Waiting places gape melted to the hip of summer; sigh let a breathless moment thicken the appletree shade resume a diesel hum. We don our boots in the young Country (what else is there to do?) things are soft; drip green and taste sweet and that rabid tongue of flame if for just a moment, stills lets older knowledge bead on bows lets it fall, but never far.
We’re waiting, so I tell her about kitchen tile patchwork gold, the clumsy veins snaggletooth tabby heralding midday in a stiff tangle of limbs peeling tint in the ute dawn-dappling thighs salt-starred eyelashes dinner on the stove.
She considers: blade sails through sweet flesh docks at thumb blood of lamb wets wolf’s throat (whets wolf’s appetite) this sugar-spun yarn laces my lips and trailing tongue as we two eat our fill.
Drunken sins are sober thirsts and this Eden-ambrosia has fermented in our marrow from a sinner a thousand mothers deep in history. time takes the flower, leaves the fruit summer heat coagulates, nectar woven; so swells this pure thing, and so it ebbs it’s cold and scaled and hungry; this wide-eyed dust, this lonely kid.
We’re falling, so she tells me about Gallipoli poppies red, haemorrhaged to white dingo jaws frothing with silk-pelted dusk sweet, cool penance in the dead-dirt gully womb’s bloody baptism soil churned, overturned.
This our supine vigil: soft bits to the stars, as the cold bastards intended. all fish-gutted pudge and pallor all trickling flesh and skin-slop hold me like you know how; gently, gently between your teeth and tell me what I’ve long known; fever, fever never sleeps.
There was a moment, I saw something bare and warm and weeping and I knew you all at once but I’ve come to understand subsistence; kiss at bus stops eat fruit in wartime coax stale blood to the boil wait till summer comes again.
