i


There’s a complex certainty in coming home.

It keeps on, something like faith – shakes the red dirt

shoulders of the Maranoa and prickles up a spine
of Ooline trees to the west. I have not travelled nine

hours here bearing sorry words, because this poem

has long been carved into the palms of my hands.
This is not the place for absolution. Not here, where

clay plains repeat with the smell of ashes and burning.

This is a wasteland for sepia-drenched stiffs, and crows
tossing gunfire emptiness with bullet-point eyes. I’d

rather drive through this molasses-thick heat, away from

ancestral fossils. Out here, Mandandanji feet know the earth
and I am only a stranger – a tightly clenched prodigal

alone with the pull of regret behind my rib cage.

Out of the car, I fall hard into my own body.


ii


There’s a fanfare building in the mess of my chest,

at first – the dull insignificance of white noise, a bedrock

for more obvious sounds. Ghost movements about the old
homestead’s bones as daylight’s axe splits the dawn.

A tin mug, filled rough from the bore – a timpani

to ring out a father’s cut-throat kind of loving. Cattlemen 
have such little cause for conversation and I never knew

how this land could colour your blood, ink your

shadow. How it could spark like live wires across the
fence post props of this old town; mouth dropped down

at one side – beaten to chalk dust by heat. Still, a strange

beauty glows in small town geography. And even here
by Oolandilla Creek (where nothing is particularly beautiful)

something bigger burns through me – leaves white light and

saltbush scars, my fingers moving along the same lines as yours.


iii


At the back of the cemetery, I sit by you, wearing cobblers’ pegs

and eating plums from the Amby store – wondering if your

constant absence was just your version of a blessing. But it’s easier
to understand all this out here, when the land continues

before you’ve even noticed it begin; the quiet flow of the

Maranoa River pushing on, emptying slowly into the Balonne.
At the artesian spa in town, a trio of boys hold a fourth

under water, til he thrashes like a hessian-bagged red-belly.

There’s not a soul in Cambridge Street after midday, as a
B-double truck rumbles over the bridge. From a clutch of

belah trees, a black-striped wallaby appears, turns to outback

coral then dust. I think of your headstone, weathered to ghost
text and about the blinding nature of recall and bloodlines;

about how the walls of this dam always seem to hold, even when

the avalanche comes – and there is nothing else left but bones.