterson’s curse

black dirt to red dirt

little dust devils curl their grins

in the tailwind
unc’ brolga notes how mulga

gently lifts from the horizon

a trick of that warm seasonal air

and begins a belly-song

navigating toward his mother’s totem

sparrow-hawks circling

in silent accompaniment

boy emu commits the rocky contours

of melody to memory
they find a place to camp

cut wood for the inner circle

for carving boy’s first war-boondi
in his crypto-tongue

unc’ wallaby

tells a tenuous fable
of those petrified great heroes

and villains painted ignobly

into landscape

as archetype

of reconciled australia

as blue

in a sea-foam girt

as reconciled

for show

for what

all to crack open

the few biomes left looking

for a composer-in-residence
a whittled boy

young and free

strung with  another’s culture

begins to see the ground

beneath him

covered with axe heads

sees the scabs of a wattle riot

overflowing ruins

hears the hidden accents

inscribed in homelands he always knew
evening edges them fireside

quiet boy emu

uncle wallaby and brolga

lick into shape

clubs made from gidj’

sounds of metal on wood

fill the nocturnal ethers
uncles leave

their dreamcraft unfinished

for the boy

tell him the rest of the story-pattern

can be found in the stars

and tomorrow…