You’re walking Lovers Lane, paperbarks

warp and woof overhead. The poodle

is at your heal, a cloud of impossible white.

Seeding clouds in the outback,

gramps and gran were gluttons for punishment.

The poodle’s coat is dreadlocked with long-grass,

between her hind legs blood fresh and wielding.

The bush is in heat, the smell of broken leaves

burning your sneakers. You didn’t want to return a murderer.
She’ll need a mate, gran said. So she’d sit on a stool.

Sit there for hours, wait for a royal mounting.

And you remember you’ve seen the red

between your mother’s legs, dark rivulets

mapping her inner thighs, her blonde pudenda so unlike

your brown, hairless skin when you washed with her

in the shower. The same heat. The same red.

The white cloud would be for the silver cloud.

The white cloud would yowl, it made you curious, this pain.

Gran became goddess of conceptions,

patience and silence, orchestrating litters

from here to eternity. The border collie would lurk

on the sideline, waiting for gramps to call her up to the ute

so they could round up the sheep

he’d shave and take to Goulburn, ending in scarves

noosing necks from here to London.

He hollers at you, you and his dog to hop in the back of the ute.
Speeding past and ducking into the yaw of lightning rod

eucalypt down to Dead Sheep Gulley, the back-burned underbrush

bares skulls of sheep that lost their way,

the collie expectant, its face stretched

as far forward as the fast ute. You’re a flying banshee,

this is what it is to be a banshee —

Flying on the back of the red ute.

Gramps knocks on the rear window,

so you pretend to oblige momentarily

holding on, your hair tied back by the wind. Banshee.
The dam’s drying up, the yabbies are still biting,

breathing holes punctuate life’s insistence

at the cracked edge. This country is carved by hoof

and bone, cliffs of dust… The whole erosion.

You got drunk at the wake, crawled

into the scrub beside the pub where you slept

most soundly. You disappeared on Hal’s Hill,

sitting there wet-faced searching the cold light

that disturbed you with its infinite.

This is where the demented flock roam,

this desert country in your deserted head.

This parched youth. This outgrown youth

that tracts then inside now, there inside here.

You burn in a plot of glowing silence,

your mother calls for you, you cannot tell her

when she embraces you she is embracing a stranger.