Indian Summer

It’s the kind of day the family calls a Geronimo Day,
since the fourth child was born in an Indian Summer just like this.
We sprawled on bone-white decking in the unexpected warmth
that morning, under a vacant-blue sky, and the sun turned the paddocks
into a hanging lake of steaming tussocks, so that it could have been a raft
that we were on, lost amongst towheads of bulrush and cottonwood.

But seasons play tricks with their painted Apache faces,
and today I’m alone, in the dark, with a violin fiddle-faddling
a bow of horsehair oh so sadly! for company.
I’m watching a tall stiff-backed man in blue overalls, and a biggish
lolloping black dog, playing fetch on the opposite slope of the gully,
and they look like square-made figures on a tapestry that have come to life,
naively placed by the weaver above a frost-fed creek.
In winter, that water is bluish, and so are the mute smoke signals
that lounge in an unravelling spiral amongst the peppermint gums,
and an absent neighbour’s mildewed tipi.

Sometimes I pace and bend in the stillness;
in the slanted rays of this place, my toes curl;
in this stifling four-walled aloneness I count five windows
over and over, as if giving birth once again,
but in hollering solitude.

I drink too many cups of mate tea, and hunker in front of the wattle fire,
chaffing my hands; and riffle through the pages of the telephone book:
as if it is some foreign testament to not being here forever,
in this wide continent of pain; craving for a voice,
for the relief of a word, a sip of cold between the pangs.
But no-one seems to be at home on lonely days.

Then, when I wrap myself in the square of sunlight that comes
undaunted through a crooked window,
and let the dark clawed bear-thing take me over,
I know I will manage this, one more time:
giving birth to myself from between my twin-sister-selves.

A brave-hearted bird comes in through the open kitchen window,
and flits and shits in fright amongst the red saucepans hanging over my head.
I almost smile into the crook of my winter-white arm.
And wonder why it is so hard for a wild bird to work out that it can leave
by the same way it came in:
by following that small rush matting of light.