Did you feel the cool change arrive?

I had the windows open all day

ceiling fan thrashing against its downrod

inside and out curdled with heat.

Then I caught its pepper scent 

a sort of wind-thrown revellery

like summer weighed nothing   

how it flung the day along our asphalt street.

I had to get up— 

pressed my nose to the flyscreen

those first drops of rain sizzled

like a line of poetry, you know

when you’re struck dumb by revelation

and it makes you put the book down…

 

 

 

She heard the gunshot ring out

and it echoed off the sky’s iron roof

of dust and rippled heat. It lingered,

the sound, and how her mother hesitated

pegging washing, gripping that flimsy wire

—a blue flannel shirt, too late, washed clean 

of his scent, the lanolin and dung and sweat,

and hung in dusk to hide from that murderous sun.

 

She felt the poddy calf’s wet, rough tongue

searching for the teat that had slipped from its keen lips 

as she stood up to the sound of that gunshot ringing out. 

For the rest of her life, she held that pause,

her mother’s stare and the sour smell of warm milk. 

 

Putting a gun to the eyes of sheep he has kept alive,

and listening to the agent tell him, now, stock prices 

have plunged. From an empty rooftop: someone 

should be yelling. The farmer listens, 

his stock too emaciated to travel 

and he counts the 400 bullets and the extra one. 

Gone are the days. Gone are the wedding rings 

to the pawnbroker. Gone is everyone knowing everyone.

 

While the poddy licked milk from the dirt

her father’s motorbike bumped across the saltbush horizon

from where he had shot a snake, over by the dam, 

and he kept riding past their fears to check the last bore.

Her mother would not breach the wounded air

and kept silence hanging until silence

remained. She was left with the calf, orphaned 

by her understanding of what had not happened.