you have this memory, aged 7 perhaps,
in the sleepout and tucked in, your brother
can taste freo in the plastic, as she burns
and spectacular gild sunsets, sand in toes
a breath away across the lino,
and you have the scene before, counting
can’t ever trip on concrete-pitted knee-high walls
painted mission brown, now mission purple
cowboys in the bricks, Dad on the piano
with the hymns for the week, and you have
his skin brown face, ripping scowl bracing
against the may gust, fat drops of nitrogen rain
the lighting, kitchen fluoro milky through the
crinkled glass window atop the sliding door,
again unable to really tell the special tales
glass slicing clean through baby skin, like steaks
but most of all you have the moment –
two notes, minor third, descending,
i can’t remember this, but poems of our guts
spat out out in chiddy-chiddy breath, koolbardies mewl
the mopoke’s call, random perhaps, or on the
minute? matters little, the wooden two notes
once we strolled hand in hand to the deli
had 12 cents, found under car seat, tiny fist grasps
of mopoke, through the slivers of louvres,
clear as moon, as yesterday
and none of them said it, no one could speak
that, her petals in cottlesloe mud,
our closest sweat unspoke
published in Unusual Work September 2014