Through all
the little stories
heard
as emulsive-minded children
on rickety and wrinkled knees,
we soaked them in
but never developed,
stayed unlit, stayed negative;
and Maggie,
ghosting darkly
on the edge of my inheritance.
The vibrating shadowness through
hazy days
and hardwood;
The mute gazes of dairy cows.
An iron roof
ticking in night's tightest grip,
blacking out the stars.
Its disapproving voice
a ground back constant,
The consonant bird calls,
the thin newsprint
that papered the walls.
Hazy days
and deepslept nights,
ringbarked hardwood.
Cowhides tanning
on the clothesline,
wraith-like.
Maggie,
slippery through the dappled light
as she
whitewashed walls
in the roofless property chapel.
Hazy days
and a housekept homestead,
and their
heat-fraught,
gin-and-tonic days.
The highcollared women
bickering more bitterly
for their hardwood silence
the minuteness of their territory,
the crumbs of a housekeeping budget,
swept like saltbread fragments from a bar.
Cicada song
like a tuneless madness
buzzing ineffectual
and restlessness
and migranes.
That tethered energy
and flyblown efficiency
turned to
corroding each other
a frustrated daughter
running away
along the rusty trainlines
so many years
and mended stockings later.
Thrumming through it all,
Maggie watches, barely seen.
Her hazy gaze
hardening into cataracts and rheumatism,
and ghosting darkly
on the edge of our inheritance.
