Mango Dingo -- The Build Up
Melon country. Crocodile rocks.
I decide to leave before the season's
over.
Let someone else wait at dawn in the back of the rattling truck,
the
truck without a bonnet, the truck without accessories—
doors,
windscreen, brakes; they stop it on an anthill. Let someone else
wait, and every five minutes is an hour
because there's twelve of us. Who's
missing?
Brian staggers out, same clothes as before.
Brian's puffy eyes,
liver, kidneys, skin cancer
upsetting the Noddy tattoo, a new eruption on
the big cartoon dick,
all of Brian climbing in and we're heading east
fast.
Already the sun's a giant. The melon paddock
breaks up into
parrots, dispersing like laughter.
Under the skies the men go off
harmlessly all day like ammunition,
don't feel the heat, get edgy even
talking of the shed.
Deisel, Dog, Shagger, Gummy and Flood.
Home is each
other for three weeks, six weeks, three months.
Up here they can wear the
prints off their fingers. Let someone else make poems or pop
psychology of their pain,
say: I've got a theory: after the funeral the boys
started collecting.
Paws, hawk wings, bones and skin,
things plucked,
pulled, hacked, sometimes dripping
strung up like sentences above the
battered coke machine.
They never spoke of the girl. Nineteen. An
accident.
Dog still collects roos like trophies on his
bullbar. Let someone else admire the little ceremony of the Drum, the
Capstan,
hands cupped, leaning in for the light,
the intimacy of it,
their hard bodies. Humidity rising. Let someone else complain,
bend and pick, bend and pick, go back to the quarters for lunch,
where
the kitchen, bloating like a drunk,
lays out its unwiped benches for more ash
burns, spills, fat splatters,
where blood from thawing meat runs down the
fridge door.
and the spider sits unnoticed on her egg sac
and the ants
track north. Suicide season. The build up.
Let someone else try
and pick the friendly dog from the savage dog
when both of them look the
same. Let someone else make notes:
Brian, pissed, sold his
swag for a carton.
Flood poured Domestos on the python in the
toilet. Let someone else dream they are packing an empty carton
the shape of themselves.
Let someone else wonder if Fuckhead can't
get a root off the women
so he's trying to shag the men will sit
in a poem
like art in a glass case. These exhibits... Let
someone else miss anthills and the long shadows of anthills
in the late
afternoon on the way to the crocodile river
where pandanus crowd to the edge
like people
and Gummy, not caring, swims.
Let someone else look up when an
egret passes,
hear Gummy lisp through his gap:
I'll be that in the next
life. Not for the view
but so's I can shit on the
cunts.
Laughter. Let someone else miss the sun going down and
the light
coming out of the ground, the green ant nests like paper
lanterns
and exhaustion at night when there's just enough of you left
to
note how the slightly forward tilt of the fan at your feet
makes it comical,
concerned, as if there's a problem
so you have to laugh again, alone in a
filthy room
on a mango farm that could be anywhere—the Top End,
the
Bottom End, the Arse End, the Dead End—and decide to leave it there
as
Deisel's tape runs out behind the plyboard wall
and Brian raves in his sleep.
Someone slams a door.
A gecko barks. No punch line.
Silence except for
the generator.
Outside, moon and broken cloud, sometimes thunder.
The sky
shakes and flickers.
It does not rain.
|
