For NO’R



Freeze, salt, shiver then slap: it’s a lethal dose margarita

that shoots us back, without fair warning, to overheated

Southern Crossed boyhoods, continuous cricket, hot chips.
Footnoting Picnic at Hanging Rock, me humming

US Forces, we walk about the old stockyards, in Texas

but not here (you Ballarat, me Cronulla) before we list 
at Remington’s The Luckless Hunter, recognize

that pale-faced Apache as yet another last aborigine,

one sentenced to brave it alone through ancestral lands, 
every lone star a tombstone, every sound a lost noun,

every remorseful painting an additional subtraction.

This is for the tourists. This is not for the tourists at all.
We stall before a vainglorious statue of a cowboy

wrangling a writhing bull, man triumphs over bronze.

Then heel-and-toe it over western heroes, star-pressed 
into the trail, set to favourably brand history, or its opposite

as a family films two dudes on horses, neon winks: Sirloin!

and Caravaggios fill museums, contrasting light and crude.